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.

NaBloPoMo & Vegetable Soup

Damn. Second day into NaBloPoMo and I blew it. I was just sitting down to post when I realized it was already after midnight.

Damn!

Ah, well, I'm going to keep going anyway, and see how I do, then try again next month.

Today I wanted to post about this lovely, lovely vegetable soup recipe. It's from a book called The Vegan Table: 200 Unforgettable Recipes for Entertaining Every Guest at Every Occasion by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.** This book is not just for entertaining and every recipe is not overly involved or requiring a zillion ingredients. Some recipes are very simple, like the soup I've made twice in the last week.

It's a basic recipe that includes sauteing onions, celery, and carrots in a little olive oil, then adding some tomatoes (canned or fresh), then broth or water, then zucchini and broccoli. In other words, it's very similar to the soup I might have thrown together with whatever veggies were in my fridge at the moment. Somehow, though, when I followed this recipe, it came out even better than it usually does. I think it might be the addition of fresh herbs or maybe the particular blend of herbs.

When I made it, I added fresh garlic while sauteing the veggies. The second time I made it, I added just a tiny bit of diced red pepper when I was adding the tomatoes. I didn't add broccoli either time. I love broccoli, but not in soup. The author included some suggestions for additions to make it more of a full meal.

It's yummy, yummy soup.


**The link above goes to this book at Amazon. I don't have an account set up with them at this time, but I provided the link for convenience.

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