Marinara Sauce

New day, new post.

Later today, I'm going to make a marinara sauce from a recipe in the book: California Pizza Kitchen: Pasta, Salad, Soups, and Sides by Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield. Most of the recipes in this book are not vegan, but it has some great recipes. I usually only buy vegan cookbooks nowadays, but I made an exception for the two cookbooks that I bought from CPK.

My favorite recipes from the book mentioned above:

Checca (page 4)**
Tusccan Hummus (page 7)
Marinara Sauce (page 93)
Focacciass (page 90)

I've been making tomato sauce of one kind or another all of my adult life. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of Italians who called it "gravy." My mother made sauce and many other Italian dishes and I also married an Italian guy and learned from my mother-in-law as well. Those were the days of long-cooking sauces that you might simmer over low heat for a few hours, sometimes adding in meatballs that had been browned to cook further in the sauce. When I go back home, this is the type of sauce that most still make.

In the 90s, I used to watch Emeril and...oh, I am not sure of her name, but it was something like Bebe, an Italian chef with her own show. I learned from them both how to make a quicker-cooking sauce, and over the years I played around with that, adding different veggies or sometimes making it plain.

Anyway, today I'm making the marinara sauce (made with fresh tomatoes) from the California Pizza Kitchen book, and, while it's best fresh, I am making a big batch and will freeze it in small, single-serving containers.


**The authors recommend serving the checca (essentially some chopped tomatoes with basil) over the focaccias (bread), but in the restaurant, they also top the Tuscan Hummus with a bit of checca and serve that with freshly baked pita bread (which I believe may actually be plain pizza dough, but it's very yummy, served soft and warm).

When I make hummus, my favorite way to serve it is with tabouli salad on pita bread or in the pocket of a pita, but it's also good on freshly baked french bread as well. When I don't have the time to make the tabouli, checca also works. It makes the hummus just a bit more fancy.

I use much less olive oil in the checca than the recipe calls for.