Spaghetti With Meat Sauce

I've been hanging out a lot on Facebook lately. And so has Elle, from Elle's New England Kitchen. This past week she posted a picture (only on Facebook) of a rigatoni she made, and it looked really good. Shall we say that she inspired Inspired Bites? Yes!

So when we made plans for friends to come over for dinner and board games (and drinks!), I decided to make something similar.

I'll admit to you all that I didn't want to make dinner. It has been a really long, hard week, making midterms for 3 different levels of classes. I didn't stop working last night until 7:30 when the school musical began. I left school at 10:15 that night wondering what we'd do for dinner. But in talking to my friend about possibilities to order out, it became clear that I would need to cook. Living out in the boonies, we don't have too many choices, and I will not eat take out pizza with a bread crust and canned mushrooms.

I threw this together on Saturday afternoon and it made for a fabulous dinner. Joe made a garlic bread with naan, and we had a great bottle of dry red wine. Karen made a wonderful salad with toasted pine nuts, artichoke hearts, cucumber and tomatoes. We sprinkled balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil over the top.

I'm going to eat every bit of the leftovers. I'm pretty proud of myself since I didn't use a recipe, instead making this one as I went along.

Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 cup chopped green pepper
2 cups chopped sweet onion (I loves me some sauteed onion)
4 chopped cloves of garlic
8 ounces sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 (28 oz) cans crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup dry red wine
1/4 teaspoon salt
1.25 lb ground beef (85% fat)
1 (1.5 ounce) rind of Parmesan cheese)
one 2/3 ounce package fresh basil, chopped, plus more for garnish
salt, again, to taste (my taste was 1/2 teaspoon)

Add the 2 cans of crushed tomatoes to a dutch oven. It should be good and deep - my sauce tended to splatter, even on a low heat. Begin heating it up on a medium-low heat.

Saute the onions and pepper in the olive oil on a medium-high flame. Add the garlic towards the end.


Place it in the pot with the tomato sauce.

Saute the mushrooms. Add it to the sauce pot.

Brown the beef. Pour it and the juices into the sauce pot.

Add the wine, basil, tomato paste, and the rind of cheese. Stir it, cover the pot, and cook on low for 2 hours. Remove whatever rind has remained. Much of it will disintegrate into the sauce and flavor it wonderfully. Here's what mine looked like:

You should taste the sauce as you go and season it with salt and pepper to your liking. Depending on which type of cheese you use, you may not even need salt! My cheese wasn't salty, I guess, and not all of it fell apart, so this is when I added another 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

I used linguine instead of spaghetti. It's a little bit wider and flatter, but not as much as fettuccine. I like it.

Serve with Parmesan cheese and fresh basil on top.


Mmmm, that's good stuff!

Seafood Quesadillas

When I was in my teens, my family lived in Evansville, Indiana. My mom and I would frequent a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants (they called themselves Mexican) call La Hacienda. My favorite dish there was their seafood enchiladas, which were basically fake crabmeat rolled up in a flour tortilla and covered with a cheesey dairy sauce and sour cream. They were really good!!!!

Last week I happened to see this recipe (which I slightly adjusted) in a magazine advertisement for TransOcean Crab Classic. I gave it a try and I was happy because these quesadillas are very similar to the flavor I remember of those seafood enchiladas I loved so much.

Seafood Quesadillas
Adapted from TransOcean

1 cup chopped onion

10 twists of the pepper mill

salt to taste
a couple of shakes of red pepper flakes

a good handful of chopped, fresh cilantro
2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice

10 ounces chopped imitation crabmeat
Cheddar and Monterrey Jack cheese

Sautee the onions, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes. Add them to a bowl with the seafood, citrus, and cilantro. Mix to combine.

Heat up a pan. When it's good and hot, coat it with spray oil (I used olive oil spray), and place the cheese-covered tortilla on the bottom. Top it with the seafood mixture.


Then add more cheese on top and another tortilla. Spray the oil on the top of the tortilla.

When the bottom tortilla is golden brown, flip over and brown the other side.

Place on a cutting board and cut your quesadilla into triangles. I do a cut across the middle, and then two across the diagonal, making 6 triangles.

I bet these quesadillas would be awesome with a mango salsa. But I just ate them plain.

This recipe makes 4-6 quesadillas (depending on how much seafood you use).

Sauteed Bok Choy

After making my Beef and Vegetable Stir Fry with Peanut Sauce, I had a good amount of bok choy left over. Bok choy is a Chinese variety of cabbage. It has long stalks and dark green leaves. It's pretty common in Chinese food.

I wanted to make something yummy to use the bok choy before it went bad, and I found just the thing. I found a nice little sauté recipe on Recipezarr, originally posted by Aimchick. I had all the ingredients on hand (that's awesome!) and it was quick and easy to prepare. I only made a few little adjustments to suit my taste. The result is very tasty and flavorful. Especially since I used my own homemade chicken broth!

It is hard to make bok choy look pretty (at least it is for me), but bok choy is a beautiful thing. It's has a great texture when sauteed - just a little crunch to it. And it makes for a healthy side dish, offering lots of vitamin C, calcium, and vitamin A. According to About.com, it "contains glucosinolates, which may prevent cancer." I like that!

Sauteed Bok Choy
Adjusted from Recipezarr poster Aimchick

Serves 4

1 head bok choy, sliced, both white and green parts
1/3 cup onion, diced
1 tablespoon grated ginger root
2 teaspoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons sesame seeds, plus more for garnish
1/4 cup chicken broth

1 teaspoon low sodium soy sauce
crushed red pepper flakes (I like heat, so I did 5 little shakes of the container)

Before I rinsed my bok choy, I cut it into manageable sized pieces. It was about a foot long before I did that. I cut it into 4" sections. Then I put it in a deep bowl of water. I drained it and filled it up 2 more times, to make sure all the grit came off the stalks and the leaves.

You could use a salad spinner to remove the excess water. But I had time, so I let it dry by putting the stalks vertically in a colander.

Heat up a sauté pan or a wok on a fairly high flame. Add the olive oil, swirl it around, and then add the onion and ginger. Sauté the onion until it's tender (about a minute).

Then add remaining ingredients and sauté for about 8 minutes.

Garnish with sesame seeds.

Italian Wedding Soup

Every winter it seems I buy can after can of Progresso Chickarina and Italian Wedding Soup. I love the stuff - they both taste so good and have a respectful amount of protein, and a nice low calorie count.

My quest this past week was to make a delicious soup - similar to Chickarina and Italian Wedding. I kept thinking that if I liked them so much canned, how heavenly would they be if they were home made? Ooh, and an added bonus is that I can lower the sodium count. FYI: one can of Progresso Chickarina has a whopping 2,000 grams of sodium! Ouch!

It took two soup-making attempts, but I ended up with the most awesome soup. I dare say it is perfection in a bowl, and the perfect food for a cold, snowy day .

My first try was good, not great. I decided that I would use a beef-pork mixture. I used 16 oz. beef and 4 oz. pork.

While the soup was good, I couldn't understand, why my fingers swelled like little sausages every time I ate it. One morning I couldn't even put on my wedding rings!

It turns out that I just wasn't thinking. I had used canned chicken broth, and I'm guessing it was loaded with sodium. Also, even though I went with more beef than pork, I could feel a light film of fat on my lips after eating it. And hey, it's the new year, and it's time to make up for that holiday eating. But if you don't have a problem with the beef/pork mixture, then that is the more traditional way to do it and it does have great flavor as well.

But I need to watch my fat intake, so I went back to the drawing board today and decided to lighten it up with turkey meatballs. And I would improve the flavor and have better control over the sodium if I made my own broth this time.

While rolling out the little meatballs, I was worried that I had over-done it with the egg plus the egg white. The consistency of the raw meatballs was so different when made with ground turkey as opposed to beef and pork. They were sort of sticky as I was rolling them in the palms of my hands. I added some extra panko bread crumbs, but I stopped at 2/3 cup and hoped for the best. And the best I did have!

I love this soup! I know that I will make it every winter from this day forward.


Italian Wedding Soup

One recipe of Home Made Chicken Broth
4 large diced carrots (I prefer a small dice for this recipe)
1 small head of escarole (only the tender leafy parts - I removed the tougher parts for this recipe)

For The Meatballs:
1 (20.8 ounce) package of ground turkey
1 small onion, grated
1 egg + 1 egg white
2/3 cup panko bread crumbs
1/3 cup chopped flat leaf parsley
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
1/2 tsp pepper

Mix all of the meatball ingredients with your hands! Don't be afraid, just delve right in. Once all the ingredients are spread evenly throughout the mixture. Put a little splash of water on your palms and take very small amounts in the palm of your hand and make many little meatballs. The water will keep the mixture from sticking to your palms. I found it much easier to work that way. Here's mine:


Once all the meatballs are rolled, put them into the soup raw. As you add the meatballs, add 4 chopped carrots.

Crumble about half the chicken meat from when you made the broth into the soup. I felt that adding all of it was too much. I saved the other half and hope that it's good for chicken salad!

Cook the pasta half way separately in a different pot. Add it to the soup pot.

At the end, add the leafy parts of the escarole. Cook two minutes more so that the escarole wilts.


Serve with Parmesan cheese and perhaps a nice hunk of crusty bread!

Home Made Chicken Stock

Home made chicken broth is far superior to it's canned counterpart! It has an enormous amount of flavor. I noticed the beautiful fragrance almost immediately after the broth began to boil. The entire house was filled with a beautiful scent that made our mouths water.

I originally made this chicken broth for my Italian Wedding Soup. I reserved a small amount and used it the next day in my Sauteed Bok Choy.

Chicken Broth

1.25 lb chicken drumsticks, skin removed
1 lb boneless chicken breasts
15 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt (I added 1 1/2 teaspoons more afterwards)
1 small onion - cut in half
2 cloves garlic - cut in half
1/2 cup chopped parsley (flat leaf)
3 ribs celery - with the leaves
3 carrots
12 peppercorns
1 bay leaf

Put all ingredients in a dutch oven. Bring it to a boil. Then turn the flame to low and allow to cook for 2 hours - covered.


Strain the broth through a colander, and if there are still particles you want out, again through a sieve.

You can freeze this broth and have it on hand. It will keep well.