Marinara Sauce ( If it’s Sunday, it must be red sauce)

by mykitchenmemories

MARINARA SAUCE

If it’s Sunday, it must be red sauce….well at least if you’re Italian.  We don’t eat pasta with vegetables on Sundays.  This is a day for red sauce only.  I’m not sure how this came to be, but not having red sauce on your pasta on a Sunday would be equivalent to having a hamburger!  As a matter of fact, should we have a barbeque in the summer on a Sunday and serve hot dogs and hamburgers, there is always a pasta with a fresh tomato and basil served as well.  There is a joke that I love…”what is the an Italian barbeque?  You eat the baked ziti outside instead of inside.”  I am just amazed at how many red sauces there actually are.  Also, just putting the same sauce on a different pasta shape, can taste entirely different.  We usually have a meat and salad to follow the pasta, but for some reason we only do this on Sundays.  I believe that comes from the tradition of having meat sauce on Sundays.  During the week, pasta and a salad is just fine.

So today I am going to share my mother’s version of “marinara sauce” with you.  There are many variations on this sauce.  My husband makes a delicious one, but it is not my mother’s.  Once again, the pot used for cooking the sauce is very important, at least for me.  It is the only way I can get the exact flavor.  My Aunt Gerry, my mother’s sister, gave me a classic 1970’s Dutch Oven for my birthday right before I was married, as she knew that was THE pot to use. I used that pot to create a perfect replica for 30 years before throwing it out.  That was a very sad day for me.  I actually passed this pot around to my dearest friends who wanted to replicate my sauce. It took some time to find a replacement pot that would create the same taste, but I finally found a copper pot that is as close as it gets.  I am satisfied with this.

If you look at this old, tomato stained recipe, you can see that there really is very little instruction.  My mother made her sauce from memory, as did her mother, and I do the same.  When I made this sauce today (it is Sunday), I measured everything so I could give you the exact amounts.  I also made a rather large pot because I will be saving the sauce and using it for eggplant parmesan later in the week…and I will share that recipe and story with you then.  This sauce also freezes beautifully, so if you are going to make it, you might as well make enough to use again.

If you have a “red sauce” recipe to share, I would love it if you would place it in the comments section.  There are 52 Sundays a year!

Recipe for Marinara Sauce

3 to 4 cloves of garlic, sliced, not too thinly.
1/2 to 3/4 cups of extra virgin olive oil
Sautee this for a few minutes but do NOT brown the garlic.  Shut off the flame before this happens.
Keep the flame off until you add the rest of the ingredients.
4 28 ounce cans of San Marzano Italian peeled tomatoes, squished in your hands*
1 tbsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
2 tsp. of dried oregano
Bring back to a mild boil, then lower and simmer for at least one hour, stirring occasionally.
* San Marzano tomatoes from Italy (and it must say “Product of Italy” on the can) are the best.  Not only do they taste the best and squish the best, but Dr. Oz says they are one of the top anti-cancer foods around.  He says they must be from Italy as well.  I don’t know why, but “squishing” is a key factor in the taste of this sauce.  In the close-up photo you can see what consistency I am talking about.
Also, don’t judge the amounts of the ingredients until you let the sauce cook for the recommended time.  The oregano will melt into the sauce for flavoring and the oil seems to disappear.

Mom’s Chicken Soup

by mykitchenmemories

soupWhen you had a cold growing up in our house, you could bet that mom’s chicken soup was in your future.  Only when someone was sick would this soup appear on the stove, and now, all these years later, we are finding out that there really are medicinal benefits in chicken soup for curing the common cold.  Throughout the sixties, I can remember pots of this being delivered to whoever had a cold in the neighborhood.  It seemed that all winter long there was always a pot of this delicious soup cooking on the stove in our kitchen.  While it was not my favorite then (remember…I was always sick when I ate this), I have come to love this on a cold winters night as well as when my sinuses are stuffed and I feel achy.  I have made some basic changes to her recipe over the years, but honestly, I just added an ingredient or two.  This is homemade chicken soup in its basic form, with a variation of the times. When my family smells this cooking, I can see their sinuses clear and their hearts warm.

Mom’s Chicken Soup

One 3 to 4 pound chicken…nowadays we like organic, free range, if possible
2 leeks, white part chopped
3 – 4 carrots, cut into 1 inch pieces
2 stalks of celery, cut into 1 inch pieces
2 small onions, quartered
2 parsnips, cut into 1 inch pieces
5 to 6 Italian plum tomatoes, squished or chopped
fresh or dried oregano and thyme, to taste
1 TBSP of turmeric ( this is my addition…they did not know from turmeric in the 1960s).
salt and pepper to taste…..I can tell you that I add at least 2 TBSP of Kosher salt
5 quarts of water, approximately

I put all the above in a large pot and bring to a boil.  Then I simmer on low for about 2 hours.  I then take the chicken out of the soup, and take all the meat off the bone and then put just the meat back into the broth.

While the soup is cooking as above, I boil some faro separately, which I will add to the soup when it is done.  Farro is a grain that is nuttier and crunchier than brown rice.  Cook as directed until crunchy.  Then add as much as desired to the soup before serving.  You can now buy faro in most food stores, but if you cannot find it, certainly brown rice will do.  I also love an egg noodle or a tiny bow or ditalini pasta.  Use whatever you like, but I highly recommend the farro.

1973 New York Times’ Teddy’s Apple Cake

by mykitchenmemories

apple cake platedToday I would like jump ahead to 1973.  This was the year I got married….for the first time.  I also graduated from college this year, just two months before I got married.  While I was very eager to begin a career in teaching  (this was the career of choice, at this time, for a woman who was going to help put her husband through graduate school), I was even more anxious to have a kitchen of my own.  I would be home every day by 4:00 o’clock, and I could start cooking all the recipes I had collected from my grandmother, mother and aunts.  I began my cookbook collection with ” Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two,” Better Homes and Gardens Recipes for Entertaining,” and of course, “Joy of Cooking.”  I bought countless magazines that contained recipes just waiting for me to try.  I would rip out the pages of luscious dishes and started keeping labeled folders with such names as “desserts,” “chicken,” “appetizers,” etc.  I lined all the cabinets in my small but cozy kitchen with red contact paper and arranged all the pots and pans in size order.  I began a pantry full of cooking staples and spices….even ones I’d never heard of.  I could not wait to get started cooking! We would invite fellow grad students over for dinner, and we still laugh about the disasters that I whipped up in that kitchen.  But somehow, I managed to muster up the audacity to try a recipe from The New York Times Sunday Magazine on September 30, 1973.  It was such a success that I have consistently pleased my family and friends with “Teddy’s Apple Cake” for 40 years.  When autumn arrives, out comes the original copy of this recipe that I tore out of the magazine all those years ago.  Just looking at the worn page from The Times takes me back to that tiny kitchen in Philadelphia and how proud I was of this accomplishment.  I see myself as a young bride, so happy to be beginning my new  life….my life in the kitchen, expressing my love through the magic of food.

TEDDY’S APPLE CAKE

1 1/2 cups oil
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups peeled, cored and thickly sliced Delicious apples
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cups raisons, optional ( I never add them)
Vanilla ice cream, optional or homemade whipped cream is also good as a topping

1.  Preheat oven  to 350 degrees
2.  Beat the oil and sugar together in electric mixer while assembling the remaining ingredients.
3.  Add the eggs and beat until the mixture is creamy.
4.  Sift together the flour, salt, cinnamon and baking soda.  Stir into the batter. Add all the remaing ingredients, except the ice cream and/or cream, and stir until combined.
5.  Turn the mixture in a bundt or angel food  pan, greased and floured.  Bake for one hour and 15 minutes or until done.  Cool in the pan before turning out.  Serve at room temperature with ice cream or whipped cream, if desired

Yield:  eight servings

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Little Nonni’s Baked Spaghetti

by mykitchenmemories
finished product

finished product

Little Nonni’s Baked Spaghetti

My grandmother on my paternal side left her native country of Italy to come to the USA with her husband and three small children.  She left her sisters and all her relatives in a small town in Puglia, Santeremo en Colle, and settled in Jersey City, New Jersey.  In the 80+ years that she lived in the USA, she never learned a word of English. Her food, however, had a language all to itself, and we knew how much she loved us, not through words, but through her cooking.

She did not like to give up her recipes, not even to her daughter and especially not to her daughter-in-laws.  The way my sister and I learned how to make the dishes that we loved was to just sit quietly in her kitchen and watch.  We were certain that she would turn her back so we couldn’t see what secret ingredient she was throwing into the pot.  Without that special ingredient, whatever it might be, nothing ever tasted like hers..  There was indeed “something” missing, and this made her very happy.  We were in her kitchen in Jersey City every Sunday in the fifties, and we continued to watch her every move, and  as we got older,one of us could distract her while the other on memorized exactly what was going into the dish.  We were so determined to get this recipe to taste just like hers, that my sister took the pan from Nonni once she had stopped cooking.  We felt that this banged up pan, that traveled many miles on holidays and special Sundays to bring this dish to our house or the houses of our cousins, was instrumental in achieving this taste from our childhood.  We now share the pan.  It travels back and forth from New York City to New Jersey several times a year as we continue this traditional meal for our families and friends.  When I make it for my father, who is 92 years old, I can see him drift away in sweet memories of his childhood and his mother.

The Recipe

This recipe is actually three recipes in one since you need to make a heavy meat sauce (ragu) and you need to make tiny meatballs.  I will include these two recipes as well.  It has taken us years to get it all to taste like hers, but we are very close. We took our mom’s recipes for meat sauce and meatballs and watched diligently for those “secret ingredients” of little Nonni’s.

Nonni’s Ragu

4 cans of Italian plum tomatoes, 28 ounce cans…..make sure the can says “Product of Italy”.
1  6ounce can of tomato paste
1 onion, chopped
1 to 2 pounds of pork spare ribs
1 to 2 pounds of beef ribs or any beef on the bone
1 pound of Italian pork sausage
1/2 cup good olive oil or lard…of course, Nonni used lard and I will sometimes use this or one part olive oil / one part lard
1 1/2 cups of red wine
salt and pepper to taste

In a large, heavy pot heat the oil and /or lard over medium heat.  When oil is warm, add the various meats in batches and brown, turning occasionally until brown on all sides.  Remove meat as it browns and continue adding until all the meat is browned well and out of the pot.  Now add the chopped onions and sauté for 5 minutes or so.  Add the wine and then stir and turn off the heat.  Now add the tomatoes, which have be “squished” in your hands until basically you have pureed tomatoes.  If you prefer, you can pulse them once or twice in a blender instead, but little Nonni would never have done that!  Turn the heat back up to medium and cook for thirty minutes.  Then add the tomato paste. Clean out the can of paste by swishing a little water around in the can and add it into the pot, stirring to mix the paste in well.  Add salt and pepper to taste. Cook on low for one hour, stirring occasionally.  Then put the meat back in the pot and cook for another hour, at least.  the longer the better.  Make sure you stir occasionally so that nothing sticks to the bottom.

While this is cooking, make the tiny meatballs.

Nonni’s Tiny Meatballs

1/2 pound each of ground beef, veal and pork
1 1/2 cups of Italian style breadcrumbs
3 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
3 garlic cloves, finely minced
1/2 cup fresh, Italian flat parsley, minced
salt and pepper

1/4 cup olive oil for frying meatballs in a skillet

Combine all ingredients, except the olive oil, in a large mixing bowl.  Using your hands, mix thoroughly. Really get in there.   If consistency is too wet, just add more breadcrumbs.

Once they are the right consistency, wash your hands, but leave them slightly wet for rolling the tiny balls.  They should be the size of grapes.  I place them in a cookie sheet as I go along and then fry all at one time.  She always used a cast iron heavy skillet to fry the meatballs and so do I.  But any skillet will do just fine.  Heat the oil.  Add several meatballs at a time, but keep an eye not to burn.  Keep turning until they are nicely browned.  I line another cookie sheet with paper towels and this is where I put the meatballs to drain as they come out of the pot.  This will get rid of the excess oil.

Okay then.  Now it is time for the baked spaghetti!

Along with the ragu and the meatballs, you will need the following:

3 pounds spaghetti, cook very al dente
2 fresh mozzarella, about one pound each, cut in 1 1/2 inch cubes…roughly cut
1/4 pound sliced prociutto, cut into short strips about 2 inches wide…roughly cut
1/4 cup or less grated Pecorino romano

And of course, THE pan.  Since this coveted pan is presently in New Jersey,i am happy to suggest other options.  I think an oval roasting pan is the best option since once assembled, this is very deep.  It needs a deep pan, so any pan with high sides would do.

The Assembly:

1.  Heat the oven to 500 degrees, then lower to 450.
2.  Once the spaghetti is cooked very al dente, drain it and put it in a bowl and mix it with the oiliest part of the ragu
3.  Butter (or use lard or Crisco)  the entire pan…especially up the side.  Then coat with breadcrumbs.
4.  Then layer:
Spaghett
Mozzarella and prociutto  (sort of stick it into the spaghetti, don’t just lay on top)
Meatballs
Ragu…not a lot
a little Romano cheese
Continue layering in this manner, until you have reached the top of your pan.
5.  Cover and cook for 30 minutes.  Then take cover off and cut into portion size pieces.  Put back in the oven, uncovered, for another 15 minutes.  The sides and top will get crispy.  Not to worry.  This is what they end up fighting for.  Once it is out of the oven, let it settle for 15 minutes.

Pass that delicious ragu, and some of your big eaters may have room for the ragu meat.

I hope you enjoy this dish.  Yes.  It is a bit of a cooking marathon, but you can make the ragu and meatballs in advance.

I can smell and taste it right now.  I am salivating.  And I can see my grandmother’s smile as we all enjoyed each morsel.   I hope your family and friends will feel the love that goes into this dish.  THAT is the “secret ingredient!”