Ann’s Spaghetti Sauce

This is Michael’s mom’s spaghetti sauce, the one he grew up with. His mom has quite a sense of humor. She jokes that she isn’t Italian so she can’t make Italian spaghetti, but she’s Polish so she can make “Polish spaghetti.” Authentic or not, it’s a good, easy multi-purpose sauce that you can use for spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, or other baked pasta dishes, and you can cook it all day in the slow cooker or in a couple hours on the stove.

Equipment

6-quart slow cooker or 6-quart pot with a lid

Ingredients

1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes Read more

Linguine with Peppers and Roasted Grape Tomatoes

We’ve had great luck with the grape tomato plants this year. They’re producing in abundance, and we bring in collanders full of them just about every night. They are sweet, flavorful, and downright addictive. Michael has been packing sandwich bags full of them to take to work for a snack.

Last week I experimented with roasting them, which worked well. The flavor concentrated and they made a tasty addition to this simple and colorful pasta dish. When roasting the tomatoes, dried basil seems to work better than fresh. I found that fresh basil burned to a crisp during the 90 minute stay in the oven. Read more

Baked Penne with Tomatoes and Mozzarella

Baked pasta dishes are really enticing for us. We love how the sauce wraps around all of the pasta and how the cheese melts and gets stringy and a little brown on top. Mmmmm.

This is a basic baked pasta dish that requires only a few ingredients. When we first tried it, we felt that the flavor was too mild for us, so I jazzed it up by doubling the garlic and adding a lot more basil than originally called for. You can make this in the summer or winter, although I like it in the summer because I can use lots of fresh basil from my garden.

Equipment

8-quart pot with lid Read more

Japanese Salmon with Soba

I saw this dish a few years ago on the old Food Network show Calling All Cooks. It looked so good that I made it the next day with a few modifications based on ingredients that I normally keep on hand. We prefer to use Tamari soy sauce, which has a rich flavor that seems to go really well with the salmon, but you can certainly user regular soy sauce. The original recipe calls for the sauce to be poured over the soba when served, but I like to drain the soba and then add them to the skillet for two or three minutes so that they absorb more of the delicious sauce.

We enjoy this with stir-fried or steamed vegetables on the side. Read more

Basic Basil Pesto

At the risk of jinxing things, I have to say that our garden is really doing well this year. We have tons of tomatoes that will be ready for picking next week. The herbs are going crazy. The Italian parsley and the dill are about three feet tall with lots of leaves, the oregano and sage are threatening to take over, and the basil is getting taller and bushier. If I can just keep the june bugs from devouring all of those tasty basil leaves, then we’ll have a bumper crop this year.

Michael and I grow lots of basil each year. Throughout the summer we cut the leaves and use them in pesto, other pasta sauces, or as a layer in lasagna. Even with frequent use, we often have many plants left over at the end of the season. So we cut them all down and spend an afternoon making pesto and freezing it. You can freeze small blocks of it in ice cube trays Read more

Cold Sesame Bean Threads

We love noodles cooked just about any way, and I find that that noodle dishes are a great way to get my boys to eat their vegetables. This is a dish that I find particularly refreshing in the summertime. I can walk in the door after a hot morning outdoors with the kids, pull this out of the frig for lunch, and it will absolutely hit the spot.

There are many different variations on cold sesame noodles, and this is just one of several that we like. I prefer to use bean threads for a more Asian touch, although you can certainly use thin spaghetti. The chopped peanuts lend a nice crunch, and the edamame adds a vegetarian protein boost so that you can actually make a meal out of this. I like to squeeze a little bit of lime juice Read more

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