A Guest Posting

Kate has really done a great job with her blog, and it's time that I finally come through on my promise to add a guest-posting. I agreed to do it weeks ago but, until tonight, I hadn't yet run out of excuses to sit down and write something.

I don't really have anything to say, but Kate suggested that I should write about the pasta sauce I made this evening. I did it a little different than usual, but I think it came out pretty good.

I started with peeled garlic cloves. Quite a few, actually. I think there were probably 10 or so. I find that grated garlic distributes flavor even better than minced, and it's a lot easier. I grated them with a small fine grater, and set the resulting mush off to the side.

Then for no particular reason, I decided it would be an interesting idea to grate the onion too.

Well, onions are a lot wetter than I thought. I ended up with a little pile of onion-mush to match my garlic-mush, but there was also a fair amount of onion... uhh, juice, that I drained off and got rid of. I probably should have just diced up the onion like a normal person.

I browned a pound of lean ground beef and 8 sweet Italian sausages, and set all the meat aside. I heated some olive oil in a medium sized pot, and fried up my grated aromatics over medium-high heat for just a few minutes. Then I added two 24 oz cans of crushed tomatoes, a 6 oz can of tomato paste and reintroduced the meat.

I gave the whole mess a stir, and added 3 bay leaves, some basil, oregano, fresh ground black pepper, salt and crushed red pepper flakes. I'd tell you how much of each, but I never measure. I brought the sauce to a low boil, and then reduced the heat to low and let it simmer mostly covered (I set the lid just a little crooked to let out steam) for about an hour - stirring every 15 minutes or so.

We enjoyed our meat sauce over ziti with lines.