Recipes, Suggestions, and Anecdotes

Have you ever opened a can of tomatoes and glare at the contents depressingly? That’s me. I hate those dull red globs of former glorious tomatoes that I discover staring back at me. I’m a big proponent of using fresh ingredients whenever possible. The older your food is, the less nutritional it is going to be.

With this in mind, I decided to whip up some delicious basic tomato sauce. Here we go! Arrange your weapons. Red pepper flakes, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 cup of dry white wine, 1 bushel of basil, 6 plum or San Marzano tomatoes, salt and pepper.

Flash par-boil the tomatoes. About 15 seconds in boiling salted water will be enough for the skins to peel right off.

Make sure to use tongs so not to scald your fingers, also discard any stems still rooted in the tomato.

In a large sauce pan, saute three diced cloves of garlic in a generous amount of olive oil, making sure that the garlic doesn’t burn. As soon as the garlic begins to darken, add one cup of dry white wine. Let this burn off a bit before adding the tomato pulp.

I LOVE fresh basil. I used 20 large leaves chopped up for this sauce, but you can use more or less depending on your preference.

Let the sauce simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes, just to thicken. It should have a healthy glowing sheen reflecting off of it when its ready.

That’s it! Dress your pasta, (or fresh raviolis in my case). Your taste buds will thank you, and your body will too! This basic tomato sauce is also fantastic with some fresh mussels and linguine, or on top of homemade pizza. Give it a try, and think twice about those old tomato cans. Proof.

Dirty and at times huggable hippies are filmed dumpster diving in this Freegan movie Dive!  Freeganism is a movement supportive of waste reclamation, centered on eating discarded food.  They have an valid, yet disgusting point.

More on Freegans HERE!

Here’s a clip of Norm McDonald and Gordon Ramsey cooking together on Conan O’Brien’s show. What an amazing blend of personalities!

Norm’s delivery is dead-pan perfection. I love when he asks the audience “Why would you become a cook?!?”

Samuel Smith Brewery, better known for delicious Oatmeal Stout and imported traditionally created Yorkshire brews apparently does best record when it comes to managing their employees.

This is sad, because besides the fact that Sammy Smith has REALLY good beer, they have a super long tradition and have kept the same brewing methods, well-water, horse-drawn carriage delivery system and even their yeast unchanged for over a hundred years. Hopefully all this publicity will be a wake up call for the owner, Humphrey Smith. I for one may take pause before ordering my next brown ale.

Anthony Bourdain drew a lot of flack this past summer for saying the following to TV Guide:

“The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. She revels in unholy connections with evil corporations and she’s proud of the fact that her food is f—ing bad for you. If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us. Plus, her food sucks.”

After the recent announcement that Paula indeed has come down with Diabetes and on top of that just got an endorsement for a diabetes drug, Bourdain rightfully tweeted, “Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.”

He is more candid in this Eater interview, “When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you’ve got Type 2 Diabetes. … It’s in bad taste if nothing else,”

Yes, she’s an affable and cute old woman, but honestly what do y’all think about this horrific video? I personally think that Anthony is exonerated. Shine on you crazy diamond!

Recipe- combine the little bits at the end of every bottle in your liquor cabinet with some Krusty-brand cough syrup, then light on fire.

Homer Simpson: “I don’t know the scientific explanation… but fire made it good.”

Alas, no more green beer and shillelaghs on Washington Street in the square mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey. The Hoboken St Patrick’s Day parade, which occurred annually for the last 25 years on the 1st Saturday of March is now cancelled.

The NYC Irish calendar of March would (for the last decade), begin at the ‘Boken parade, then festivities would continue the following weekend at the South Street Seaport Irish Stroll for day-drinking with great views of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, and finally the Gaelic season would conclude at the 5th Avenue, New York City parade on the 17th of March (pictured above in 1907).

Here is a link to the Hoboken parade committee’s letter. It seems as though Hoboken’s City Fathers are fed up with the boozy shenanigans and rowdy house parties that occur, and the city is using safety as the main justification for cancelling the event. It is a shame that we can’t have nice things. There was always more than just inebriated revelry, there was a sense of tradition, and also a venue to hear Celtic music, drums, pipes, and witness folk dance that is being forgotten in our modern age. Also mentioned in the letter, (and for good or for bad) the parade may played a hand in the revitalization of Hoboken since its 1986 inception. Negative proof.

I spent the day playing around and making pasta with my new pasta maker (thanks Mom!). Making pasta dough is very easy and straight forward, you can get workable ingredients together in no time.

All you need is some semolina flour, eggs, and salt, pulse these ingredients in a food processor a few times and then rest for 20 – 30 minutes.

Flatten out the dough, and then just keep compressing it through the roller to the desired width and texture before slicing into noodles. My linguine came out perfectly. It went straight into a asparagus and pancetta white wine reduction, which was quite tasty.

Due to the ease and simplicity of making homemade pasta, I plan to make ALL of my pasta from scratch and freeze it for future ingestion from here on out. I also want to make experimental raviolis the size of my head. Proof!

This book was an eye-opener, Steven Rinella’s The Scavanger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine.  Rinella, a hunter, (at first haphazardly) tries his hand at preparations by the famous French Chef Auguste Escoffier from his classic tome Le Guide Culinaire.

Rinella discovers that Escoffier often used items not available to the typical 21st century consumer.  Ingredients like pig bladders, squabs, song birds and turtles were common to his menus at the turn of the last century.  His universal preparation of Animalia  appealed to the sensibilities of Rinella as a hunter, a scavenger and a cook.

Rinella’s success with a recipe for wild trout (Trout au Bleu) from Le Guide Culinaire converted him completely.   Rinella resolved to spend a year hunting and gathering ingredients for a three day Escoffier feast for his friends.

Steven Rinella’s book confronted me with the theory that certain tastes, textures, flavors and smells are no longer consumed or even available to contemporary humans.

Fauna that  humans have been preparing for generations have fallen out of favor for industrially sourced  livestock and fish.  It was only in the last few centuries that humans started to exclusively dine on cows and chickens and pigs (all to the detriment of the environment).  A whole universe of creatures inhabit this planet.  Rinella’s book concludes with a nod to the importance of biodiversity.  We all can help preserve biodiversity by investing in every creature of this planet for food, not just a handful of domesticated ones.

The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine is available on Amazon.com.

Check out the super-cool takeout map of New York City with percentages of cuisines ordered and also average tip percentages! This is fun to play around with. I was amazed that Greek food is so tightly concentrated in Queens, I order souvlaki no matter what neighborhood I’m in!

It’s safe to say that Pizza is still the city-wide unifying takeout choice of New York City! How is that separate from Italian food though?