When Paige turned four-years-old a few months ago, she had a pretty simple request for dinner: pasta. Like many kids, she and Will adore pasta, calling it one of their favorite foods (along with salad, broccoli and chocolate). And they aren’t just talking about macaroni and cheese. They love it so many ways — such as in carbonara or pasta with shrimp and kale. Of course I obliged the birthday request, making a trio of pastas for dinner. Paige was in heaven.

The birthday dinner selections included this Sausage Bolognese, a hearty, rich sauce that is simmered for about an hour to allow the flavors to really develop. Bolognese is a longtime favorite of mine. When made right, it develops an incredible meaty richness that is irresistible. When I saw loose sweet Italian sausage at a favorite market just before Paige’s birthday, I was totally inspired to combine her love of anything with sausage with my love of bolognese. It was a huge hit.

If the original version I made was good, this version which has been further tweaked to get it just right is amazing. With diced tomatoes for a little more texture and good red wine for that richness, it’s both filling and satisfying — the perfect combination. The fresh basil in the sauce brightens it up a little so that it’s not too heavy, as meat sauces can sometimes be.

Of course, this isn’t a weeknight dinner. This sauce needs to simmer for awhile. So save this recipe for the weekend when you have some time to spare. It’s largely hands-off cooking, but not being pressed for time is an important thing when it comes to making longer cooking time dishes like this.

What’s your favorite pasta dish? Share in the comments.

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Don’t be alarmed, but Thanksgiving is a mere eight days away. Scary, right? It crept up on us so fast that I totally didn’t see it coming. Now, I am knee deep in grocery lists, recipes and meal plans for the big day. I’ll be sharing my 2011 menu here on Friday, along with a few last minute planning tips.

But today I want to share with you a little trick that I came up with to make absolutely foolproof, lump-free, easy, delicious turkey gravy. It’s ridiculously simple and makes the whole gravy making process a cinch.

See, for me, making gravy is a tricky and frustrating thing. I’ve tried using my grandfather’s method of mixing a water/flour mixture and whisking that in. I’ve tried using cornstarch. I’ve tried mixing a little flour into hot broth before adding it. But my gravy has seldom been perfect, instead ranging from lumpy (hint: strain lumps out of lumpy gravy to save the day) to jelly-ish (too much cornstarch). Sometimes it’s been under-seasoned and flavorless while other times it’s been too salty or peppery.

With this recipe, none of that happens. Basically I’ve taken my method for making homemade macaroni and cheese and applied it to gravy — and it worked like a charm. The smooth, velvety gravy has a rich herbalness with rosemary, thyme and sage cooked into it. It’s a beautiful thing.

To make this absolutely fool proof gravy recipe, you start with a roux (that’s a fancy way of saying a butter/flour mixture). Melt the butter and then add the flour, whisking it together until it’s good and bubbly. This is your thickening agent. By adding it first, you ensure that the flour doesn’t form those dreaded lumps when you go to thicken it.

Then, you add turkey stock and whisk it up like crazy to combine the stock and roux. Next, you add herbs for flavor. Just stir them in and let the gravy bubble away for five minutes. Fish out the herbs, season with salt and pepper, and you are there.

Really, it couldn’t be easier. Oh, and here’s one more little hack for you: if you don’t have a gravy boat, try using a plain coffee cup like this white mug. It works just as well (and I swear it keeps the gravy warmer for longer too.

How are your Thanksgiving plans coming?

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The great thing about having friends who love food as much as I do is that I can email or message them for advice and they can instantly inspire me (and sometimes save the day). I was chatting with Maris about needing something more for a dish I was working on (more on that on Monday) when she suggested that I make chimichurri to go with it. Ding, ding, ding!

Since I had a lovely bunch of fresh basil waiting to be used, it was only natural that I adapt the sauce to focus on this summery herb. Basil. Garlic. Olive oil. Red wine vinegar. Seasonings. You won’t ever mistake this sauce for pesto — it’s a whole different fresh and tangy take on basil.

Making chimichurri sauce is so incredibly easy. You just stuff everything into a mini food processor, whirl it around and it’s done and ready to use. This sauce is great with steak, chicken or even on rice with grilled onions, which is how I ate it. And it was good. So good. This would also be fantastic drizzled on fresh mozzarella and tomatoes as a different take on caprese salad.

What have you been making with basil lately? Read the rest of this entry…

Last week, I asked on the Sarah’s Cucina Bella Facebook page if anyone would be interested in my ultra-fast recipe for homemade macaroni and cheese that takes about 15 minutes to make. The answer was a swift and resounding “Yes!”

I loved the response. I loved knowing that this is something that people want to hear about. And I love sharing it because it is so freakin’ easy.

This recipe is something I have worked on and honed over the last few months. I started making it one snowy night when Shawn and I were trying to decide what to make as a side dish for dinner. We were out of the boxed mac and cheese, but it seemed like the perfect accompaniment for the chicken he was making. So, I tossed together a quick roux (that’s just a fancy word for a butter and flour mixture), added whatever milk and cream I could find in the fridge and tossed in cheese.

It worked. In fact, it worked so well that I made it again shortly after. It’s become a staple for us because it’s fast (10 minutes of active cooking!) and made from ingredients that I always have on hand: butter, flour, milk, cheddar, dry mustard and salt.

A note on the dry mustard: I hate mustard. But this spice (it’s a powder, found in the seasonings aisle at the grocery store) is absolutely essential to a great cheese sauce. It really brings out the flavor of the cheddar cheese.

The recipe is below, but I wanted to give you three really clear steps on how to do this so it takes 10 minutes to cook (Note: total time is slightly longer if you add in the 5-10 minutes it takes to get the water to boil).

Step 1: Fill up the pot of water and get it going on the stove. It’s going to take a little while to start boiling, so do this first.

Step 2: Gather and measure the ingredients. I cannot stress how important this is. Once you start making the sauce, you need to move fast so having everything measured and ready to go is essential. Do this while you are waiting for the water to boil. Also, you will need a wire whisk and a rubber spatula or a spoon with a long handle.

Step 3: Cook everything.
Alright, this is crunch time. But if your ingredients are all ready, it’s a cinch. Toss the pasta in the water, then start cooking the sauce. But make sure you time it so that the pasta and sauce are done at about the same time. How?

It’s easy. The sauce takes about 10 minutes to make. So, depending on how long it takes to cook your pasta to al dente (these small shells took 10 minutes), you may start making it at the same time as the pasta goes in the water or you may wait a few minutes.

Making the sauce will be an intense 10 minutes. You really need to stay there, stirring a lot. But once the cheese sauce is done, the whole dish is done. You toss the sauce with the pasta and voila! You’ve made macaroni and cheese, no package of powdered cheese required.

That’s it.

See also Slow-Cooker Macaroni and Cheese. Read the rest of this entry…

Well, hello there, old friend. This is Homemade Jellied Cranberry Sauce, and I don’t care that Thanksgiving was last week — you need to make it. So get out that extra bag of cranberries and get cooking. It’s super good.

When I was a child, my grandmother would make cranberry sauce from scratch, starting with the familiar bag of cranberries and ending with a chunky, slightly sour, deep red sauce. Did I love it? Crave it? Pine for it? Um. No. I hated it. I dreaded it even. All I really wanted was that thick, jellied cranberry sauce in a can that made a distinct plock noise as it loosened and landed on a plate. And that jellied sauce? It needed to be sliced. Always sliced.

Then I grew up and made about 10,000 versions of whole bean cranberry sauce. Okay, maybe not 10,000 … but a lot. Still, even after experimenting and developing a whole berry cranberry sauce that I like, I pined a little for the canned jellied version. But I resisted … It just wouldn’t fit onto my homemade Thanksgiving table.

But then my baby brother came clean about preferring the jellied version too and I decided to figure out if there was a way to make it myself. Enter Vegan Yum-Yum’s recipe for Jellied Cranberry Sauce. It’s just as easy as making whole berry sauce, but it’s that jellied version we love. Cue the trumpets and confetti … this one is a total winner. Read the rest of this entry…

Heirloom Tomato and Provolone Sauce on pasta

Every fall, I make a big batch of Roasted Tomato Sauce (and, last year, tomato paste) and can it for wintertime. Opening up a jar of it in the dead of winter is glorious. It’s like bottling summertime. But this year I just haven’t gotten to it and really am not sure if I will. While I love having my own, fresh, homemade sauce ready to go, I’ve had a lot on my plate lately.

But I still want to make it.

In the meantime, I am small batch cooking with tomatoes. This lovely Heirloom Tomato and Provolone Sauce is a thick, hearty, slow-cooked sauce with a sharp, but craveworthy, taste. It’s enriched with a little butter too, an idea I gleaned from the latest issue of Bon Appetit (it’s in Molly Wizenberg’s column).

From tomatoes to sauce in a little over an hour ...

All in all, this sauce can be made in a little over an hour. You start by chopping tomatoes and crushing garlic. Toss it in the pan with a few other ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and let it simmer for an hour. Then, you puree the sauce, add the butter and cook for a few more minutes. Ready to serve.

Paige helped stir the ingredients together.

Paige and Will helped me make this sauce. Paige transferred most of the ingredients to the pan and stirred it all together. Meanwhile, Will ran the scraps out to the compost pile. They love helping in the kitchen — anyway that they are asked to.

Love that. Read the rest of this entry…

Oh tomatillos … are they fruits? Vegetables? Tomatoes? Something else? When I tried them for the first time a few years ago, I was totally filled with a bazillion questions. The papery husk, and slightly sticky skin, had me all sorts of confused. But I read up on them and figured out how to use them to make delicious dishes. For the record, they are a fruit that is part of the nightshade family — and a relative of the tomato, eggplant and gooseberry. They are popularly used in Mexican cooking.

Earlier this summer, I decided to try growing tomatillos in my garden. With just one plant, I figured we would get a few tomatillos .. enough to make a recipe or two. But not the plant is now huge. It’s branches have extended far and wide, bearing so many little husks for tomatillos that it’s almost unbelievable. Once they are all fully grown, it will be quite the harvest.

If you aren’t growing tomatillos though, you can also purchase them at grocery stores and farmers’ markets all over. The tart taste is fabulous in sauces and other dishes.

My favorite way to use them? In salsa. This easy, fast, raw salsa is a cinch to make and it pairs well with everything from tortilla chips to tacos to cheddar omelets. Tomatoes, tomatilloes, garlic, a shallot, a jalapeno pepper and lime juice are whirled together in a food processor with salt and pepper to make a delicious fresh salsa. And since it’s pretty mild, the kids love it too …

Of course, you could switch out the jalapeno for a hotter pepper and make it hot too. Just sayin’.

Also try my Tomatillo Guacamole recipe!

Do you have a favorite tomatillo recipe? Share a link! I am looking for more great uses for these delicious fruits.

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That’s ketchup. Homemade ketchup! Yum.

A few years ago, when I first started to rid my house of processed foods, I pondered making my own condiments like ketchup, but that seemed like too, too much when there were acceptable organic versions available in most stores. Of course, we soon learned that some of those organic versions of ketchup in particular left something to be desired in the taste category. Still, we found one we liked and stuck with it.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when one of my editors and I were talking about creative toppings for the barbecue. The idea of homemade ketchup came up, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So, I started working on it, finding the right combination of seasonings to create a homemade ketchup recipe that my family would love.

Once I set to making it, I discovered that tomato puree worked as a perfect base for this homemade ketchup recipe since it could be combined with seasonings and reduced pretty easily — no blending necessary. Just whisk it together, and occasionally whisk it a bit to keep from burning or anything. But mostly, you just let it boil down (with a splatter guard, of course!). It’s super easy.

Also, be warned, it’s best to remove the pan from the heat and wait a few seconds to remove the splatter guard for whisking … this boils rapidly and that will help you avoid getting burned. Return to the heat when you are ready to cook again.

The result is a fragrant, well-seasoned homemade tomato ketchup that is great on fries, hot dogs, burgers and more. Just spoon a little on and go. You’ll never want to go back.

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Got chips?

It was mid-summer when I started dreaming up this cranberry concoction. While my family and I were contemplating whether the elevated temperatures really warranted turning on the air conditioner, I was also starting to fantasize about how I could take some traditional Thanksgiving tastes – like cranberry sauce – and give them a new life.

And this? This ain’t your grandmother’s cranberry sauce. Oh no, it’s totally different.

This Cranberry Salsa is made from ripe cranberries that I bought roadside on Cape Cod. It’s sweet and spicy, a perfect contrast to salty tortilla chips. It should also be amazing on a turkey sandwich … you know, the day after Thanksgiving. It’s something that you take one bite of and instantly want more. And perhaps the best part? It takes no time to make.

To make it hot, I used a habenero pepper, which gave it a hearty bite. If you like really hot, include the pepper seeds in the salsa. For a milder salsa, use a milder pepper like a jalapeno.

This might not be the sauce you thought you wanted for Thanksgiving. But it’s amazing — use it as an appetizer or alongside the turkey. The leftovers will be ideal for turkey and cheese quesadillas, nachos, alongside omelets …

But, that’s if you have any leftover to eat. It’s just so amazing.

For the recipe, head over to SheKnows where I wrote about three alternatives to cranberry sauce, including this one.

Don’t look too closely at the blurry photo … I know, it’s subpar. And I am so, so, so sorry. But this was so good that I just couldn’t wait to dig in and somehow all of my photos came out blurred. I swear, it won’t happen again. So, just forgive me for now.

Besides, the goodness of whirled butter more than makes up for the badness of the photo. Just a little dob of this delish butter is all you need for a sizzling steak (which of course causes it to melt everywhere) to make the steak taste simply divine. I suggest you try it. And again (cause this definitely makes enough for several meals).

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