Peter's Cooking Diary #23

So I want to start off this weeks blog by mentioning how much awesome produce I have received from the mom. I get a wide variety of things from her during the growing months, and also something things during the long winter as well. She has provided me with a lot of home grown and home made tomato sauce, with all sorts of different greens from  mixed salad greens to dried greens like the bok choy I used in this week's cooking. She uses her food dehydrator to make dried apples, banana chips, and even fruit leather. There are numerous of things like garlic that I have used in many different dishes in my cooking. This blog is a tribute to the things my mom gives me that contribute to my cooking.

We are starting off with most of the ingredients being put into my sausage and bean stew. The bags of dried greens that I received from my mom, I had 3 different types of beans in my cabinet that I wanted to use up, some chicken stock, an onion and some garlic. I was going to put celery in the dish, but I just left it in the fridge when I was preparing everything. I also get my absent mindedness from my mom. There was also a yogurt container filled with my mom's tomato sauce going into this.

I am a bit of a bargain hunter at the grocery store, I love the extra discounted meats at Festival foods. Its the meats that are approaching the date they can no longer be sold, and they sell them at a great discount. I do make sure to use it within a day of buying it, or I will stick it right into the freezer. I came across these mild sausages in the that section and though they could be fun to cook with.

The issue with them being in casings and going into the soup is that its just much easier to brown them off without the casings on so I just sliced the casing and pretty easily removed the vast majority of the meat from the casing.

I started the tomatoes in the crock pot, putting it on low, letting it come up to temperature, before adding more.

I added the dried bok choy to the pot with the tomatoes, and some chicken stock letting them start to reconstitute in the pot. I also added a little salt for the tomatoes.

I put the sausages in the pan with a little bit of vegetable oil over medium high heat. I used a spatula to chop the sausage up into smaller bit to cook faster, and also I would want them in smaller bits in the stew.

This was when the sausage had finished cooking, I used a slotted spoon to get the sausage out of the pan and into the crock put, I didn't dump all of the grease out so I could use it.

Wish the sausage grease left in the pan I added the onion and garlic to the pan and spent a lot of time scraping up and of the sausage bits left in the pant.

I added some thyme, oregano, and red pepper flake to the pan as well as some flour to help thicken the soup.

After the flour had been cooked into the onion, garlic, and spice mixture, I then added the remaining chicken stock to the pan, and stirred it all together, once again making sure I got everything off the bottom of the pan.

This is the soup as I was about to put the lid on, and let it simmer for about 4 hours.

After the soup had been cooking for about 4 hours, I shut the heat off and let it cool down. I then removed some of the fat that settled towards the top as well as the bay leaves. I then added the 3 kinds of beans to the pot. I didn't cook the beans with everything else  I just stirred them in and let it all sit overnight before having some for lunch today.

This is the finished dish. I really like the different colors of beans in the dish, it really looks cool to me like this. This same dish could easily be made with ground pork, ground turkey, ground chicken, or many other things. It was quite good for lunch, and quite filling.

This is the start for my version of puttanesca sauce that I first saw made by Rachel Ray, but of course I had to do my own take on it. Starts with some olive oil, and some onion and garlic as well as a little salt to help them sweat.

I added some tomato paste to the pan and stirred it in. I would have also added some anchovy paste to the pan, but for whatever reason I just forgot that in the cabinet, it is actually one of the traditional ingredients in this sauce.

I added another container of my mom's tomato sauce, and stirred it all together and let it cook for just a few minutes.

I added a few handfuls of kalamata olives as well as the red wine vinegar that they are sitting in. I gently squeezed the olives when adding them to the sauce pan to get a little bit more of the liquid out. It will provide some nice acidity to the dish.

I chopped up some fresh basil and added it along with some dried oregano, and some red pepper flake. I stilled all of the ingredients together again, and gave it a few more minutes to cook together.

I flaked out a few cans of white tuna to make sure it was broken up into small pieces.

I added the tuna and stirred it all together. I brought the sauce to a simmer, and let it simmer on low heat with the lid on for about 30 minutes.

This is the finished sauce. I like it over some kind of curly noodle, or a tube, it is ok with any kind of strand, but the chunks work better for me with something else.

Peter's Cooking Diary #8

Well I know I had promised that I would be posting again soon, but didn't. I didn't really make anything at all worth noting on here, just random small things. I have been eating a lot of cottage cheese and pineapple, and I did go through a bit of a cold that left me without much of an appetite. Reflecting back on the things I made in this edition have a lot to do with substitutes. If you are not sure if you can substitute something in a recipe, I always search online, if not what you wanted, you can get ideas on other things you can substitute.

This week is the first time I have really baked anything at all, I came across the recipe for this coconut pie one day and thought I should give it a try, it is really simple to make. I ended up substituting brown sugar for the white sugar, and whole wheat flour and baking powder for the self rising flour. I don't know what the regular recipe tastes like, but my version was great with a little whipped cream on top! Recipe can be found here: http://shine.yahoo.com/shine-food/impossibly-easy-coconut-pie-143800186.html

The other main thing that I made this week was my version of meat sauce along with pasta, and my substitute in this dish was using ground turkey instead of beef or pork sausage. I like to use turkey in my meat sauce because it does not weigh down the dish with fat like beef would. I think the turkey does remain filling, and for me at least doesn't leave me wishing it was beef instead.

This is the raw turkey going into the pan, starting to cook. Because turkey is so lean, I added some oil to the pan before the turkey to help with the cooking.

Once the turkey was cooked, I removed it from the pan, and added my onion and garlic to the pan, which is pretty much the base for most of my recipes. I cooked them until the onion was clear and soft.

Once the onions had cooked to my liking, I added the turkey back to the pan to cook them all together for a few minutes

One of my favorite ingredients to add is fresh basil, I also added some dry oregano, and red pepper flake. I use 2 jars of prepared sauce, to 2.5 lbs of turkey. I don't really have a preferred brand for the sauce, but I will get tomato and basil, or tomato and garlic flavors. I just say avoid Ragu as I think it is quite tasteless.

Garlic Break, boiling pasta, and the nearly finished sauce. I usually simmer the sauce with whatever I am adding to it for about an hour before serving. This will allow the flavors to marry a bit, and it will also allow some of the water to cook out of the sauce. I prefer my sauce on the less runny side, so cooking it down a bit is what I do.

This is the final shot of the pasta sauce before serving.