Food, glorious food!

So, I just wanted to share with you all the wonderful news that I've discovered the secret to making awesome homemade pasta sauce! I know, you can hardly contain your excitement right? Ok...are you ready for it? The secret to the best, most delicious, better-than-Ragu pasta sauce is....brown sugar! I know! It's insane, right? Who would've thunk to put brown sugar in pasta sauce? Well, I guess I did, and that makes me and my pasta sauce awesome. It really adds a depth of flavor and just a touch of sweetness, which makes the sauce taste so much richer. So, here's what you do - saute a cup each of chopped onion and bell pepper, and two cups of sliced mushrooms in olive oil. Add a teaspoon of minced garlic, and crushed red pepper to taste. Add red wine (once around the pan is enough) and cook the alcohol off. Add a 28oz can of crushed tomatoes, salt and black pepper to taste, whatever herbs you want (I usually only add oregano and parsley), and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Stir in about 1 teaspoon of brown sugar, continue cooking for 5 or so minutes. Then, just before serving, stir in about a quarter cup of the pasta water (the starch helps the sauce stick to pasta). Done! Deelish! Try it - you can thank me later.

Seriously though, as of late I've been trying to come up with different takes on meals that we eat regularly. Like fish. Ugh. I'm getting so tired of fish. I mean, I love it and I do enjoy eating it every week, but it gets hard to think of new ways to prepare it. So, on Monday we had cod wrapped with a slice proscuitto, drizzled with olive oil and topped with a sprinkle of crushed red pepper. We bought proscuitto to make chicken cordon bleu, but I'm guessing you could probably wrap the fish with bacon and it would still be good. Yum. Although it would have been better if I cooked it in the skillet instead of in the oven - the proscuitto wasn't crispy enough. But still, a slightly different take on boring ol' fish.

Another new dish that will probably go into semi-regular rotation was the stuffed pork tenderloin I made on Sunday. When we buy pork, we usually buy the pre-marinated tenderloins and just roast or grill them. This time, we got plain tenderloin, I butterflied it and pounded it thin, filled it with a stuffing of chopped apple, craisins and walnuts, tied it up and roasted it. Holy cow, was it good! It really wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, and it's probably fancy enough to serve for a nice dinner party.

One dish that I actually made from a recipe was a Moroccan chickpea stew. It was soooooo tasty, and I didn't miss eating meat at all. It would be pretty good with some diced chicken breast added in, but it was fantastic just as it was. And it was nice to not eat meat for once, not to mention it was a super cheap meal to make.

Anyways, I guess the moral of this blog post is that trying new things in the kitchen doesn't have to be hard, and you might be pleasantly surprised!

What an occasion!

In an effort to avoid the massive crowds making their way into DC for Obama's Inauguration today, I'm working from home. There's absolutely no way in hell you would find me anywhere near DC today - they're expecting up to 5 million people to arrive in the city for the festivities. Ugh. Sounds miserable to me. But, of course, the TV is on and I'm half-watching the Inauguration coverage in-between snippets of work. It really is incredible. Every square inch of the National Mall is covered with bodies. I have NEVER seen so many people together in one place, most of them united because of one man. It's awe-inspiring that a country that is usually so divided can come together so peacefully for a common cause. Amazing. What an incredible moment in history.