Easy No-Cook Tomato Sauce

The original plan for this week was to publish my Chianti Sauce recipe. However, since that sauce, like the traditional vodka sauce that inspired it, begins with a finished tomato sauce, it seemed appropriate to offer first the tomato sauce I used, and to continue next week with the recipe for converting it to Chianti Sauce.


Should the mention of home-made tomato sauce conjure images of standing over a large pot of bubbling liquid with a wooden spoon for a couple of hours, you're in the right place. With great pleasure, I offer you this recipe for an Easy, No-Cook Tomato Sauce.


If you love watching cooking shows on television as much as I do, you may have noticed a couple of recent trends that (it seems to me, anyway) are related:
• High level chefs and cooks are increasingly making the point that we’ve let making good tomato sauce become a lot more complicated than it has to be.
• Even in this age of high-tech electric kitchen gadgets, the humble (and, let me be sure to mention, inexpensive) food mill remains one of the greatest pieces of kitchen equipment you can own, especially if you like making sauces and soups.


A food mill, for the unfamiliar, is something like a colander, except it has a manual crank device that forces food through the holes. It’s a delightfully low-tech piece of pureeing equipment that has one significant advantage over its cousin, the food processor: a food mill naturally filters out the solids after the liquid has been squeezed out. (You can also use it for tasks like ricing potatoes and forming spaetzle. Try doing either of those with a food processor.)


This recipe makes about one quart of a tomato sauce I think you’ll find so delicious you won’t believe how easy it is to make.


After grating one medium carrot and chopping 2 stalks of celery, set aside 2 tablespoons of each for later use. Combine the remaining carrot and celery pieces with 1-1/2 tablespoons of chopped onion, 6 cloves of garlic, one 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes, two 6-ounce cans of tomato paste, 2 teaspoons of dried basil, 1-1/2 tablespoons of sugar and and ½ teaspoon of chili powder in a non-metallic bowl and put through a food mill. (If your food mill has more than choice of orifice plate, use the plate with the widest holes.) Scrape the underside of the orifice plate into the milled mixture. Discard the remaining solids in the bowl of the food mill.


Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to the milled mixture and stir till combined. Add salt and pepper to taste, then the sauce rest for at least 30 minutes before using. When you add the sauce to your dish, garnish with some of the reserved celery and carrot mixture. (In the photo at the top, the sauce was used on hand-made pasta and topped with baked flounder.)
As always, if you prefer a cookbook style, notebook-ready version of this recipe (or any other Kissing the Cook recipe), ask and it shall be given!


Now that you have this easy, delicious tomato sauce, visit again next week for how to turn it into a very special Chianti sauce! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Electric Cranberry Sauce with Apples and Apricots

Aside from being easy to serve, canned, jellied cranberry sauce has this redeeming quality: eating it is such good-tasting fun that you forget it doesn’t have any other redeeming qualities. I confess, with just the right amount of righteous guilt, to being a big fan of the stuff.


Still, with Christmas dinner barreling toward us at high speed and us staring at it like a reindeer in the headlights, it seems as good a time as any for "electric cranberry sauce with apples and apricots." It's a delicious, easy, and just a bit grown-up cranberry sauce I think you’ll like.


In a cup or small bowl, soak ½ cup of chopped dried apricots in 1/3 cup of brandy while you prepare the other ingredients. (It's this touch of brandy that gives this sauce both its deep taste and the word "electric" in its name.)


Combine 2 cups of cranberries, 1 large chopped apple, the juice and zest of one orange, 1/2 cup of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of cinnamon, and ½ teaspoon of nutmeg in a saucepan. Heat it to boiling, then reduce it to a simmer until the cranberries are tender and start to burst, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.


Combine 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and 1 tablespoon of water, and mix into the cranberry mixture, cooking until thickened. Add the apricots, including the brandy, and heat until cooked through and the smell of alcohol subsides, about 3 minutes. If necessary, add additional sugar to taste. (I've found adding another 3 tablespoons works for me, but you may like more or less.)


If you’d like a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this recipe, just let me know in a comment or e-mail and it will be on its way, guaranteed to arrive in time for Christmas.


See you next week! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Enjoying a Cold One

In the summertime, there's nothing like relaxing with something cold and refreshing. Since some folks don't hold alcohol very well (which is code for, since I don't hold alcohol very well), I often rely on the delicious, tomatoey tang of the classic cold soup from Mexico (where they really know what a hot summer is), home-made gazpacho. If you've had good gazpacho, you know just what I mean. If you haven't, well, today's your lucky day. (This also addresses a promise I made after last week's post to write about something that is both low-fat and not heavily burdened by carbs.)

The recipe, which makes four meal-size portions or six to eight appetizer size portions, follows. As you'll see, the overall approach involves dividing the chopped vegetables into thirds, one of which is pureed to a fine consistency, the second of which is ground to a slightly larger, coarser consistency, and the third of which is used in its basic chopped state without being pureed at all. The resulting combination of textures adds a wonderful dimension to the tasty tartness of the basic soup. The only thing that would make it even better would be to top it with fresh, home-made croutons, so we will. (I have to get some carbs in there, you know.)

The recipe, as you would expect, involves a lot of tomatoes. I use fresh, since this is primarily a summer dish and it's easy to get - or even grow - good tomatoes. (I've never made this with canned tomatoes, but if you do and it works, let me know!) For this reason, a couple of special notes about the tomatoes are in order.

First, I like to use plum tomatoes. In addition to having a delightful taste, their oblong shape makes it easy to seed them by cutting them in half; round tomatoes need to be cut into quarters for seeding. That may not make much of a difference if you're using five tomatoes, but if you're starting with five pounds of tomatoes, as you do with this dish, a few seconds saved on each tomato quickly add up. (If this reminds you even a little of that oft-told story of why a certain famous cartoon mouse has four fingers on each hand instead of five, it's not coincidental. That's where I got the idea.)

Second, you'll note the recipe calls for the tomatoes not only to be seeded, but also peeled. For any readers who are new to peeling tomatoes, it's easier than it sounds. The trick is to blanch them in boiling water for about a minute; once they cool off enough to handle, you'll find the skins remove easily. (I like to quicken the process by blanching the tomatoes in batches of three or four; while each batch is blanching, there's enough time to take the previous batch out of a cooling bath (think blanch-and-shock) and peel them before the newly blanched batch takes their place in the cold water.

A third special note, this one about the red onion you'll be using. Red onions have great flavor but tend to have a nasty bite. You can decrease the onion's bite, while still keeping the flavor, by soaking it in water for five minutes prior to using.

Enough talk...let's make some gazpacho!

As with most things involving tomatoes, use non-metallic bowls.
Begin by peeling and seeding five pounds of tomatoes as described above. When they're done, cut them into bite size pieces. Place the pieces into a pot, slowly bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer. After simmering the tomatoes for 15 minutes, stirring often to prevent them from sticking to pot, press them through a food mill (or let them cool and then crush them with your hands), putting the juice back into the pot and keeping the tomato meat for used later in the recipe. Boil the juice for about five minutes, stirring often.
    
While the tomatoes are cooking, combine in a large bowl 1 chopped red onion; 1 peeled, seeded and chopped cucumber; 1 seeded and chopped green or red bell pepper; and 2 chopped stalks of celery. Separate about one-third of the mixture and put it aside. To the remaining two-thirds, 2 tablespoons of chopped, fresh cilantro;2 tablespoons of chopped, fresh chives; and the tomato meat you put aside earlier. Then add 2 minced garlic cloves, 1/4 cup of red wine vinegar, 1/4 cup of olive oil, the juice of 1 lime, 2 teaspoons of sugar, 4 teaspoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of fresh-ground black pepper, and 1 teaspoon of hot sauce.

Mix all these ingredients well and divide that mixture in half.

Using a food processor, finely puree one of the halves and coarse-puree the other half. Once that's done, combine them with the chopped vegetables you put aside earlier, add the tomato liquid you heated, and mix until everything is combined.

You're just about done! Just put hot mixture into a non-metallic storage container, cover tightly and refrigerate overnight to let the soup cool and the flavors blend.
Of course, you'll also need croutons to go with your new gazpacho.

To make the croutons, put 4 roughly chopped cloves of garlic into 1/2 cup of olive oil. Let it rest for as long as possible, to give the garlic a chance to infuse the oil. (If you do this before you start the gazpacho as noted above, the garlic will have time to infuse the oil while you're processing the tomatoes.)

While you're preheating your oven to 250 degrees, brush both sides of three or four slices of firmly-textured bread with the garlic-infused oil. Cut the bread into squares about 1/2" on each side, and spread them out on a baking sheet. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour until the bread is at the desired level of crispness, turning the baking pan half-way through to heat the croutons evenly. When they're done, sprinkle them with fresh parmesan, put in a sealed bag or container, and store until you're ready to use them to top your gazpacho!
For a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this or any other recipe from this site, just drop me a line and I'll get it right off to you.


Thanks for visiting! Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)