Recipe: DiZazzo home made pasta sauce! pt.2

This post is a continuation of my first 'home made pasta sauce' post.

Lets get all the prep and other stuff sorted out!

Instructions

Prepping the tomato sauce

We need to blend the tomatoes to break them down into smaller pieces. Keep in mind, the longer you blend them, the smaller the tomato pieces will be, and the more "watery" your sauce will be. I like to grind my tomatoes on a "pulse" setting for literally under two seconds (super blender!). This leaves somewhat medium-small size chunks of tomato, which gives a nice rich flavour to the sauce.

1. First thing you want to do is to open all your canned tomatoes and tomato paste. Set them aside.
2. Add 1/2 cup of canola oil to the bottom of the empty sauce pot. Let it heat and spread across the bottom completely. Turn heat up to 3-4 (medium-low).
   
3. Empty the contents of a single can into the blender, and add a single can of tomato paste. Fill up the empty can of tomatoes half way with water and add that to the blender. Blend on a low setting for 1-2 seconds at a time, checking until desired consistency is reached.
4. Pour the blended tomatoes into the sauce pot! Repeat until done.

Now it's time to chop and fry some garlic. I've made a few videos for you. They're super interesting. Of me. Chopping .... garlic. Okay maybe they're not that interesting. Here they are anyway. (Please excuse the extremely poor sound quality, camera mic)

A note for the second video, at the end there's quite a bit of garlic left in the pan after I empty it into the sauce, I had to put the camera away to salvage all of it. Make sure you scrape the pan clean and get all the garlic in your sauce!

Now that we've chopped and fried garlic, we need to add the rest of the spices to the sauce. Remember to check my first post for the quantities!!

1. Add the basil. Grind it up in your hands and sprinkle it in if you have fresh stuff!
   
2. Add the salt.
   
3. Add the sugar.
4. Half the onion and put each into the sauce. This absorbs a lot of the acidity from the tomatoes and I think it's a pretty important addition to the sauce!
   

At this point, the base tomato sauce is complete. It's really that simple. Here's the kicker.

It needs to boil for 4-5 hours until a thick consistency is reached!

The truth is, the slower you cook something, for some reason, the better it tastes. Mind you, there are exceptions, but this is not one of them. When I made this sauce, my pot was as full as you saw in the basil picture. It boiled to about just over half that amount, and that was adding meat (which increased the total volume of solid items displacing sauce).

I'm going to leave you with this final video showing you how to stir the sauce so that its mixed well!

Check my next post for instructions for a meat sauce and pork side ribs (so so so good!).

Recipe: DiZazzo home made pasta sauce! pt.1

Yep, I've been holding it from you. Not anymore, though! This weekend I was busy getting something special ready for you guys, the recipe for pasta sauce which has been passed down the long line of DiZazzo's, to me, who is sharing it with you today.

Now, don't get me wrong, it may not be the best sauce in the entire planet... but I haven't tasted anything better anywhere. So unless you can cook me up a batch of pasta sauce that tastes better, I'm going to boldly claim that it's the best. Why? It's not over complicated with too many ingredients put into it like celery carrots and peppers. It's just a simple, traditional sauce!

Not only did I photo-document the whole process, I took little video clips of me doing some of the prep work that didn't involve using both hands. I had to hold the camera, after all. This is going to be a long recipe, so I'm going to split it up into a couple of posts.

Lets start!

Ingredients:

Usually the recipe calls for freshly skinned Roma (plum) tomato's, but we're going to cheat a little and use something else. Who has time to skin tomatoes anyways? The sauce already takes long enough to make!

For the base tomato sauce

• Aylmer whole tomatoes (5 cans)
• Unico tomato paste (4 small cans, or 2 large)
• Sugar (2 1/2 tbsp, more if needed)
• Salt (2 tbsp, don't forget you might want to add meat which reduces the amount of salt you'll need)
• Dried Basil (two handfuls if its freshly dried and unground, 2 tbsp if its already ground up)
• Garlic (3/4 to 1 whole bulb of garlic)
• Onion (1)
  
• Canola oil - 1/2 cup ... BUT qty depends on what kind of sauce you're making ... meat sauce takes much more.

For Meatsauce

• Ground beef (1 lb.)

Additional Meat Items

• Pork side ribs (seriously don't knock it till you try it, its melt in your mouth good)
• Meatballs (1/2 ground pork, 1/2 ground beef - will post a recipe for this later!)

Tools

• a LARGE pot
• a blender

So that's everything you're going to need to get started, see the following posts for details, pictures and videos!

St. Patrick's Day green food items!

Happy St Patrick's day! Today is the day most of you will be looking to incorporate the most green as possible, and by green I don't mean environmentally friendly... I mean full of St. Patties day festiveness! ... Or green because of alcohol poisoning, which usually comes after the festiveness. In order to facilitate today, I've come up with a list of green food items / ideas for you!

• Guacamole Dip
• Leprechaun Punch (Make sure you go overkill on the Lime!)
  
• Green Jello
• Green cupcakes (You'll need some dye, I'm sure you have some for your beer)
  
• Green milkshakes (dye vanilla ice cream green)
• Green cookies (again, dye...)
  
• Asparagus (check my blog for a recipe!)
  
• Brusell Sprouts
• Caesar Salad
• Celery
• Cucumber
• Pickles
• Okay you know I'm running out of ideas when I write stuff like celery and pickles...
• Really, just add green food colouring to stuff. You might be too drunk to be cooking / cutting / preparing anyway :)
  

And in honor of today, I've made my blog green! Ha ha, not really, it was always this way.

The poll results are in ...

At the beginning of the month, I added a poll to my blog which asked readers if they had used any recipes they found on my blog... Well, the results are in and here they are:

Here's the breakdown ... I voted yes once, and my girlfriend voted yes once ... and the rest of you voted 'No' (essentially) so that means nobody has used anything from my blog!!

Seriously, why? What type of recipes would you use if I posted them? Are you looking for extremely gourmet recipes? More "reviews"? What? I'd love to know.

Discuss below!

FREEGAN: When Vegan isn't enough.

I recently heard about a new type of "aware" eaters. Flavour Fiascians, meet: THE FREEGAN. This isn't an "bad economy" thing, people want to do this!

They aren't your typical Vegan. They're budget minded, environmental conscious eaters who won't let chain grocery stores waste an ounce of food. How are they doing this?

THEY'RE PICKING THROUGH TRASH TO GET DISCARDED FOOD ITEMS.

The best part is, they're not destitute people. They have good homes, jobs, and lives.

Sure, minimizing waste is great. But rolling in it isn't really my idea of fun. Saving tossed food isn't really a crime, but trespassing to get it sure is, plus, don't you think it's a little humiliating?

Comment below!