Simple Sauces Part 4–Tomato Sauce

Everyone needs a good all-purpose tomato sauce, one that can be used for everything from chicken parmesan to pizza to pasta. It needs to be easy to make and open to additions of vegetables, herbs, and meats.
This is that sauce.
It's kind of a miracle that this just happened to be the sauce because I kind of chose it arbitrarily, but whatever! It's a great tomato sauce.


Basic Tomato Sauce (from the side of bionaturae's Organic Strained Tomatoes):




Ingredients:


1 jar strained tomatoes (preferably organic, bionaturae recommended)
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

4 minced garlic cloves
4 teaspoons dried basil (or 8 fresh minced basil leaves)
Sea salt to taste


Instructions:


Place olive oil, minced garlic, and sea salt in a medium saucepan over medium heat and sauté until garlic is golden.

Pour strained tomatoes in and stir.

Simmer for 5-10 minutes.

I recommend not serving it with the slotted spoon.

As I mentioned before, this sauce lends itself to any occasion. You want to throw some chopped tomatoes in there? Sure.
You want to sauté onions and carrots with the garlic? Done.
Ground beef? Just toss it in (cooked, of course).
Chicken chunks? Go for it.
Anchovies? ...Maybe stick with chicken.

Even in its most basic form, this sauce is tasty. The organic tomatoes jibe perfectly with the garlic. The reason I love bionaturae's Organic Strained Tomatoes because the only ingredient is tomatoes. No additives or preservatives, just pureéd tomatoes. Their sauce recipe is insanely easy to prepare as well; it can be made in less than 15 minutes, perfect for those "Oh crap! I forgot to make a sauce for the pasta tonight!" moments.
Please pray for my grandfather. He is currently very ill in the hospital.

Simple Sauces Part 3–Mayonnaise

I'm going to stop you right now. Mayonnaise is a sauce, got it? When it's not white fluff out of a jar, that is.
Seriously. Real mayonnaise (NOT Hellman's "Real" Mayonnaise) is a rich, yellow sauce for bread, potato salads, and many other things. It is made with egg yolks; thus it tastes eggy and delicious.
Mayonnaise is simple, too. In the time it takes you to go to the store and buy mayo, you could make a potato salad with homemade mayonnaise. And contrary to popular belief, you don't have to add the oil drip
by
drip
by
drip.


Mayonnaise (adapted from The Best Recipe):
Makes about 3/4 cup


Ingredients:

1 large egg yolk
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1-1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon white wine vinegar (sherry vinegar works too)
3/4 cup corn oil (or any other tasteless oil)

1 teaspoon water


Instructions:


Whisk egg yolk vigorously in medium bowl for 15-30 seconds.

Add salt, mustard, vinegar, and lemon juice and whisk until thickened and brightened in color. There is no such thing as over-whisking in this step.

It should be brighter.

Add water and whisk.

Add 1/4 cup oil in a slow and steady stream.

Whisk vigorously until oil is completely incorporated and mixture is thickened, about 1 minute.

It should be thicker than this.

Add another 1/4 cup of oil the same way. Whisk until incorporated.

Add last 1/4 cup all at once and whisk until completely incorporated, about 30 seconds.

Apparently, I failed to whisk it enough.

While this was definitely the best mayonnaise I've ever had, taste-wise, the texture wasn't quite right. It was more of a liquid than a spread, which I will take the blame for. I probably didn't whisk enough. However, that actually made it better for use in a potato salad that night. It was a lot easier to stir in.

My laziness in whisking paid off!

The only modification I made was adding the water, which I decided to do after reading the New York Times' article on mayonnaise. It apparently keeps it from "breaking," or separating before it's supposed to.

Enjoy your mayo!

Innovative Leftovers Part 2–Coulis Stir-Fry

When you have a severely depleted fridge, what do you make as a vegetable for dinner? Hint: You have a random bag of shredded carrots, some peas from your garden, two paltry scallions, and a blender half-full of tomato coulis.
What do you do with this mish-mosh of produce? Gnaw on raw scallions? Sit in a corner by yourself and eat a bag of raw carrots? Chug the coulis from the blender? Aside from being completely disgusting, where's the fun in that? No, you have to cook something. And that something is stir-fry.

Coulis Stir-Fry


Ingredients:

1 bag shredded carrots
2-3 scallions

3-4 cups sugar snap or snow peas
Meat of choice (optional)
1/2-1 cup tomato coulis
1-2 tablespoons olive oil, depending on pan size


Procedure:

Chop the scallions into small pieces.

Place pan over medium heat. Pour olive oil into pan and use spatula to coat bottom entirely.

Put vegetables and meat into pan and stir with spatula. Stir periodically until cooked, roughly 5 minutes.

Scoop stir-fry into bowl and pour coulis on top.

Though the coulis wasn't great on chicken, it was fantastic on stir-fry! It coated the vegetables nicely and enhanced them with its tomato flavor. The vinegar definitely wasn't as noticeable as it was on the chicken. Also, the stir-fry was so pretty! The colors were so bright and happy-looking.

See? Look at those peas. They're smiling.

This is a perfect summer dish!

Simple Sauces Part 2–Raita

This is the second in a series of quick and easy sauces to jazz up any dish.

I had about a half-tub of leftover yogurt from the Bell Pepper Harissa Soup. Since we were having spicy sausages for dinner, I decided to make a nice yogurt sauce that I could douse my sausage in to hopefully prevent it from burning a hole in the roof of my mouth and causing irreparable damage to my larynx as it blazes a fiery trail down my esophagus.
So.
I consulted one of my favorite cookbooks, The Joy of Cooking. It has two recipes for raita, which is an Indian yogurt sauce specifically for spicy meats. Perfect! I chose the fruit one, mostly because we didn't have any of the stuff for the other one and conveniently had everything for this one. (The other is a cucumber/mint sauce.) It was actually good that I didn't have a choice, because they both sounded good–and they're both really easy to make.


Fruit Raita

Ingredients:


1 ripe banana, peach, or nectarine, finely chopped, or 1/2 cup fresh pineapple chunks
1 cup yogurt or 1/2 cup yogurt and 1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons chopped almonds or macadamia nuts

1 tablespoon golden raisins (optional)
Up to 4 tablespoons sugar or honey, depending on fruit
Pinch of ground nutmeg or ground cardamom


Procedure:


Chunky: Put fruit, yogurt, nuts, and raisins in bowl and stir. Add honey/sugar and spice to taste and stir to combine.

Honey

Smooth: Put fruit, yogurt, honey, and nuts in a blender and blend until smooth. Add honey and spice to taste and blend a little more.

Please accept this picture of an adorable puppy as my apology for there not being pictures of the smooth sauce.

Though I don't mind chunky sauces, I created a "Smooth Sauce" approach for those who do. I wouldn't recommend using raisins for a smooth sauce, though, because I don't know how well those would blend.
I really like this sauce. It cut down on my sausage's heat nicely.

Thankfully, it did not burn a fiery hole down my esophagus.

Though some might say that it's just yogurt with fruit chunks, I disagree. It has the consistency of yogurt, but it tastes like more than a sum of its parts. The fruit and honey make it a sweet, balanced sauce perfect for hot dishes. Also, it's hugely versatile. By my calculations, there are over 192 versions of this sauce that can be made just by using peach and macadamia nuts instead of almonds and nectarines and simple switches like that. And that doesn't factor in the veggie version at all!

I should have a raita party–traditional Indian cuisine with a bunch of tiny things of raita. Can anyone loan me some bowls?

Simple Sauces Part 1–Tomato Coulis

This is the first in a series of quick and easy sauces to jazz up any dish.
The June 20th edition of the New York Times had an article on coulis in their Good Eating section. A coulis is supposed to be a sauce that is beautiful as well as tasty. Since I've never made a "fancy" sauce before, I decided to give it a shot.
I decided to make my coulis with tomatoes, which were literally the only produce we had in the house beyond scallions and arugula, to go with some leftover chicken my parents brought home from a restaurant. I was improvising most of the time, since the Times used bell peppers. I actually had no clue if this would work or just explode in my face. (I have no clue how that would work either.) So without further ado, here is my tomato coulis.

Tomato Coulis


Ingredients:


2 large tomatoes
2 unpeeled garlic cloves
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

To my knowledge, my brothers have never made olive oil. I wish they would.

1/2 to 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
Seasonings: Salt, pepper, cayanne, cumin
Chicken broth (optional)


Procedure:


Roast tomatoes over a burner or under a broiler until soft.

Place in a brown paper bag to cool.

I assume a white paper bag would work too.

While tomatoes are cooling, roast garlic in a small skillet over medium heat until skin is blackened and clove is soft.

Peel garlic and tomatoes and cut tomatoes into quarters.

Place everything except for seasonings and broth in a blender and pureé until smooth.

Season to taste and blend to mix in spices. If pureé is too thick, add chicken broth. If you like, strain through a fine mesh strainer or chinois. If it becomes too watery after straining, mix solids back in.


Pretty? Yes.
Tasty? Depends.

It was a nice orange color, but I used a full tablespoon of vinegar in mine, which was too much for me. As a sauce for my chicken, it was too strong to use a lot of, although it provided a nice kick when I used a little. It made a great sauce for a veggie stir-fry we had the next day, and my mom said it made a great salad dressing. (She didn't mind the vinegar; she actually ate it as a soup!) Next time, though, I'm either going to use the half tablespoon of vinegar or make a fruit coulis. It really depends on your preferred tastes. Also, I would highly recommend using a broiler to roast your tomatoes because I almost killed myself trying to roast them over a burner.

I dropped it multiple times and almost sent it flying across the room once.