Pork Ragu with Fettucine

Oh winter.

While Gren may adore this particular season (at least until his little feet get cold), I do not. Some days I just want to wrap myself up in as many blankets as I own (which is quite a few) and count down the days until spring. But I can’t, and this is why people invented comfort food.

This particular recipe comes from a recent issue of Real Simple magazine, and it does the trick. The Pie and I have a resolution to use our slow cooker more (because it’s AWESOME), and it was really nice to come home the other day to a house that smelled like awesome had been slow-cooking in it for hours and hours. And the preparation takes no time at all. I did ours the afternoon before, which was a weekend, and put it in the fridge overnight. Then before I left for work the next morning I popped the crock on the pot and turned it on and blamo kablam it was done.

So let’s get around to that preparation, shall we?

Start by scrubbing and chopping up a large carrot. I ended up using two because I wasn’t sure if mine qualified as large or not. Do the same with a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic (I may have used the whole head, but I really like garlic and this head was pretty old).

For spices, you’re going to need about 1 teaspoon dried thyme, 1 teaspoon dried oregano, and about 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt and 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper. But feel free to add more or less if you choose.

You also need a large (14oz) can of diced tomatoes and a small can of tomato paste. The recipe calls for just 2 tablespoons of the paste, but that’s like a third of the can and I would just have to figure out what to do with the rest of it so I used the whole can.

Chuck all your vegetables and spices and canned goods in a 4-6 quart slow cooker (for scale, this one is 6 quarts).

And you need a hunk of pork shoulder or pork butt (haha, butt), about 1 1/2 lb.

Trim off the larger hunks of fat and cut the shoulder/butt in half.

Pop that in the slow cooker as well and give everything a stir to coat it in tomato juice (the acids in the tomatoes will help to tenderize that sucker).

Cover it and let it cook on high for 5 to 6 hours or low for 7 to 8 hours, until the pork is super dooper tender.

About twenty minutes before you want to eat, cook up a package of fettuccine according to the package instructions (normally fettuccine takes about 12 minutes to cook to al dente).

While that’s on the go, take two forks and shred all that lovely slow-cooked pork in the slow cooker.

Drain your pasta and plop it into the slow cooker on top of the pork stuff and give it a thorough stir.

Serve, spraying bits of tomato juice everywhere (at least, that’s what I did). Grate some parmesan on top and eat your way into ragù heaven.

The recipe says it serves four but the Pie and I think that serving size is immense, so we would say that it more accurately serves 6-8, and it’s especially good the next day when all the juices have been sucked into the fettuccine. When I brought it to work everyone became jealous of my delicious leftover lunch.

Pork Medallions in Tomatoes

This recipe mostly started because I received this can opener from Ando and Teedz for Christmas.

They told me that they wanted photographic proof when I figured out how to use it.

So here you go. The instructions are a little vague, saying simply that you put it on a can and rotate it slowly.

And if you think that there was something lost in translation, the French version says pretty much the same thing, but with more poetry. Literally, it tells you to sprinkle some poetry on it.  The accompanying diagram implies that you do something like this:

Which of course doesn’t work. There’s just not enough leverage.

However, if you use it like an old army (or camping) can opener, it works quite well.

And now that I’ve gotten that 14oz can of tomatoes open, I should figure out what to do with it, eh?

I’m so excited with the possibilities that my hands are shaking.

I also have a lovely pork tenderloin here, from which I have removed the silvery skin and excess fat.

So I sliced it into medallions, which I seasoned with salt and pepper.

And chopped up an onion and some (rather overgrown) garlic.

Then I heated a bit of olive oil in a cast iron skillet and browned the medallions, setting them aside when they were fully cooked.

Then I chucked in the onion and garlic and gave that a stir.

Lovely and soft now. I also squeezed in some lemongrass, oregano, and basil. Sounds like an odd combination but I like the lemongrass with the tomatoes.

Then I added the tomatoes and brought it to a simmer. Smells so good!

For a bit of starch, I added a generous sprinkle or two of this teeny star pasta, stellette. It takes pretty much no time to cook, about 7 minutes. If you want to skip this part, you can serve the dish on a bed of rice instead.

When the pasta was ready I chucked in the medallions to reheat.

And that is that. A hearty, hot, and quick meal for a cold, dark, winter’s night!  How’s that for poetry?

Chicken Cacciatore

Canadian Living always seems to have the best freezer-friendly recipes.  I haven’t tried this, but the stuff smelled great and when I licked my fingers to catch some spills I was quite happy.

I doubled the recipe, but the single batch makes 8 chicken thighs and a bunch of red delicious sauce.

Start with your vegetables.  Chop up an onion and a pepper.  I had some roasted red peppers in a jar so I used those as well to boost my quantities.

Take 8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs.  You can use bone-in ones to save money, but they will need to cook for twice as long.

Toss them in a bowl with 2 tablespoons flour and some salt and pepper for seasoning.

In a large skillet or Dutch oven, heat some olive oil and, working in batches, brown the chicken on both sides.  You don’t need to cook it all the way through — you just want a nice crispy edge.  That’s why I like the skillet.

Transfer the chicken to a plate and drain any fat out of the pan (if you used skinless chicken this shouldn’t be a problem).

Add a bit more oil to the skillet and fry up your onion and pepper, with a little bit of minced garlic and some Italian seasoning (or basil and oregano if you don’t have it).

Pour in 1 can diced tomatoes and 1 can tomato paste and bring it to a boil. Because I doubled the recipe, I ran out of room in the skillet and had to move to a pot, alas.

Add your chicken back in and simmer for about 20 minutes until the chicken is cooked through.

Serve over rice or pasta and sprinkled with parsley, or freeze for later, which is what I did.

Roasted Chicken and Rice Soup

So I made a roasted chicken to go with our poutine from earlier, and the Pie and I ended up, in the events of that week, forgetting about the leftovers completely.

So let’s make some soup for those busy periods in our lives (which, this term, is pretty much every day).

Pop your carcass and any other bits of chicken you have, skin, bones, everything, in a large pot.  Cover it with 1 litre chicken stock and the rest with water.  Bring that to a boil and reduce the heat to a simmer.  Let that bubble away for about an hour.

Remove the pot from the heat.  Set a large colander in a larger bowl and pour the contents of the pot into the colander.  This makes getting the wee bits of non-meat out of the broth easy.

Pour the strained broth back into the pot.  Strip the chicken of bits that you want in your soup, and chuck those bits in with the broth.

Chop 1 carrot and 1 onion and add those in.

Add 1 cup rice.

I was going to add a can of tomatoes to this, but it turned out I didn’t have any (which was kind of a shocker, considering that I normally have about four on hand).  Instead, I had a little over 1 cup pumpkin purée, left from the Pie’s first attempt at pumpkin pie, so I added that in.

Sprinkle on some herbs (I used oregano) and add salt and pepper.  I also added a pinch or two of chipotle seasoning.

Put your pot back on the heat and simmer it for about half an hour, until the rice is cooked and the carrots are tender and everything is hot and yummy.  Taste, and adjust your seasonings if necessary.

Serve hot or freeze for later on.  It’s that simple!

Sausage Stuffed Peppers

Thanks to everyone who stopped by on Friday and over the weekend from Freshly Pressed, and thanks for all your great comments!

This is a strange experience.  I’m actually eating this meal (leftover) as I blog about it.  I have already gotten rice on the keyboard.  This is one of those recipes I wrote down as a child in my magic recipe book and which I haven’t made in twenty years.  But it was also another one of those if-I-have-to-eat-plain-sausage-AGAIN-I-will-throw-something nights so, it had to be done.  And of course I changed it around a bit.

First you take 4 red peppers, wash them, and cut the tops off.

Pull out all the guts.  If you wish, you can parboil them for a few minutes at this stage but I like my veggies crisp so I left them raw.  Spray a small oven-proof dish and pile them all in, open side up.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and cook up 1 cup of rice, or enough that you come up with 2 cups cooked rice when you’re done.

I made the mistake here of chopping up 1 large onion.  What you should really do is chop up 1 medium or small onion.  Plop those in a saucepan with some olive oil.

Squeeze the meat out of 1lb sausage (I used about a third less, and with the extra onion, mine ended up a little meh) and add them, together with a few teaspoons minced garlic, to the onions.  Sauté those until the onions are tender and the sausage is broken up into little bits and fully cooked.

Stir in the cooked rice.

Melt 3 tablespoons butter and add it to 1/2 cup bread crumbs.

Stir that around.

Stuff each pepper with as much of the rice-sausage mixture as will fit.

Squish it down a little at the top to make a shallow depression.

If you have extra rice, put it in a casserole dish.

Open up a can of diced tomatoes.  Spoon on a few pieces of tomato, enough to cover the top of the pepper, and be generous with the juice.

Use more on your extra rice.  See how the tomato juice kind of percolates down?

Top each pepper (and your casserole) with bread crumbs.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until everything is all bubbly and the bread crumbs are brown.  Serve hot!

Barbecue in a Bottle

This recipe has been adapted with thanks from PickYourOwn.org, who set out all the steps for this delicious tangy tomato goo, including the entire canning process.  For other tips on canning, check out some previous posts here.  I doubled the batch laid out below (of course) and ended up with about 8L of sauce.

In a very large pot, start simmering 5 14oz (796mL) cans diced tomatoes.  This is roughly equivalent to 16 cups or 4 quarts (I did the math).  In one of my batches I substituted one can of crushed tomatoes for diced.  It didn’t seem to make much difference, save I had less seeds in that one.

Once those are going strong, chop and chuck in 4 stalks celery, 2 onions, 3 red peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers, and 2 cloves crushed garlic (or garlic-in-a-jar).

In addition to that, add in 2 teaspoons ground black pepper, 1 tablespoon dry mustard, 1 tablespoon paprika, 1 tablespoon sea salt, and 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper.

THEN add in 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce, such as Tabasco, 1 cup brown sugar and 1 1/2 cups 5% (white) vinegar.

Remember you can adjust any of these flavourings to suit your own tastes.  I added extra cayenne and brown sugar, as well as a few dobbles of sweet chilli sauce and a can of tomato paste.

Simmer everything for about 30 minutes or until it’s all softened.

Now here you have two options.  If you have tremendous patience, you can run the cooked sauce through a food mill, which will remove the seeds and give you a lovely velvety smooth sauce.

If you’re me, you can use an immersion blender. 

Tomato sauce will end up everywhere, and you will still have seeds in your slightly chunkier sauce, but you will end up with more sauce for preserving.

All you have to do at this point is cook down your processed sauce until it’s the consistency that you like.  Just keep an eye on it and stir frequently to avoid burning.  Remember that the sauce at this point is thick enough to interfere with proper convection so stirring is essential.

Pour into sterilized jars and can according to your canner’s instructions.  And that’s it!

Quick Chili

Fall is always a busy season for me.  Usually, school is ramping up and the hot weather has disappeared, leaving me with more energy to get out and be active.  Plus the hockey season starts in October, and that keeps me busy until June.

As the outside temperature cools, we start making hotter dishes to keep us warm.  But because the fall is so busy, we don’t always have the time to have some sort of comfort food simmering on the stove all day.

This chili recipe can be ready in half an hour, and tastes almost as good as its slow-cooker counterpart.

So you start, as always, with an onion and some garlic.  I of course use garlic-in-a-jar, but you can use whatever you like.

Chop up the onion.

This is where I like to use the new love of my life, the Onion Goggles.  I’ve tried knives dipped in lemon juice, and cutting onions next to an open flame, but these work wayyyyy better.

Of course, I look like a total dweeb when I wear them.

Anyway, chuck your onion in a saucepan with some garlic and olive oil and cook until the onions are translucent.

Chop up two red peppers and chuck them in as well, together with some chopped fresh basil.

Add in some cumin, chili powder, and tabasco sauce (hot sauce) to taste, together with whatever else you need to make it the kind of spicy you’re in the mood for.

Our hot sauce came from my brother’s wedding.  It’s pretty good.

Next you can add in your beans.  White beans, black beans, kidney beans, it really doesn’t matter (well, perhaps not broad beans).  They can come from a can or a bag, but make sure they’re cooked before you chuck them in.  This is a bean medley my mother cooked up a while ago and froze.

Pour in a can of diced tomatoes.

Add a handful or two of TVP if you wish.  If you think the chili is too liquidy, you can also add a can of tomato paste for thickening.

I like to pop in some frozen corn when it’s almost ready.

Let it simmer the whole time you’re adding stuff, then for about twenty minutes after you’ve added the last ingredient.

Serve hot, store in your refrigerator for up to a week, or freeze it for a quick dinner some time later on.

Risotto Cakes with Roasted Vegetables in Rose Sauce

I went to lunch last Saturday with Kª (of KK fame, otherwise known as The Lady Downstairs) at The Rooms, St. John’s only museum/archives/art gallery/restaurant.

One of the few vegetarian options on the menu was risotto cakes with roasted vegetables in a rosé sauce, so I ordered it, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The Pie and I kind of have a policy where we won’t order it in a restaurant if we can make it ourselves, and I think this is one of those things that I could easily re-create.

I had to think about this for a bit, and do some research.  I haven’t made risotto in years and the last time I did so things ended badly.  Not only did this risotto have to be well-done, but I had to figure out how to bake it into wedges.

I also had to think about the sauce I was going to use.  I could just buy some rosé sauce in a jar from the store, but I figure if I was going to take the time and have the patience to make risotto that turned out right, then I was going to make the effort to create an original sauce to put it in.

Also, I was on a quest for the right kind of roasting vegetables.  The vegetables I had at the restaurant were red, yellow, and green peppers, with eggplant and I believe zucchini.  I was going to do it with red peppers only, onions, zucchini, and butternut squash because I couldn’t find any eggplant anywhere (you make do with what you have, right?).

The nice thing about this recipe, I think, is you can do all three parts separately and ahead of time, and then heat the whole thing up later on.

Toss in a bowl with pepper and salt.

Oiled up like a Turkish oil wrestler.

So let’s start with the vegetables.  Preheat your oven to 400°F. Cut one large onion into eighths and chuck in a large baking pan.  Chop 2 small zucchini into thick discs and add it to the pan, along with a red pepper, cut into long thick strips, and one butternut squash, seeds and stringy bits removed, cut into wedges.  Season with salt and pepper, and toss with olive oil until all the vegetables are coated.  It’s easiest to do the tossing in a bowl, actually.  Cover tightly with foil and bake until golden and aromatically soft, about 30 minutes or so.  I then uncovered them and baked them for a further 30 minutes so they crispened up a tad.  Use your judgment.  Leave the vegetables to cool for a bit while you do other things, but leave the oven on.

Roasty toasty.

While the vegetables are doing their thing you can start on your sauce.

Finely chop about 6 or 7 regular-sized mushrooms.  Sauté them in a large pan with a bit of butter and a bit of olive oil (the oil keeps the butter from burning) until brown and tender.   Add 3 or 4 teaspoons of minced garlic (from a jar, because that’s how I roll) and reduce the heat.

Sautee with butter.

Spice it up.

Add cream and stir carefully.

Add a 28oz can (about 800mL) of crushed tomatoes to the pan.  Add a 5oz (150mL) can of tomato paste and mix evenly over medium heat.  Sprinkle in generous amounts of dried parsley, dried basil, and dried oregano.  Let this simmer for about 15 minutes, then add 1/4 to 1/2 cup heavy cream (whipping cream).  Alternately, you can use plain yogurt or coconut milk.  Stir carefully until fully integrated, then reduce heat to low and leave it like that, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.

Now we can work on that risotto of ours.  In a medium saucepan, melt some butter with some olive oil (again, to prevent the butter from burning), and chuck in one whole onion, diced.  Sauté that sucker for a little while until translucent.

Saute until translucent

Add in one cup arborio rice (that’s right, it’s not actually called risotto — risotto is what you make out of it), one cup of dry white wine, and a heaping tablespoon of powdered vegetable broth.  Stir at high heat and allow the liquid to evaporate.

Add wine and rice.

Add one cup boiling (or very hot) water to rice and stir occasionally to release the stuff that sticks to the bottom.  After about 3 or 4 minutes, the water will have been absorbed by the rice.  Repeat this step twice more, so the total amount of liquid you will have added will be 3 cups of water and one cup of wine.  It will take about 20 minutes for the risotto to achieve its signature creamy consistency.  While it’s doing that, carefully butter a springform pan and set it aside.

Creamy risotto

Add 2 tablespoons butter to the rice as well as 3 tablespoons grated romano cheese.  Remove from heat and beat in 2 eggs.

Quickly stir in the eggs.

Level the top.

Bake until set and golden.

Pour the risotto mixture into the buttered springform pan and level the top.  Pop the pan in the oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the ‘cake’ is firm and golden.  Allow to cool for about 15 minutes.

Run a soft spatula around the edges of the ‘cake’ and pop it from the springform pan.  Allow to cool a bit more, then cut into wedges.

Cool and cut into wedges.

While the risotto cake is cooling, go back to your vegetables.  Peel the skin from the roasted squash and roughly cut the vegetables into bite-sized pieces.

Add the vegetables to the rose sauce and heat the whole thing up until it starts to bubble a bit.

Heat up the vegetables and sauce.

Arrange one or two wedges in a bowl and surround with vegetables and sauce.  Sprinkle with more grated romano cheese.  Serves 4-6.

I hope you're hungry.