Mangia! Mangia!

After my sad little post earlier this week where I fessed up to using tomato sauce from a jar (horror of horrors!) the lovely and amazing Ahna sent me the link to Orangette's tomato sauce recipe. She is one of our favorite food bloggers (Remember these muffins? They are definitely next on my list.) and Ahna has impeccable taste, so I decided it was time to step up my game!

I'd been thinking about going on an Italian kick for a while now. There's a real shortage of good Italian places in Phoenix. Peter and I ventured to Aiello's, henceforth to be referred to as The World's Most Expensive Italian Restaurant, this fall and it was good, but even before the imposition of austerity measures, it wasn't going to be a regular thing. There are plenty of great pizza places - most notably LGO, Parlor, and Cibo - but sometimes nothing but a plate of pasta will do. For my dad, eating Italian 5 nights out of 7 would be 2 nights too few. Family history-wise, we hail from Northern Europe and Germany, but we are closet Italians. Nana makes spaghetti and meatballs for Christmas eve every year, and rigatoni and lasagna are our go-to meals the rest of the year. I'm headed back to Bar La Grassa when I'm in Minneapolis for Labor Day (Isaac Becker AND Italian? There is no better combination) but until then, it's pasta night at Amy's until further notice.

Criminally Good, Never Going Back to Jars Again Tomato Sauce
 I based this off of the Orangette recipe, but tweaked it a bit.

2 28 oz cans of whole plum tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, halved (one half kept whole, the other half diced)
1 stick of butter
A handful of basil leaves

In a large pot (I bought a super jank metal stock pot at Fry's during Katie and my grocery shopping bonanza/blackout, pretty proud of myself for slowly restocking our kitchen...) sauté the minced garlic and the diced half of the onion in a tablespoon of butter until the onion starts to become translucent. Add the rest of the stick of butter, the 2 cans of tomatoes (liquid and all), the unchopped half of the onion, and the basil leaves. Simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally,  for about an hour. Mash up any large chunks of tomato left with the spoon, fish out the onion half, add salt to taste, and serve with pasta.

Peter also made a tomato bread salad, which was outrageously good. We're obsessed with Martha's Great Food Fast cookbook, and her version of a panzanella is really good. We had some rosemary and olive oil bread from the earlier Fry's blackout shopping trip (I always seem to walk out having spent $200, even if I initially just wanted to grab, say, a can of tomatoes, and Katie only exacerbates the problem!) that got cut into cubes. Technically it should have been grilled but since we don't have one yet at the house (WE WILL TONIGHT!) it got doused with a bit of olive oil and went into a pan to crisp up. Toss it with a sliced up cucumber, 2 diced tomatoes, chopped basil, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and you've got a knockout summer meal!

 

 

 

We're pretty much amazing, as Chiddy Bang would say...

We finished it off with some strawberries and angel food cake, accusations of ringworm from petting cats outside Rose and Crown (cough JILL cough), sifting through teaching resources, discount wine from Target, and jimmying off my fake nails with a deck of cards (austerity measures!). It's a generally agreed upon fact that summer should just never end.

Love, Amy