italian

2 June 14, 2020 Dairy-Free

Dead Simple Tomato Sauce

For me, pasta sauces fall into two categories, fast sauces, and sauces I never make. This dead simple tomato sauce is the former. You can easily throw it together in a couple of minutes, though it tastes best when it has at least 10 minutes to simmer. It is an incredibly forgiving recipe, so feel free to play around with the proportions if you want something different out of your sauce. This dead simple tomato sauce is of course great on pasta, or use it in my weeknight baked eggplant Parmesan recipe, or on a pizza.

Ingredients

3 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, diced (I like yellow, red, or white. Not a Vidalia)
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 28 oz cans whole tomatoes in juice
1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)

Method

Open the cans of whole tomatoes and dump them in a large bowl. Squeeze the tomatoes with your hands to break them up into small bits.
Heat the oil in a large (12” or so) pan with a lid
Sauté the onion for 5-6 minutes until translucent
Add the garlic, stir and cook for 45 seconds or so
Add the tomatoes and basil, salt and pepper to taste and red pepper flakes if you are using them.
Turn heat low enough that the sauce isn’t splattering everywhere, partially cover and simmer for 10 minutes to so, stirring occasionally.

5 June 14, 2020 Dinner

Weeknight Baked Eggplant Parmesan

We have all had tons of time at home over the last few months. For all of us that means more cooking, which is a great thing. For those of us with two working parents and kids in the house, it does not necessarily mean more time to cook. I came up with this dead simple version of baked eggplant parmesan because I was really craving it, but I wanted a faster way. Roasting the eggplant makes everything much easier than individually frying each piece. It also probably makes it lower in fat, but that was not my main goal in making the recipe.

I chose to throw together a quick and simple tomato sauce for this. If you are really crunched for time, feel free to use a good quality jarred sauce. I like Victoria’s and Rao’s, but use whatever you like. Throwing together a red sauce is dead simple, so give it a try.

Feeds 3-4. This recipe is easily doubled
Time 45 minutes, somewhat unattended

Ingredients

1 large eggplant (1.5 – 2 lbs)
1/2 cup olive oil (for brushing)
Salt
1/2 lb fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced
1 recipe dead simple tomato sauce
Fresh basil for serving

Method

Heat the oven to 375 degrees.
Slice the eggplant crosswise into 1/2 inch thick slices. Arrange the slices on a large baking sheet.
Generously paint the eggplant on one side with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt. A pastry brush works well for this. Flip the eggplant slices and paint and salt the opposite side. This is a great step to let a child do. It’s very simple and not too messy.
Roast the eggplant in the oven for 15 minutes. Flip and roast for 15 minutes longer. The eggplant should be nicely browned. If it is not, leave it in a bit longer. Remove when the eggplant is browned. Leave the oven on.
While the eggplant is in the oven, make the sauce.
Now it is time to assemble the dish. Spread 1/2 cup of the sauce on the bottom of a 9 inch square, or oval baking dish.
Place one layer of eggplant down, trying to cover the entire surface of the dish.
Cover the eggplant with a layer of tomato sauce, then cover with slices of the mozzarella. Repeat until you run out of eggplant. In the dish I used, this worked out to be two layers of eggplant.
Bake the dish, uncovered for 15-20 minutes. The cheese should be melted, maybe slightly browned and the sauce should be bubbling.
Make a chiffonade of the basil and sprinkle it on top of the eggplant. Serve with pasta and the remaining sauce.

Eggplant before baking, brushed with oil

Roasted eggplant — Eggplant after roasting

Baked eggplant Parmesan, right out of the oven

6 January 22, 2019 Dinner

Broccoli Soup with Lemon and Pecorino

Winter has really set in here in New Jersey. At West Point, this is called the gray season, where the sky, roads, grass, and pretty much everything is a shade of gray. It can be a depressing time. Or, you can curl up next to the fire with the kiddos and read some books, or throw some vinyl on the stereo while a pot of this brightly flavored Italian broccoli soup with lemon and pecorino bubbles away merrily on the stove.

If you take a look through the other recipes on the blog, you’ll see that I have fallen head over heels for the tried and true flavor combination of garlic, lemon, and pecorino. (Simple kale salad, spring snap peas with pecorino) It’s a really versatile holy trinity of flavors that you can apply to a lot of things. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen has done this with a bunch of recipes. I thought taking these flavors and making them into a healthy, stick to your ribs, winter soup was just the thing.

This brightly flavored Italian broccoli soup is a nice departure from the umami bombs that we tend to eat so much of in the winter. I’m all for a bowl of ramen, or a really well made French onion soup, but sometimes I need something acidic to wake yourself up. This recipe is very forgiving. You’ll save yourself a bunch of time if you have a decent immersion blender, but you can blend the soup in a regular blender too.

Also, here’s a tip for this recipe, and anything else with broccoli. While the onions are cooking, peel the long stems of your broccoli. This makes it so you can use the entire broccoli instead of throwing away the stems. After peeling, chop the stems off of the broccoli. Cut the toughest bit off of the very end and discard it. Now cut the broccoli stems into 1/3 inch pieces and add to the onions. The stems need a bit more cooking time than the florets.

As I was tinkering with this recipe, I thought I wanted something with quite a lot of garlic, so don’t shy away from the 6 cloves. It’s not too much, really. Also, as I was grating the cheese for this, I was using my new microplane box grater, which was a christmas present from my brother. I’m not usually one to get excited over a box grater, but this thing is amazingly sharp. I accidentally grated much more cheese than I intended to, but just went ahead and used it all. It’s just the thing to balance out the garlic in the soup.

grated pecorino cheese — A bit too much pecorino romano (or is it?)

Recipe

Ingredients

1 large onion, roughly chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp olive oil
2 large Yukon gold potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch dice
8 cups water or broth
Salt to taste
1 tsp black pepper
2 lbs broccoli cut into florets, stems cut into 1/3 inch pieces and separated
2 cups grated pecorino romano
Zest of one lemon
Juice of one lemon
Crushed red pepper for serving

Method

Heat a large dutch oven over medium heat. Add the olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the onions, and sauté for 4 minutes or so until they start to become translucent. Add the garlic and sauté for about 30 seconds. Don’t let the garlic burn. Add the chopped broccoli stems and potatoes, and sauté for 3 – 4 minutes.

Add the broth or water and bring to a boil. While you are waiting for the liquid to boil, add salt to taste. Depending on how salty your broth is, this could be none, or up to 3 teaspoons. Go easy on the salt because you will be adding pecorino cheese at the end which also has quite a bit of salt. Add the fresh ground pepper as well. Once the soup boils, turn to a brisk simmer and let cook for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, check to make sure the potatoes and broccoli stems are cooked through. If they are, add the remaining broccoli, and cook for 5 more minutes. Once the broccoli is cooked, take a large ladle, and remove two or three large scoops of chunks of broccoli and potatoes and set aside. Remove the soup from the heat and blend the remainder of it with your immersion blender. If you don’t have an immersion blender, do this in batches in a regular blender, or just forget about it and have chunky soup.

Once the soup is all blended, add the broccoli and potatoes you removed back in, along with the lemon zest, lemon juice and pecorino cheese. Give everything a stir to make sure everything is incorporated. The soup should still be hot enough to melt the cheese, but if it isn’t, turn the heat to low and bring it up to temperature. Taste the soup and adjust the salt and pepper if you need to.

Serve with crushed red pepper and enjoy!

92 September 24, 2018 Dinner

Italian Cauliflower Soup

After a long and very hot summer, soup season is finally here! It’s the time of year when something delicious is seemingly always bubbling away merrily on the stove or in the oven. One of my favorite soups to make is this rustic Italian cauliflower soup. It is simple, versatile and absolutely delicious. It’s a recipe I came across years ago on a long defunct Mario Batali cooking app. Over the years, I have made this a million times and in a bunch of different ways. The one consistent thing about the soup is how it warms the soul on a cold day, and how much my girls love it. When I made it for dinner earlier in the week, I actually got “yay, cauliflower soup!” from my six year old.

Growing up, my father’s side of the family was Italian, and my mother’s Jewish. Food was important on both sides of the family, and holidays were really just an excuse for a really good meal. I remember visiting my Italian grandmother in New Jersey around holidays, almost always for thanksgiving. Of course the thanksgiving meal was a highlight, but I also remember the whole week being an amazing parade of dishes, one after another. I remember incredible pizza rustica, steak a la pizzaiola, and all sorts of other staples of the Italian grandmother repertoire. I don’t recall her ever making an Italian cauliflower soup, but if she did, it would have been like this.

This Italian cauliflower soup is 100% Italian grandmother food. It will fill your whole house with savory smells for days. You’ll be slurping up every drop of soup and looking for excuses to make it again. It is also extremely versatile. To make it heartier, I usually add some pasta to the soup. But, you can keep it light if you wish and add nothing, or add farro or barley if you want a whole grain instead of pasta. If you add no grain or pasta, reduce the volume of water by two cups. Pro tip: if you use wagon wheel pasta, your kids will eat this no questions asked.

Most importantly of all, you must add the secret ingredient that takes this soup from a simple cauliflower soup recipe into the sublime; a Parmesan rind. If you’ve been throwing out the end of your Parmesan cheese blocks when you are done with them, stop immediately! Tossing a Parmesan rind into soup results in zillions of little tiny ribbons of Parmesan melted throughout the soup and gives the dish a really earthy, rustic flavor. You can do this with all sorts of stuff, which is why I always have a little Ziploc bag full of the rind from old Parmesan cheese wedges, and you should too.

You can round this out with a simple kale salad, but the soup is filling enough to make a meal on its own.

Italian Cauliflower Soup

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INGREDIENTS

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, diced
2 celery ribs, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 large cauliflower
4 bay leaves
14 oz can of whole tomatoes with juice, crushed between your fingers in a bowl
8 cups vegetable broth
Salt to taste, usually about 1.5 teaspoons depending on how salty your broth is
Fresh ground black pepper to taste, usually about a teaspoon
1 3" to 4" Parmesan rind
8 ounces short pasta

METHOD

Heat the olive oil in a large dutch oven over medium heat. Cook the onion, celery, and carrot for 4-6 minutes, until the onion is translucent. While the savory vegetables are cooking, separate the cauliflower into florets, and chop the softer part of the stem.
Add the garlic to the pot and stir. Cook for one minute more. After a minute or so, add the cauliflower and stir and cook for another minute.
Add the tomatoes, broth, bay leaves, salt, pepper, and Parmesan rind. Bring to a boil, stir once, reduce heat to a simmer, cover and cook for 15 minutes. You should have enough broth to cover the cauliflower. If you don't add more.
After 15 minutes, check that the vegetables are done. Add the pasta and cook for what the package says to cook the pasta for. Don't let it simmer away, it will get mushy.
Taste for salt and pepper one last time, and serve.

https://thedinnerwinner.com/italian-cauliflower-soup/

Nutrition

Calories

961 cal

Fat

58 g

Carbs

104 g

Protein

13 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

0 July 19, 2018 baking

The Dinner Winner Pizza Dough

The pizza dough before rising.

There is something about making your own bread at home that is just awesome. I’m not one of those amazing home bakers who has a sourdough starter bubbling away on my counter. I do like to make bread, and yes, I’m lumping pizza dough in there with bread. There is something about getting your hands into the pizza dough, watching it rise, and rolling it out that is incredibly satisfying. And, my daughters love helping to make pizza dough, especially since there is usually the promise of pizza at the end of it.

Which pizza dough to make?

I have tried dozens of recipes over the years, and consistently go back to a variation of Mark Bittman’s basic pizza dough. He calls for using instant yeast, which is far more convenient than the packaged kind you must hydrate before you use. With instant yeast, you just add it to the rest of the dry ingredients, and it does all the yeasty magic all on its own. Bittman also calls for making the dough in the food processor. I have made dough by hand, the hard way, with a lot of kneading, in the KitchenAid stand mixer, and in the food processor. You can get a great pizza dough with any of the methods. The food processor is the fastest, so if I stand any chance of making a pizza dough from scratch on a weeknight, it’s going to be in the food processor. If you are in the market for a good food processor, this is the updated version of what I have and it is great.

I like to vary Monsieur Bittman’s recipe a bit, and use half all purpose flour, and half white whole wheat. This means using a bit more water to get the dough to come together, but makes for a bit more nutritious dough.

You can also use this dough for making focaccia. Roll or press it out to about half an inch thick, rub olive oil on top, sprinkle a little salt on and maybe some fresh rosemary and bake at 500 degrees for 10 minutes.

If you are looking for a good pizza recipe to make with this dough, why not try my Grilled Pizza with Summer Vegetables?

The pizza dough after rising.

The Dinner Winner Pizza Dough

Sam Kaestner

2 pizza dough balls

A quick and nutritious pizza dough with no kneading required.

15 minPrep Time

1 hr, 30 Total Time

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INGREDIENTS

Ingredients
1 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 ½ cups white whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons instant yeast
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 ¼ cups water
cornmeal for dusting

METHOD

Put both types of flour, yeast, 2 teaspoons salt and 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a food processor. If your food processor came with a plastic dough blade, use that. If not, no worries. Turn the machine on and add 1 ¼ cup water through the feed tube. Process until the mixture forms a slightly sticky ball, about 30 seconds. If the mixture is too dry, add more water 1 tablespoon at a time and process for 5 to 10 seconds after each addition. If the mixture refuses to come together, add more flour 1 tablespoon at a time and process until it does.
Once the mixture is in a ball, take the dough out and form it into a ball by tucking it under itself several times. Here is a clip of the pro level version of what that looks like Basically, you want the top to be totally smooth, and the bottom to have all the seams tucked under. Drop the dough into a large mixing bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap, or a clean kitchen towel. Set the bowl somewhere warm to rise for at least an hour and up to three. If you don’t have an hour, take this time to get all of the toppings ready, and preheat the grill, then proceed to the next step. You need at least 20 minutes for the dough to rest. If you are making the dough the night before, just pop it in the fridge and it will rise more slowly overnight. Some interesting flavors develop this way, so it’s worth a shot if you remember to do it.
If you are making this pizza the same day as you are making the dough, you might want to get all of your toppings ready while the dough is rising.

https://thedinnerwinner.com/the-dinner-winner-pizza-dough/