Will Cook For Beer: Pasta Feed

Before a long night at the clubs in Galway, it is important to eat a high carbohydrate meal so you have enough energy to dance all night.

A little tongue in cheek, but not necessarily false. The boys of Appt. 144 hosted the rest of the Willamette Galway group for dinner and a show. Music was provided by Mr. Jack Martin, and the food by yours truly. The opening night of Cafe 144, as it was.

Dinner was pretty simple. I didn't have a ton of time to shop or cook, so I just did a quick pasta sauce that I started making about this time last year (with a lot of help from Ms. Katie Kantrowitz), boiled some pasta and let people have at it. The recipe below is for the most basic iteration of the sauce that I make, but you can go a lot of different ways with it. Usually it yields a pretty chunky, robust, primavera style sauce. I'll go over the changes that I made for the dinner tonight, but this the basic go-to tomato sauce.

Basic Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

10 smallish tomatoes, or an equivalent amount of larger tomatoes. The ones I used were pretty small.
2 cloves garlic
1 white onion, probably not sweet.
Salt*
Pepper*
Chili flake*
Cumin*
Fines Herbes* (basil and rosemary make the sauce rule, however Dunnes Stores doesn't carry them fresh, so I used a tube of Italian herbs that I found (basil, parsely and some other stuff)
Olive Oil*

*I don't usually measure the spices that I add to a dish, so I can't help there. Just add according to your tastes.

Get out your knife and start chopping. A medium dice is good for the onions and tomatoes, mince up the garlic. Heat a good glug of the olive oil over medium heat in a saute pan. Toss in the onions (love the sizzle), and cook until translucent. Season at this point with salt, pepper, cumin and chili flakes. Once the onions are done, toss in the garlic, and let it cook for a minute or two (love the smell). Then hit it with all of the tomatoes stir it up, and leave it alone until the tomatoes start to give off their water. Turn down the head to just above a simmer, stir it again, and let it reduce until thick. Taste and re-season. Just before serving, stir in the fresh herbs, so the flavors are still really bright. What do you end up with?

Since there was a cry out for meat dish tonight, we added some ground beef (95% lean) to both pans of sauce. I think we had a half-kilo of meat, but I'm not 100% sure. 2/3 went in the bottom pan, the other third of it in the top. The top one was a bit sweeter, lighter on the chili flakes and had a chopped roasted red pepper in it. The bottom was my favorite, since I forgot there was no shaker top on the chili flakes, so I dumped a ton in on accident. Got most of them out, so it wasn't nuclear hot, and instead it was pleasantly spicy, with a great rich meaty flavor. I didn't get any pictures after it was plated, as everyone was really hungry, and the food disappeared quickly. I served it with penne pasta.

Given that we are a couple of college boys in a new apartment, Jack and I haven't gotten around to buying much in the way of cleaning supplies. Pans got a soak, but all the dishes are still dirty. What did we wake up to this morning? Utter chaos.