Y'all, I am really excited about a dish I made this week. It's one of those dishes that demands appropriately amazing counterparts, and it's an original recipe by me! What is it, though? Is it a sauce? Is it a filling? A stew? A topping? It's all of those. Check it out...
Italian As-You-Wish
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large sweet onion, chopped
1/4 cup water
1 small head of garlic (about four or five large cloves), minced
1 large red pepper, roasted, skinned, and chopped
5 vine ripe or 7 Roma tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 lb ground beef, pork, chicken, or turkey, browned
Large handful of basil, 1/4 to 1/2 cup depending on your taste, minced
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper
Pour the olive oil into a medium saucepan and heat over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the chopped onions, season with salt, and cook until desired doneness (anywhere from just barely softened to soft and golden brown) depending on dish application. Once the onions are done, deglaze with the water and scrape any bits up from the bottom. Add the minced garlic and cook for a few minutes until just softened.
If your dish is something like a bruschetta where everything needs to be pretty firm, brown the meat now and add with the tomatoes and red peppers. If it's a sauce, stew, or filling, add the red peppers and tomatoes now, cover, and allow to cook down while you brown the meat. Then add the meat to the mix.
Once the tomatoes, red peppers, and meat are all in, add the basil and cheese and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste and then use the mix as desired.
Yes, the name is a wink and a nod to this man. Ladies, do your best not to swoon.
This recipe will do whatever you ask of it.
I recommend starting by chopping the onions if you plan on getting them really caramelized. Some people love the taste of a rawer, less cooked onion, but I personally love it when the onions get really soft and golden brown. It can take a good long while, though; anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes.
Yes, you can roast peppers yourself! Just pop it under your broiler (mine defaults to 500 degrees) and turn it about every seven minutes or when the skin gets nice and black.
When you pull the pepper out of the oven, pop it into a glass bowl and cover it with plastic. Let it hang out for about ten minutes while you attend to the other vegetables.
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You can buy roasted red pepper in a jar, but this is a lot cheaper, even if it is a bit more time and effort.
Your mince can be pretty rough for this dish. It's almost a chop really.
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You can buy pre-minced garlic in a jar, or you can mince it yourself in a food processor with oil. The stuff you do yourself can be kept ready to go in the fridge.
Okay, so after ten or so minutes, the pepper should have cooled enough to skin it. The skin separates from the flesh when it roasts, so you can literally just peel it away.
The seeds will also come away from the pepper very easily. I turn it inside out to make sure I get them all and then chop.
Didn't I tell you I liked a good golden brown color?
I happened to have heirloom tomatoes on hand (all of my veggies this week came from Hidden Valley Farm here in Nashville), so I used them. They are really yummy, but such a pain to seed. I tried slicing and quartering them to seed them. I don't know if either way is really better. It's awfully tedious no matter what. This is a good job for little ones. :-)
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You can also use tinned tomatoes for this. I use them a lot. Two cans of Italian style would work for this recipe.
Once again, how long this cooks for kind of depends on what you want. You only want to barely warm it through (left) if you're using this as a bruschetta topping or something similar. If it's going to be a sauce, you'll want to really cook it down (right).
If you choose to do this bruschetta style, make sure to have the meat (I used beef) already browned when you add the tomatoes. If you're going for a stew or a sauce, it doesn't matter as much either way.
My original plan was to use this as a pasta sauce, but it didn't exactly work out that way. People, count your blessings if you don't have to be a gluten-free house. GF pasta is not the same as the real (good) stuff. It's okay, but it just can't compare. I found that most tend to fall apart no matter what precautions you take, and this time was, tragically, no exception.
Because I was so disappointed by the quality of the pasta, I only used about a cup of sauce for the whole box of pasta, which still worked well. Sadly, it wasn't good enough for me. I saved most of the sauce because I didn't want to waste it on inferior pasta, but what to do with it now? Turn it into a filling.
Fast forward to the next evening. I spooned my leftover sauce into bowls (there was a lot left)...
...and topped it with some precooked polenta. Then I just popped it into the microwave to heat it up and voila! Delicious Italian pot pie! These are really big bowls, and I intended each one to be for dinner and lunch the next day. Mike at his entire bowl!
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