/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Glad there's a thread up. Haven't posted in a while due to a variety of reasons, I'll spare you guys the elaboration. Today is the wedding anniversary and when I asked my wife if she wanted to go out or eat in she requested pasta. Here's the cast of characters.

Tomatoes - see note
Head of garlic, chopped
Large onion, chopped
Sausages - see note
Olive oil
Tomato paste

Note - tomatoes are an interesting topic and the most important part of your sauce. If you live in a sunsoaked paradise whereupon you have entire bushels of fresh, red tomatoes at your beck and call, by all means, use them! For Midwest boys like me I make due with San Marzanos, which are like the Cadillac of canned tomatoes. This 106 oz. can cost me less than $5 at Costco. Been using them a while. Also remember that if you're using fresh tomatoes you're gonna wanna skin them first. For these canned in pic related you could run them through a food mill but I don't have one and I ain't fancy anyway. I grab hold of them and crush by hand into a bowl. More meaty that way I guess you could say. Watch out they don't squirt you when you squeeze. You'll also see a tiny bowl in the picture; I use it to keep any especially hard pieces like stems or whatever else I find. Compost or stock it.

On the meat - here I'm using sweet Italian sausage as it's my wife's favorite. Today we're making a basic sauce, not a gravy, so lots of meat isn't necessary. I can go into more detail on what I mean in a later post for those interested.