penne with sweet pepper sauce and sweet italian sausages

This is another of my dad's old standbys. He actually used to make this at his restaurant. I made it more than a week ago, but I will try to remember the details.

To start off, bought some *sweet* italian sausages at the whole foods. Usually I get little ones - but these were twice the size! I put them in a frying pan with the heat on low. I turn them every 5 minutes or so. I later learned from Kristen that slicing them into quarters lengthwise cooks 'em faster and more evenly. gonna try that next time.

gina marie sliced a whole yellow onion and we also sliced (into long medium strips, not chopped) 2 red, 1 yellow, and 1 orange bell peppers. We added this along with a lot of chopped garlic into a big saute pan with some olive oils and put the heat on low.

once the peppers had softened I seasoned with some thyme and a little pepper. then I added half a can of low-sodium chicken broth and brought it just to a simmer and then turned the heat back to medium. I let that simmer until the broth had reduced a bit and added 1 can of diced tomatoes.

continued to let this all cook on medium low. towards the end I added half a stick of butter to the sauce. just let it melt and stir.



when my sauce was the consistency I wanted, I added some chopped fresh basil at the very end. The following pictures were to document my basil chopping method Stack up some leaves, roll them, then slice the roll-up:



Then I served it over whole wheat penne. (I made too much penne - one box would have cut it - also, generally I wouldn't use whole wheat for this -but it's better for you!) Also, served with parmesan.






Kristen made it awesome by bringing us her favorite bottle of french red. Excellent!




Vegan options: use vegetable broth, veggie sausages, no butter at the end

beef stew - are you tired of my weekend yet?

So here comes, finally, the beef stew I've been threatening to make for ages. I just realized I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but you'll just have to deal with seeing the process.

Also, will someone please buy me a digital camera? the phone camera sucks.

Once again, as with the spaghetti sauce, this is my dad's recipe. but all mistakes are mine :)

For starters you need 1.5 pounds of beef. I like to just buy the precut stewing beef, because then you don't have to trim it. I still cut it into smaller pieces though. If you can't get it precut or it's much cheaper not too, get a nice piece of beef and trim off the fat on the outside and cut it into cubes about 3/4 inch.

I bought stewing meat, so I just made the pieces smaller and then dumped them into my big pot and turned the gas on about medium. I stirred every so often until the meat was pretty brown on all sides. This creates some nice juicyness and drippings that will make the stew taste good. add some salt and pepper at this point as well. while it's cooking chop one small-medium sized onion or half a large onion. when the meat is pretty brown, add in the onion. and then it will look like this:



Next it's time for spices. lots of spices. add dried thyme, basil, and marjoram (marjoram is key - it's totally what makes it taste/smell like stew!) I usually add about 1-2 tablespoons of each - but mostly I just play it by ear. whatever I have enough of. Stir.

Then comes the tricky part - not that tricky, but my dad made it sound tricky when he was first explaining it to me. add 2 tablespoons of flour, like this:

stir the flour until the meat and onions are nicely coated. this is what will thicken the broth into a tasty, thick stew.

next add water. I like to add a lot. the general rule is 2 cups of water for every bullion cube that you are going to add, and you need to bring the water level up at least as twice as high as the meat, but I like to bring it up much higher. This time I added 6 cups of water, but then I added more later, so it might be prudent to add it all at the beginning. now turn the heat up to high. then I added 3 beef bullion cubes - however, these were extra large bullion cubes, and I think made the stew a bit saltier than I liked it, so if you used extra large bullion cubes, I'd go with 8 cups of water for 3 bullion cubes.

Next use a wooden spoon to scrape the sides and bottom of the pot so all those nice drippings the meat made earlier get mixed into the broth.

Add a bay leaf.

now lower the heat so that the soup is simmering, not boiling. just little bubbles. Let it sit on the stove simmering for about an hour. if you only have half an hour, that's ok, but longer is better.

While it's doing that chop your vegetables. My dad always says 3/4 cup of carrots and 3/4 of a cup of potatoes, but I always add more than that because that's my favorite part. I think I chopped 1 1/2 cups of carrots and 2 cups of potatoes (peeled first) and it was about right.

The carrot was actually all one carrot, because it was an enormous carrot from my farmshare. the potatoes were also from the farm share, but unlike the carrot, were not so spectacularly large as to require me to take a picture of them:



Look how big that is!!!


After an hour, add the carrots, and stir.

let the carrots simmer for ten minutes in the stew, and then add the potatoes.

finally, add the secret ingredient:

2 tablespoons of plain tomato paste, and stir. You will see that this completely changes the color of the stew, and makes it amaaaaazing.

cook until the potatoes are nice and tender - but take it off the heat before they get mushy!

You can check the salt and pepper at this time and adjust to taste as needed. I say less salt, but sometimes really peppery stew is excellent.

you can serve it right off the stove once the potatoes are done, but it is best 1-2 days later out of the fridge. if the broth has dissipated, feel good about adding a fair bit of water to it before it hits the stove/microwave for reheating. The leftovers are always better than the original.

Breakfast in Skurdalen, from the one who makes it.

Sarah emily posted a bit about breakfast in Norway. The breakfast that she and others have eaten that I make in the cabin in Skurdalen (pronounced, roughly, "skrewdallin,") is influenced by the smorgasbord-y breakfasts common in scandinavia, the bread, cheese and eggs that they consume constantly, and my dad's awesome cooking skills, straight outta southern california.

Basically, the key is, use everything in the little cabin refrigerator, including whatever is left of last night's fish dinner. It's important to have at least one hot "centerpiece" - this is to satisfy the American in me.

Usually, it's potatoes. To make the potatoes:

scrub a buncha little potatoes (you can peel if you want, but I never do) - either red or white
cube the potatoes
cube one small-medium sized onion
finely chop or crush 4 cloves of garlic
put a 1/4 stick of butter or (for vegans, lactards, and the rest of the butter-averse) a bunch of oil (vegetable or olive) in a frying pan
add onions on medium heat
add garlic
saute about 2 minutes
add in potatoes
stir pan with spatula every 1-2 minutes
dice 1 red, yellow or orange pepper (optional)
dice 1 zucchini (optional)
(you can add pretty much any vegetables you have, they will change it up a little, I have found peppers and zucchini particularly satisfying, but carrots, broccoli, etc can also be good - or you can skip the extra veggies altogether and just revel in starchy goodness)
after potatoes have been in pan for about 10-15 minutes, add zucchini and pepper
add salt & lots of pepper
add garlic powder if you feel like it
cook - stirring often to avoid burning, and adding more butter/oil (especially necessary when using butter) whenever it seems prudent.
you can now be done, if you wish. Vegans must finish here.

optionally, you can scramble/fry an egg into the potatoes.
to do this, whisk an a few eggs, and optionally, some milk in a bowl.
pour the mixture over the potatoes and stir it around.
it's done when the eggs are cooked to your liking.

AND/OR

add cheese!
you can grate it or just break off hunks. In Norway I almost always use gulost (yellow cheese - which is sort of like a mild cheddar) or jarlsberg (a mild swiss-like cheese) for this.
add chunks of cheese liberally with the heat on medium low and stir until it melts.

when the potatoes are done, put them in a brightly colored bowl with some kind of ikea utensil for serving.



Moving on from the potatoes,
another key element is the boiled egg.
you need an egg cup for everyone
boil the eggs to their liking (softer is better for this purpose).
put each egg in an egg cup.
when it's time to eat the egg, tap your knife on the side of the egg near the very top to crack it a little, and then slice off the top.
if you like, add a little salt and or pepper to exposed egg.
now using your little bitty spoon, scoop the egg out of it's shell to eat it. you can eat it off the spoon, or you can put it on bread as part of your smorbrod assembly.

which brings us to smorbrod, the real heart of the breakfast. "Smor" in Norwegian, means butter. "bord" means table, thus, smorgasbord, buttertable. smorbrod is what norwegians eat for breakfast and lunch - butterbread. basically, you take some bread - usually a pretty heavy one with lots of seeds and stuff in it, and you spread some butter on it, and then you spread more stuff on it. the "smor" (butter) has come to mean more than just bread, so the smor is the spread, whatever you spread on it, and that's what we but on the smorgasbord (spread table!)

Here are some typical things for the smorgasbord:

bread, sliced in a basket sitting next to the toastmaster (person sitting next to the toaster is the toastmaster. they toast bread on request for the rest of the table) you might have a graabrod, very rough bread, "loff" (pronounced "loof") which is yummy white bread, solskinnbrod, which is sunshine bread and has sunflower seeds, and whatever other bread you baked or picked up at the bakery. Also in the breadbasket there may be Wasa crackers or other breadlike objects that you can spread things on.

cheeses. set them out on a wooden board with a knife and a cheeseslicer (norwegian invention!). I usually but out all the kinds of cheese in the fridge, usually at least one yellow cheese, one brown cheese (usually geitost, a brown sort of sweet caramelly goat cheese - geit means goat), something kind of creamy and/or stinky, and then whatever else you picked up.

veggies. usually a tomato (tomat), a pepper (paprika), a cucumber (agurk), put on a board with a paring knife so people can slice their own. these are key.

meats/fishies. salami or other sliced meat, any leftovers. often I poach the fish (fisk) that we catch in the lake, and if you make it nice the night before it's very yummy the next day. sometimes I reheat it by sauteeing it in a little parsley butter (persillesmor) just before breakfast. (there is no microwave at the cabin, which is why the food always tastes better). also, jars of little fishes, brined and pickled - herring mostly. These are not my favorite, but sometimes I put them out so folks can try. Norwegians also like to eat little shrimps (reker) and breakfast. I can't usually afford it, but smoked salmon is also a biggy. and yummy. sometimes also there is bacon, but the norwegians have nothing to do with that :).

Boiled eggs. I know we already had them in our eggcups, but it's important to also have them hardboiled for peeling and putting in the eggslicer (another norwegian invention!), which then makes perfect smorbrod slices.

also key are butter, jams (syltetoy) (the norwegians are big on blueberry), nutella or other chocolate (sjokolade) spread.


then everyone sits down with their hot beverage, their cold beverage, and gets started on their eggcup, the bread gets toasted, people have some potatoes, and then the spreading begins. At this point it is also key to *make your lunch* - which you do by spreading your bread (all open face sandwiches in norway) and then putting a piece of wax paper between each piece of spread bread. then you wrap it in more wax paper - or if you're modern like me, a plastic bag.

then you go swimming in the lake and fall asleep with your book on your face.

meat sauce for spaghetti. like bolognese. but different

So I made my spaghetti sauce for the first time in two years last night - it came out pretty good I thought! Could have used some more kick, but overall, it worked out. I make a lot so that I can freeze more than half of what I make and then thaw it out of nice little meal appropriate containers when I'm ready. It tastes better after it sits around for awhile anyways.

Here's my recipe. I'll try and take some pictures next time I thaw...

Go to Super Stop & Shop and buy all the cans of tomato products you need for cheap
Go to Whole Foods and buy 1 to 1.5 lbs organic grass fed not-too-lean ground beef. the 90% lean stuff is not juicy enough. And I'm afraid of beef that's not all yuppie and expensive.

This is totally my dad's recipe. He taught me to cook it, and mine will never be as good as his.

Brown the beef all by itself (no oil or anything) in the bottom of the big pot you're going to make the sauce in.
When the beef is half way to brown, add 1/2 a big or 1 small chopped yellow sweet onion. stir it up.

Add some salt and cracked pepper. be liberal.

When the meat is all cooked through (all brown, no pink) add about 1 teaspoon of finely chopped or crushed garlic (usually about 3 cloves in the garlic press) and keep sauteing.

Stir and then immediately add 2 tablespoons of dry basil, 1 teaspoon dry thyme and 1 teaspoon oregano. Don't brown the garlic! turn down the heat a little to avoid this.

after about 4 minutes with the garlic and spices in there, return the burner to high heat and add 2/3 cup of red wine and cook it on high for 2-3 minutes to burn off the alcohol.

Reduce the heat and add a regular-sized can of chopped tomatoes and stir,

add 2 regular-sized cans or one of the mega cans of tomato sauce (plain tomato sauce made by Heinz or whatever that comes in a can, no fancy jars or ragu necessary.) Add one little can (a little more than 2 tablespoons usually) of tomato paste and 2 large bay leaves and stir.

Sometimes at this point I add a little water by running the same half can of water through all the cans of tomato sauce of used and stirring that in. reduces waste, helps cleaning, and adds a little liquid.

Reduce heat so that the sauce is simmering but not boiling - no big bubbles. Leave it for 1/2 an hour to to 2 hours. I think at least an hour is ideal. Then you can eat it on pasta! Freeze the rest unless you're eating it tomorrow, in which case put it in the fridge. the more days on, the better it will be.