Sausage Stir-Fry with a side of Nostalgia

One thing that frustrates me as a person who likes to cook is the barrage of questions that I frequently have to face when feeding new people. "Where did you learn to cook?" "Where did you get this recipe?" Sometimes it isn't questions so much as assumptions--"Wow, your mom did a great job teaching you to cook!" The questions and assumptions on their own wouldn't be all that bad, but people always seem so disappointed in my responses. I learned to cook from reading cookbooks and following the directions. When I didn't know what something meant, I looked it up. More recently, I've expanded my skills using online tools (such as other blogs or sites like Recipezaar). Chances are, I found the recipe online; I think I have a total of two "old family recipes" that I can toss together from memory in my repertoire.

My point here is that, no, my mom didn't teach me how to cook, and I don't think that's a bad thing as so many people seem to. Why is it that everyone always seems disappointed when I say I got a recipe online, or that I taught myself with the help of numerous cookbooks and weeks of my life staring at the computer screen? My mom isn't a bad cook (though she would probably tell you otherwise)--I quite like her cooking, and when she does cook I think it's excellent, but she doesn't love it like I do. We never spent time in the kitchen when I was little with her showing me exactly how she makes a pie crust, and I think it's okay that I found out from a book.

However, the passion and interest must have come from somewhere, and that credit goes to my dad. He never really taught me a recipe, because I'm not sure if he ever really followed a recipe, but I do remember him busy making something for dinner and asking me if I could pit the olives, which was my favorite job because I ate most of them. (I got yelled at for this. Sorry, Dad.) He would chop up peppers for a stir fry and give me slices so that I could learn how much sweeter red peppers are than green peppers. There were nights that my mom and brother and I searched the refrigerator and cabinets and pantry for something to make for dinner, finding an old tomato, some peanut butter, three or four gallons of milk, huge jars of spices, and nothing else. Somehow, on these nights when there was nothing in the house and we were all too lazy to go grocery shopping, my dad could come home and whip up some simple, excellent meal out of our total lack of ingredients.

I never learned to be quite that resourceful, unfortunately--I either plan a meal out and go to the store and get everything I need, or I don't plan a meal and I go to the store wandering around until I find something that inspires me. I also never learned the knife skills that my dad tried to teach me; they're getting slightly better than they used to be but it still takes me at least 6 minutes to chop up a pepper. (I'm getting good at carrots, celery and rhubarb, though.)

So...nobody really taught me how to cook, and I find my recipes wherever I feel like, but I think my dad taught me how to play with my food and enjoy my time in the kitchen. He taught me to triple the garlic in any recipe I read and to like pepper far more than is perhaps healthy. And, without him, I never would have learned to buy twice as many olives as I planned to put in a dish. This recipe is based on one of those things that he used to come home and throw together, leaving the rest of us wondering where the ingredients came from but in the end quite satisfied with our meals. It's quick, simple, and delicious.

RECIPE: Sausage and Pepper Stir-Fry

Ingredients:

-1 package of sweet Italian sausages (usually contains 5 or 6) (If you'd like, use half a package of sweet and half a package of hot for some more variety--freeze the rest!)

-1 or 2 green peppers

-1 or 2 red peppers

-2 tomatoes

-1 large onion

-a whole lot of garlic

-some cooked pasta (homemade if possible!)

-ground pepper (or whole pepper in a grinder) (I like to use peppercorn medleys instead of just plain black pepper, but I don't really know what the difference is, so use whichever you prefer)

-extra virgin olive oil

-freshly grated romano or parmesan cheese

Instructions:

1. Heat some olive oil in a large frying pan. Once it's hot (a drop of water sizzles and evaporates immediately), add the sausages whole. Fry on each side for a few minutes, until lightly browned and partially cooked through. When you're not tending to the sausages, chop the peppers and onion (and, of course, garlic).

2. Remove the sausages from the pan and slice them into medallions. (If you don't fry them whole first, they won't slice properly and you'll get sausage-balls with little strips of sausage casing, and you don't want that.) Return to the frying pan. Lay as many flat as possible.

3. Fry the sausages until cooked through, flipping occasionally. Once they're done (or mostly done, since they'll still be in the pan) add the peppers, onion and garlic. Sauté until slightly softened, but still crisp enough to crunch a little when you bite it--you don't want soggy vegetables.

4. While the peppers and onions are softening, chop the tomato. Once everything else is done, add the tomato and a a few grinds of pepper, stir, and cook until the tomatoes are hot.

5. Serve over a bed of pasta with a generous amount of cheese to top each dish. Make sure to get some of the juices from the pan onto your plate--they're excellent!

Tasty sausages!

Yum! Mike and I use a ton of vegetables when we stir-fry--that's a BIG pan full of them. We usually end up thinking that we should have used less, but we never do the next time, and we fill up on healthy food and don't have room for ice cream. (Which is really sad--there's key lime and graham cracker gelato in the freezer that we keep being too full to eat.)

That looks like a ton of food, but it's mostly a pile of vegetables. We used leftover homemade whole wheat noodles, which wasn't true to my childhood memories at all but they were perfect with this dish.

I was originally going to post this on Father's Day, but then I had to go to my cousin's graduation party, and then I forgot about it, and then I realized that I never really posted anything for Mother's Day and I didn't know if it was okay to post something for Father's Day and not Mother's Day, and THEN I figured, well, my dad was always the cook, so it makes more sense, and I also gave my mom an awesome scarf and baked her a pie. So, consider this a very belated Father's Day post. (I think he also deserves credit for my tendency to cook with peppers, tomatoes and onions.)

How about you guys? Did you teach yourselves to cook, or did you have a parent or grandparent to show you the ropes? Any family recipes?

I hope everyone (well, everyone in the US) has a great 4th of July tomorrow--we're going to my family's annual grilled-meat-fest (seriously: sausages, steak tips, burgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, and it's all too good to pass up--I think I'll skip breakfast).

SAUCE ADVENTURE!

Remember way back when I wrote about my pasta adventure? You probably don't, since that was only my second post and I have a lot more followers now! Welcome to those of you I don't know, it's so great to know people are reading my blog! Anyway, at some point in that post I mentioned that maybe eventually Mike would let me document/blog about his sauce recipe, and today is that day! (Well, documented a while ago, finally had the time to resize all the pictures and post today.) I apologize in advance for the picture-heavy post: this sauce takes five hours to cook and has a lot of steps! It's a family recipe passed down from his great grandmother, who moved here from Italy, so he likes to think it's pretty authentic but we don't know for sure. (I'm pretty sure my Italian professor told us that spaghetti and meatballs is an American thing.)

Okay! Since this is so picture-heavy, I'm going to try to ease off the irrelevant writing and stick to the recipe. It's sort of complicated, so bear with me.

RECIPE: Five Hour, Multi-Meat Pasta Sauce

Ingredients:

-2-3 medium white or yellow onions

-1 whole bulb of garlic

-A tablespoon or two of extra virgin olive oil

-1 6oz can tomato paste

-1 8oz can tomato sauce

-1 29oz can tomato puree (We highly recommend using Contadina for all of these.)

-1 package sweet Italian sausage (5 or 6 sausages, not one of those giant packages) (You could use hot Italian sausage if you wanted to. We wouldn't be upset. Mike just isn't a fan of spicy. You could also use one of those herb-y or garlic-y sausages. Seriously. It's up to you.)

-1 lb lean ground beef or buffalo (surprisingly buffalo is available in most grocery stores and doesn't really cost all that much!)

-1 cup Italian-seasoned breadcrumbs (we haven't gotten quite ambitious enough to make our own yet, but if you want to, by all means go for it--just add some Italian seasoning!)

-1 cup finely grated Romano cheese (Parmesan would work just as well; we use Romano because Mike prefers it)

-1 egg

-Copious amounts of Basil, Italian seasoning, and Rosemary

-Frozen leftover pieces of steak and/or pork chops and/or chicken (make sure it's all boneless)

Special Equipment

-8-quart stockpot (6 would work, but you'd have to let everything simmer down for a few hours before adding the meat so it doesn't overflow, and having all the meat in the whole time makes it more awesome)

-A roasting pan with a wire rack that allows grease to drip under the meatballs instead of letting them absorb it (I mean, you could probably use a cookie sheet if you wanted, but this is healthier and they cook more evenly)

-A tiny rubber spatula that will fit into the tomato paste can

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees (don't forget to do this first because forming the meatballs doesn't take very long).

2. In a large bowl, combine the ground beef/buffalo, breadcrumbs, grated cheese and egg. Mix thoroughly. Divide and form into about 12 balls, or whatever amount of balls you think makes a good size. We like this size.

3. Spray the roasting pan (with wire rack in it) with cooking spray (Pam makes an olive oil spray that I prefer over most others) and place the meatballs on top of the wire rack, evenly spaced. Put the meatballs in the oven and bake for 1 hour.

4. Peel and chop the onions and garlic (yes, the whole bulb) and put them in the stockpot with a few tablespoons of olive oil. Turn the heat on medium-high and sauté until the onions become clear and soft.

5. Ideally at this point the meatballs have been in the oven for about half an hour.

6. Add the tomato paste, sauce and puree. Make sure to get all the tomato-y goodness out of the cans! (This is why you have the tiny rubber spatula.) Fill the tomato puree can (the largest one) with water and pour it into the stockpot. Repeat two more times so you have three cans of water in there.

7. Grab your seasonings. Sprinkle enough basil on top of the sauce to cover the entire surface, then stir it in. Repeat with italian seasoning, then cover only half the top with rosemary. (This was the first time we'd used rosemary, so we didn't want to add too much, especially considering it's a fairly strong herb. Mike couldn't really taste the amount that we put in, I could detect a hint--next time we'll probably coat completely like with the other spices.)

8. Stirring frequently, bring the mixture to a soft boil, then reduce heat so that it reaches a low simmer. Put the lid on the pot slightly ajar.

9. Put the sausages in a medium frying pan and put enough water in with them such that the sausages are about 2/3 submerged. Stab them all over with a knife. TRUST ME. (See picture for explanation.) Put on medium heat. Flipping the sausages occasionally, allow the water to boil off completely, then increase the heat and brown the sausages on both sides. Turn off the heat.

10. When the sauce has been simmering for half an hour, add the sausages, meatballs (which, ideally, have just come out of the oven) and any frozen leftover meats that you have (we had two small steaks and two pork chops). TIP: If you enjoy making sauce, make and save leftovers. If you're cooking for two, make three steaks/pork chops/chicken breasts, toss them in plastic bags, and toss those in the freezer. Label them if you think you'll be confused. They are excellent in the sauce and that way, if you want them, you don't have to cook them while you're also doing everything else--they're ready to just drop in.

11. Stir. Let the sauce continue to simmer, stirring at least every half hour. When you're not stirring it, keep the lid ajar.

12. When the sauce has been simmering for about two and a half hours, get the herbs out again. Sprinkle the basil and Italian seasoning over the top just as you did before (so that it covers the surface), and the rosemary again to cover half of it (and next time we make sauce, we'll know whether we should completely cover with rosemary both times, but for now I'd say stick with half). Stir, cover (ajar) and resume stirring every half hour. (If you're making fresh pasta or gnocchi, this is a good time to start it!)

13. When the sauce has been simmering for five hours, it should be reduced to the perfect consistency (if you like a really thick sauce, though, you might want to simmer it a little more). Taste the sauce--it's probably pretty acidic. If it is, add a tablespoon or two of butter (I think we used two) to reduce the acidity (so you don't end up with awful heartburn after eating the sauce because that would be bad). Once the butter is melted and stirred in, the sauce is ready to eat!

Step 2! This seems to be a good size for the meatballs. And also this is what I mean about the roasting pan.

Step 4: It looks like so much garlic, but we couldn't really taste it--next time we'll probably add two (possibly three) bulbs, and throw it in halfway through the simmering with the second round of spices, instead of at the beginning. That might give it a stronger garlic-y taste. (This was the first time we'd added garlic, though--we're learning!)

Also step 4: the onions and garlic (and olive oil) ready to start. Yay!

Step 6: after adding all the cans of tomato, but before adding the water. It can be hard to incorporate the tomato paste well!

Step 7: Now you've added the water and the seasoning and your entire house should start to smell REALLY GOOD.

Step 9: I was so skeptical when Mike first showed me how to do this and he boiled the sausages, but it gets a lot of the unnecessary fat out of them--just make sure to prick them in a bunch of places with a knife. Otherwise they develop large pockets of grease and you stab them and they sort of explode and you're covered in hot grease. NOT COOL.

Also step 9: When they look roughly like this, they're done and ready to go in the sauce.

Step 10(ish): meatballs right out of the oven. If you can tell me why the meatballs are nice and round and pretty when they go into the oven and come out all deformed like this, you'll win a prize. (Not a good prize. Probably just gratitude and the knowledge that I'm slightly less confused. But I'm calling it a prize. Maybe that guy who does the show about food and science on the food network should answer this for me.)

Also step 10: Mike drops a little frozen steak into the sauce.

Step 13: yay butter!

This time, we had the sauce with freshly made whole wheat pasta. I always hated whole wheat pasta when I was a kid because the texture was too grainy, but when you make it yourself it comes out way better. That could, however, be due to the fact that I used half whole wheat flour and half pasta flour. To replicate this pasta (which was delicious and will probably be how I make pasta from now on), combine two cups whole wheat flour and two cups of pasta flour. Make a mound with a dip in the middle like a volcano and put four eggs into the hole. Stir the eggs, slowly incorporating more and more flour. When you're out of egg and need to get the rest of the flour in, add a little bit of water at a time. An important thing to keep in mind is that the whole wheat for some reason becomes a stickier dough, so when you're rolling it out later you'll want to keep flouring the surfaces with the pasta flour.

Once it's all rolled out and cut, hang the noodles on something and let them dry a little. My dad uses a ski pole; we used a hockey stick. Whatever you use, just make sure it's clean! This amount of pasta gives you lots of leftovers--to keep them, nest them in ziploc bags and toss them in the freezer. (If you don't have a pasta maker and want uniform noodles, flour the rolled-out pasta sheets well and them roll them up. Then, with a sharp knife, cut at the width you want your noodles! This way they're a uniform width the whole way through without you having to be really obsessive about cutting straight lines.)

Boil the pasta for a few minutes (fresh pasta cooks so fast!) and toss it with some sauce to coat. Then let everyone add more sauce to their liking and pick the pieces of meat they want out of the pot. (I keep wanting to call it a bucket because it's so huge.) Sprinkle with cheese, mix everything up, cut the meat into bite-size pieces, whatever you want--just enjoy your meal, you've been working on it all day!

UPDATE: When I first posted this I'd totally forgotten where I read the tip about rolling up the pasta sheets, but I googled it and found it! If you're making pasta without a machine, whether it's whole wheat or not, go here for some more great tips and an overall lovely blog. :)

Thank you so much, Mike, for letting me share your awesome family recipe here!