Guest Post: Pineapple Salsa

So the other day, Rose had to go out to a meeting and she left me in charge of dinner. 98% of the time this means I should order us some takeout out from one of our favorite places. She leaves the bad-decision-making up to me when it comes to our food intake.

This night though, I wanted to impress her. I am Sous Chef Brian after all. All this time in the kitchen with her means I have to have learned something, right? So I formed a plan. Tacos! But I wanted something more than just tacos. I don’t mean to be insulting to anyone here, but anyone can make some decent tacos. To surprise my wife, I decided to take some of the pineapple in the fridge and make something she would never expect. A pineapple salsa.

Harissa Mayo

Ok, so this post started with a lie. I didn't make harissa mayo, I made harissa vegenaise.  So maybe you want to swap the honey for some agave and make it vegan, or maybe you want to use real egg mayo, or maybe you're ok living in limbo like me, with the vegenaise and the honey. It's really up to you.

But the point is that you should make this sauce, and you should put it on everything you eat. Ok, in moderation, because it's mayo, but still. 

Turn your regular pasta sauce into vodka sauce

There's a whole debate over whether vodka sauce is really a food, or if it's a 1980's food trend that refuses to die.   Chowhound has some decent conversation on the topic, and folks land on both the "vodka makes tomatoes taste better" side and the "this isn't really food" side.  More than 10 years ago, NYT said it was food, but that might have been too close to the 80s.  If you were to Google it, you'd find additional sources on the debate.

I think it's food.  But since I wasn't all that aware of what was food before the 80s, what do I know?  I make cream sauces without vodka, and they're good, but in my silly little opinion, vodka sauces get you to the magical place of pepperyness balanced with sweetness, and I don't think a sweet cream sauce with some pepper in it does that as well.  

Pasta with Broccoli and White Wine Sauce

When it's cold out, I want food with rich sauces.  Two weeks ago I said I wanted lasagna or beef stew or something like that and ended up pretty happy with barbecue seitan.  This was like that.  I wanted mac and cheese or pasta with meat sauce or ... mmm ... white wine sauce.

I don't think you're going to dig through your pantry and pull out the same experimental spelt noodles I used, and I don't think you're going to have one inappropriate mushroom to add to the dish either.  But you can do this with what's in your fridge.  Let's focus on the wine sauce and leave the rest aside for now.

Local Pasta from the Big Chain Store

Ok, so I didn't really cook.   Our Whole Foods recently started selling fresh local pasta*.  A couple of weeks back we tried some ravioli, which was awesome but expensive.  I compare everything to the price of meat,** and this was like if we had shared a free range, boneless, skinless chicken breast.  But again, awesome.  So then we went back to try the cheaper unfilled pasta. 

It comes in sheets and they cut it there, so I was like, "Can I get two people's worth of something like a fettucini?" And the teenager working the booth was like, "I don't know it by name, I know it by size."  Uh... so fettucini sized?  I pointed to one of the example pastas and he cut the spinach sheet into these ribbons.

I don't get exposed to much fresh pasta.  I threaten to learn to make pasta, but don't follow through.   It was incredible.  Really tender without being soft, and it cooked quickly.  This spinach pasta tasted way more spinachy than dried, too.  


It cost us just under a buck a serving (we asked for two people's worth - because I have no idea - and got three meals out of it).  So for the cost of a box of decent dried pasta, we got three meals of incredible pasta. So, in terms of spaghetti, way more expensive, but in terms of dinner, cheap as hell.  


I dressed it up a bit with leftover basil cream sauce and some parmesan.  With a salad, it made a great meal.


*I'm not so much saying, "Run out to Whole Foods and buy this," as much as I'm saying, "get your hands on some fresh pasta."


**ok, not everything, just foods.  Can you imagine?  "I want to buy this shirt - let's see, it's the cost of 4 pounds of ground chuck..."

Hot Tip: Freezing Tomatoes

Remember when I had all those tomatoes?   My cousin Michael, and I should be clear, because I have three of those, so my first cousin's husband, Michael, reminded me that I could freeze them to peel, rather than blanching them.  Just toss them in the freezer, whole, and when they defrost the skins come off.  I've done this with a handful of tomatoes, but never with a serious tomato bounty. At the time, I didn't have room in my freezer(s) for 27 pounds of tomatoes. 

You can freeze tomatoes whole, though, when you have the space.  You can't use them on a BLT afterwards (well, you can but you shouldn't) but for cooking, it's fantastic.  So recently, I got a smaller load of plum tomatoes in my CSA and I just washed them and popped them in a gallon zipper bag in the freezer.  


Then when I started feeling guilty about how I don't do much to take care of the 100 year old man* who lives on my street and looks after the block, I

Slow Roasted Tomato Sauce

I had a lot of tomatoes.  Not like, a lot of tomatoes, but several.  Enough that I needed to take action before they went to waste, but not so many that I wanted to blanch and seed them and spend serious time fussing over them.  I had like a pound and half of all sorts of tomatoes.  

I also had time.  We had a bit of a storm here, you may have heard, and had prepared to not have power or water on Sunday.  But we had power and water, and I had done all of the laundry and cleaned out the fridge and everything in advance of the storm so once it passed, I had nothing but time.  

Slow roasted tomato time. 

Basic Tomato Sauce

A few weeks ago I got all those tomatoes, remember?  I had seeded and drained them and hidden them away in freezer bags.   So it was time to make sauce.  A while back I made my "winter sauce" from canned tomatoes, and this is what I do in the summer with real ones. 

Chunky Vegan Vodka Sauce

This is exciting. You should make this and eat it.   You should not tell people (non-vegan people) that it's vegan until after they're wow-ing about it.  

I was apprehensive about trying to do a non-dairy cream sauce.  I'm trying to expand my repertoire of vegan recipes, not because I'll ever go cheese-free, but because you never know who you're going to end up cooking for.  Actually, I do know, one of the friends I cook for (used to cook more for, got lazy, I suck) is vegetarian and dairy free, and frankly, eggs aren't exciting enough to me to call her anything but vegan.  So I like to try different things and see if we can get by without milk.  But this dish isn't about getting by, this dish rocks and I don't see a reason to make dairy cream sauce again.  

Anyhow, back to my apprehension.  1.  I like cheese and stuff and 2.  I tried to use the cashew cream a couple of days ago and it's was disgusting.  I mean like, spit-it-out-and-try-to-forget-it-ever-happened disgusting.  But maybe that's because I tried to use it raw in a cold sauce, in lieu of sour cream, because this time, again, fantastic. 

Spaghetti and Bison Meatballs and Italian Bread

Spaghetti and meatballs.   Something about it sounds so just thrown together.  Like a weeknight meal you wouldn't make for company.   But it was Sunday, and we had a dinner guest.   Oh, I should tell you - I asked her, "Hey, since I reference you in all my Sunday posts, is it cool if I use your name on the Interwebs?"  And she's all, "Yeah, I mean, that's fine and all, but it'd be more fun if you kept me a mystery."  So we had our mysterious dinner guest on Sunday, and made spaghetti and meatballs.   It was time intensive, making sauce, meatballs, bread, and totally worth it, even if in the end, it was just spaghetti and meatballs.