Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Over the weekend, I was simultaneously making tomato sauce from scratch and getting the yellow beans ready to blanch and freeze. I had chopped onions and tomatoes everywhere, when I realized that I didn’t have any containers to put the beans in to freeze them.

Fortunately, I did need to bring a side dish to a gathering that evening.

I cut the yellow beans into bite-sized pieces, and boiled them just enough to get rid of that fuzzy/sticky, spilled-beer-on-industrial-carpet feel that they have when raw. I sauteed up some of my onion and garlic in a generous amount of olive oil, and added in the cooked beans. Next into the pan were chopped tomates, followed up by some oregano. Not only did they make a very good side dish, the leftovers were the next day’s main dush, reheated with cooked chicken and corkscrew pasta stirred in.

As for homemade tomato sauce, there are millions of ways to go about it, but they all start with a couple of pounds of chopped tomatoes slowly simmered until they start to fall apart. I usually scoop most of the tomato base into a blender and puree it, then return it to the pot; I like my sauce a little bit chunky. Sauteed onion and garlic went into the pot, along with some red wine vinegar and red wine. After the alcohol cooked out, I reduced the heat to a low simmer and stirred in oregano, basil, parsley, thyme, rosemary, black pepper, salt, and anchovy paste. 20 minutes later, I stirred in a small can of tomato paste and some truffle oil. After that, another 10-15 minutes over medium-low heat, to let the flavors come together. I was feeling lazy, so I skipped the eggplant and squash, but when I ladled the sauce over the pasta, I didn’t find myself missing anything.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 7:26 am and is filed under CSA: Indianapolis, Tales from the Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.