…tomato sauce that is almost-but-not-quite made in your slow cooker.
I can’t remember if I posted this here or not. I don’t think I did. I posted it on the Domestic Blog a few months ago, but not here. Anyway, if it’s a repeat, I’m sorry. I got an email a bit ago asking for recipes and we had this for dinner last night, so I’m posting it.
From babies to bruises to bomato sauce (sorry. got caught up in the alliteration of it all).
I wish I could figure up the cost comparison between this and Ragu but I’m too lazy it’s too much thinking for 6am on a Tuesday. Having to price out a single carrot or stalk of celery is… bah.. I dunno. My gut tells me this is cheaper, my mouth tells me it tastes better, my body tells me it’s healthier, therefore- this recipe is way better than store-bought. Like that logic? :)
So what you need, to start, is a bottle of red wine.
Open it. Pour about 6 oz in a cup and set it aside.
Pour the rest in a glass and start sipping on it. Don’t worry. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.
Then take a couple of diced up carrots (I use 3), a couple of diced up stalks of celery (I use 2), a chopped onion, some minced garlic (I use the handy stuff in a jar) and a tablespoon or two of evoo.
This is the homemade but not-slow-cooker part:
Toss all of those aforementioned ingredients in a pan and saute the shit outta them.
(Do you see that chip there on my brand-spanking-new stove? Right there in front of the pan? Know where that came from? A bottle of wine! I know, right? We have toooo much wine in this house. The cat jumped up on the cabinets, knocked a bottle off and it dented my stove! AND left a dent in the floor. Didn’t break the bottle though. That’ some seriously well-bottled wine!)
You really gotta saute this for awhile. Everything has to be nice and soft. This gives you plenty of wine-sipping time.
I have tried to rush this part before and not let the carrots get soft and I only ended up with crunchy sauce. Really not the texture I was going for. So, don’t rush. Take your glass of wine, put your feet up, and sip ‘n’ saute.
When everything is tender, open up one small can of tomato paste and dump that sucker in.
Here, we conveniently run into more drinking time because you’re going to want to sit back and let this heat up a little bit. Let it even get a little fried and brown looking. Stir it around now and then, between sips, and just smell the garlic-y, tomato-y goodness. Depending on how fast you’ve been sipping, you might even start talking to it. S’okay if no one else is home. If there is someone else home? Whisper.
Once it’s all cooked through and starting to scrape off the pan a bit, remove the pan from the heat, take your reserved 6oz of wine (don’t tell me you dipped into it because then you’re forced to open another bottle and at this point, you should probably walk away from the stove. Shut it off first though.) and pour it in the pan to deglaze.
Scrap all that browned bit of goodness together, set it back on the heat and let it bubble merrily away.
This is where it starts to smell so. fucking. yummy. Kinda yeasty, very earthy, very heady, intoxicatingly delicious, room-spinning — wait. Maybe that’s the wine talking.
Nevermind.
While that’s heating through, we’ll move on to the not-homemade but definitely slow-cooker cooking part.
Open up 3 cans of diced tomatoes and 2 cans of stewed tomatoes and dump them in the crock.
Carefully pour in the sauteed wine mixture. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you’ve sipped too heartily. That shit is hot.
Add in a couple of bay leaves, a generous shake of oregano and basil (or whatever other italian-y spices you want), and a teaspoon or so, maybe a little less, of sugar to cut the tang of the ‘maters.
Stir it all up and set it on low for about 4, 5, 6, whatever hours.
Finish your wine. Or, if you’ve already finished it, go take a nap, ya lush. Jeez. Can’t take you anywhere.
While that’s cooking, let’s chat.
This is the part where I figured I could cut short on the saute time and the carrots and celery would finish getting mushy in the crock. It works with roast and soup so wtf-chuck? Well, it didn’t work and I have no idea why. Fail. I ended up straining out hard bits of carrot and that was a bitch.
I think you could probably add almost any sort of vegetable in the sauce to sneak some in to your family because here in a bit, we’re going to blend it all up and they will never know. It’s like when a recipe calls for cream of mushroom soup and my kids think mushrooms are akin to little flecks of fungus-y poop and won’t eat a thing that is even in the same room with a mushroom so I dump the can of soup into the blender and eradicate the tiny gray lumps and they don’t even know it’s in there. Dumbasses. Heh.
But I digress.
I bet zucchini would be awesome. Maybe even cauliflower. Oh heck, you could add a lot of stuff. Go hog wild with it. But like I mentioned before, make sure they are sauteed into softness or else they don’t blend worth a shit.
I’ve also used broth in place of wine to see how that tastes, and… meh… the wine brings a pretty unique flavor to it that I missed with the broth. Maybe if I’d have used broth first so I wouldn’t know what I was missing, it’d've been okay.
One other little tidbit about the finished product- for whatever reason, when you’ve plated it, it seems to get a little watery. Like, don’t try carrying your plate across the light beige living room carpet and tipping it just slightly or red tomato water will drip all over the place (Thanks B-man!). I have no idea what to do about it or why it happens or anything. I just ignore it and the kids make snide comments about having “spaghetti soup” for supper. Ungrateful fuckers.
Fortunately, by then I’ve had enough wine that I think they are hilarious ungrateful fuckers.
Okay. Back to the cooking. Keep up with me, lushes, we’re almost done!
If you don’t like chunky sauces (or are sneakily disguising vegetables) AND you’re blessed enough to have an immersion blender like I am (Thank you thrift store. Brand new, still in the box!), then stick it in there and start pureeing that shit up.
Personally, I think I would like the chunky sauce. I’m not sure Master would though because he really doesn’t like chunks of tomato. And I know the kids wouldn’t eat it. They even know what’s in it before I blend it, but they still wouldn’t eat it if I didn’t.
Anyway. Puree it up. Carefully. One wrong tip of the hand-held blender and you have tomato puree flying across the walls, the cabinets, yourself. Ask me how I know this.
It’ll look like this when you’re done. Like you just poured it out of a jar.
Though this is a meatless sauce, I have added meat to it before. Mostly, I find that adding the meat to the sauce makes it greasy. So, if I’m going to have meat with the meal, I cook it separate and add it to the plate and not in with the sauce.
Add something green, some bread, a drink (wine if you have any left, ya boozer!) and call it a meal.
In summary, and sans my witty banter, teh recipe is:
1-2 Tbsp of EVOO
2-3 carrots, diced
1-2 stalks of celery, diced
1 medium onion, chopped
3-ish cloves of garlic, minced
1 can tomato paste
3 cans of diced tomatoes
2 cans of stewed tomatoes
6 oz. red wine, or some sort of deglazing liquid
2 bay leaves
Italian spices of some sort
sugar
1. Saute onions, carrots, celery and garlic in a pan with olive oil until soft.
2. Dump in the tomato paste. Let cook for a few minutes
3. Remove pan from heat, deglaze. Put it back on the heat and let cook until it gets thick and smells yummy.
4. Empty cans of tomatoes in the slow cooker. Add contents of saute pan.
5. Add bay leaves, spices and sugar. Stir.
6. Cook on low for 4 -6 hours.
7. Remove the bay leaves and blend up, or serve as is.
Buon appetite!
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Uncategorized | kaya | 
Tuesday June 29th, 2010 7:37am | 
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