Good stuff (another ugly one)

Pasta E Fagioli With Sausage
Food and Wine Magazine’s Quick From Scratch Italian Cookbook Copyright 1998, 2002, 2004

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound mild Italian sausage
1 carrot, chopped fine
1 onion, chopped fine
1 rib celery, chopped fine
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried rosemary or 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
6 cups drained and rinsed canned kidney beans ( three 19-ounce cans) I used three 15.5-ounce cans
2 ¾ cups canned low-sodium chicken broth or homemade stock
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup tubetti or other small macaroni
½ teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper

1. In a large pot, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over moderate heat. Add the sausages and cook, turning, until browned and cooked through, about 10 minutes. Remove. When cool enough to handle, halve the sausages and then cut crosswise into slices.
2. Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil in the pot over moderately low heat. Add the carrot, onion, celery, garlic, and rosemary. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables start to soften, about 10 minutes.
3. Puree 4 cups of the beans along with 1 ¼ cups of the broth in a blender or food processor. Add the puree to the pot along with the remaining 1 ½ cups broth, the whole beans, bay leaf, and salt. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, partially covered, for 15 minutes.
4. Stir in the pasta. Cook the soup over moderate heat, partially covered, stirring frequently, until the pasta is done, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove the bay leaf. Stir in the sausage and the pepper. Cook until the sausage is warmed through, about 1 minute.

The thought of pasta and beans doesn't usually excite me. I usually think of a meatless dish with white beans. This recipe with the kidney beans and sausage caught my eye though. I thought it would be perfect for Sweetnick's ARF/5-A-Day Tuesday, which is actually being hosted by Stephanie at Dispensing Happiness this week. I used one of my favorite sweet Italian sausages and this stuff was just packed with flavor.

Will Food and Wine Magazine's Quick From Scratch series ever let me down??? I'm going to be very surprised the day that happens.

Question of the Day: Can you 'handle' beans (if you know what I mean)?

Read this quickly before it disappears!

Whole Wheat Pizza Crust
Breadman TR2828 Instruction Manual

¾ cup water, 80 degrees
1 TBL olive oil
1 TBL sugar
½ tsp salt
1 ¾ cups bread flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp active dry yeast

Makes 2 (12-inch) crusts (Or one 16-inch)

Use Dough mode and 3 Pizza Menu

1. Divide dough into 2 parts. On lightly floured surface, roll or pat dough into a 12-inch circle. Place on a greased pizza pan.
2. Spread/sprinkle with favorite pizza toppings. Bake at 425 degrees F for 20 minutes or until toppings are bubbling and/or melted.

Blogger has been eating my posts all weekend so hopefully that bug has been fixed by now. Fortunately I hadn't posted any recipes over the weekend.

I finally made pizza! It was so easy with my new bread machine. It only takes 50 minutes to make the dough. One of the reasons I've put off making my own crust is that Friday night is pizza night in our house and I work full-time. We don't like to eat dinner late. I can have this done by the time my husband gets home.

I made the whole-wheat version of pizza crusts from my manual and I topped it with jarred sauce, an Italian blend of cheeses, cheddar cheese and then some fresh grated Romano. I also had some pepperoni on hand. I used the screened pizza pans.

I thought it was really good. The crust really reminded me of take-out except that it was whole-wheat. Take-out around here usually isn't cooked right (too soggy and underdone) and the cheese they use can get really greasy. This was so much better.

So I can cross another one off my list of culinary New Year's Resolutions. And I used my bread machine for a third time so I'm halfway to crossing that resolution off the list.

Question of the Day: Do you have a standard meal that you eat on a certain day of the week?

Just like the old days

I rarely used to use a recipe for savory foods but now I find myself almost exclusively using recipes, so I can blog about them. It's been almost five months now since I started this blog and I'm having trouble recollecting what we used to eat for dinner when I was a 'freestyle' cook.

Last night I found myself without a recipe planned. Well, venison was on the menu but I wasn't excited about it. My new-found love of deer meat was as short-lived as most of my romantic relationships. I wasn't too upset when our large freezer crapped out and my husband gave most of the venison away.

Anyway, I needed a quick replacement and I happened to have a package of flour tortillas on hand. I decided to make an old 'freestyle' favorite - quesadillas. I was going to post a Basic Quesadilla recipe from a Martha Stewart cookbook (well, she had some fancy filling options along with it, of course) but really, who needs a recipe for quesadillas?? It's way more fun to make something like a quesadilla without a recipe.

This is what I did:
I tossed chicken tenders and sliced onions, sliced red, yellow and green peppers with homemade taco seasoning, salt (I leave the salt out of the seasoning when I mix it up) and a little bit of oil. I threw it all on the George Foreman grill until the chicken was cooked through. I pulled it all off the grill and wiped the grill down. I roughly chopped the chicken, onions, and peppers and sandwiched that with cheese (I thought I had enough cheddar but I didn't so I also added deli-style American cheese) between two flours tortillas, which I sprayed with a bit of cooking spray, on the sides that would hit the grill. I threw them back on the GF grill (one by one - these were dinner plate sized) and that was it. I topped them with some taco sauce, sour cream and pickled jalepeños.

My husband was so excited to see these. I don't know if he really loves quesadillas or if he was just glad to see something he recognized for a change. He ate two of these (and they were huge!) I know him well enough to have known I didn't need to make any sides with this but in the past I've accompanied this with some pretty good freestyle rice.

So there you have it, it was a recipe free night. A blast from the past.

Question of the Day: Which foods do you enjoy making 'freestyle'?

I wish this looked as good as it tasted

Old-Time Beef Stew
America The Beautiful Cookbook Copyright 1990

3 lbs stewing beef, cut into 1-inch cubes I only used about 1.75 lbs
salt and freshly ground pepper
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped I sliced two medium onions
1 large clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour I accidentally added too much, making my gravy too thick
1 cup beef stock
1 ½ cups dark beer I used Coors Light lol
1 ½ tablespoons dark brown sugar
¼ cup red wine vinegar
¼ teaspoon chopped fresh thyme or pinch of dried thyme
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Pat the beef cubes dry with paper towels. Sprinkle well with salt and pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons butter with the oil in a large heavy pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sauté the meat, a few pieces at a time, until well browned and transfer to a plate. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon butter to the pot and reduce heat to medium-low. Add the onion; cook for 1 minute. Add the garlic; cook 4 minutes longer. Stir in the flour. Cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Whisk in the stock, scraping the sides and bottom of the pot. Add the beer, sugar, vinegar, thyme and sautéed meat. Heat to boiling. Cover and bake in the oven for 1 ½ hours. Let cool. Reheat, covered, on top of stove and sprinkle with parsley before serving.

I loved this stew! I debated over several stew recipes - some including carrots - but settled on this one and it was so good. It had a touch of sweetness which I liked. I overthickened it a bit but otherwise it was perfect. I would definitely make this again. They tell you that it's best reheated but it tasted pretty good when I tasted it right out of the oven too.

This is a large softcover cookbook that offers authentic regional American recipes. It's the kind of cookbook that you can just flip through over and over. It has lots of great pictures and commentary too. This beef stew recipe is supposedly something that is popular in Wisconsin. This book was part of a series and I'm kicking myself that this is the only one I purchased.

Okay, time for the Question of the Day. Do you eat red meat? Why or why not?

I'm easily confused

My Mother’s Tuesday Night Meatball Soup
Primi Piatti Italian First Courses That Make A Meal Copyright 1989

½ pound lean ground beef
¼ cup (loosely packed) finely chopped Italian parsley leaves
1 egg
2 tablespoons grated Romano cheese
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper

3 cups chicken broth
3 cups water
3 large carrots, peeled and trimmed
3 celery ribs, trimmed and sliced
Half a 3-pound frying chicken, cut into 4 pieces
1 cup alphabet pasta
1 cup diced fresh or canned Italian tomatoes
Grated Romano cheese

Combine all the meatball ingredients in a large bowl. Beat vigorously with a wooden spoon until thoroughly blended. Chill the mixture up to 4 hours.

Heat the broth, water, carrots and celery in a 5-quart pot over high heat to boiling. Add the chicken, reduce the heat to a simmer and simmer, skimming the surface occasionally, until the chicken is cooked through, about 40 minutes.

Remove the chicken pieces from the broth to a plate. Cool to room temperature.
For m the meat mixture into ¾-inch meatballs, rolling them smooth between your palms. Refrigerate until needed, up to 3 hours.

Pick the meat from the chicken bones. Shred as much as you would like to add to the soup. Reserve the remaining meat for another use. (The cookbook author said that his mom would sauté the extra chicken with potatoes and serve it along with this soup.)

Add the pasta to the soup. Heat to a gentle boil, stirring constantly. Stir in the tomatoes, meatballs and shredded chicken. Cook until the pasta is tender and the meatballs are cooked through, about 6 minutes. Ladle into soup bowls, passing cheese separately.

One simple thing threw me off in this recipe. He didn't say to slice the carrots. Were the carrots supposed to be removed from the broth or sliced in the soup? I ended up cooking some carrots and celery with the chicken, then discarding those and adding more chopped carrots and celery to the broth before completing the soup.

This was good soup. Very filling. I love the flavor from the Romano cheese.

This recipe is from one of my older cookbooks, from my book warehouse days, and this is the first I've ever cooked from it. The recipes aren't bad, however, with no pictures I've just never gotten very excited about this book. And to be honest, when I first acquired this book, a lot of the recipes probably seemed more exotic to me than they do now.

On the bread front, I baked two more loaves last night. Randi asked which bread machine I'm using. It's the Breadman TR2828 but I didn't pay $99.99. I actually didn't pay for it at all - it was a gift from my husband but I picked it out at Ollie's Bargain Outlet so I know it was only $39.99. It wasn't reconditioned either, like many of the appliances they sell there. It was an impulse buy and I'm still not sure how I feel about it making the two smaller loaves, instead of one larger loaf. My plan is to eventually mainly use it to do all the work and then bake things off in the oven. I've never baked bread before so I've taking things slowly.

So far I've only made plain white bread, since this was emergency bread for my husband and I don't have any whole wheat flour on hand. It's quite a treat for us since I never buy white sandwich bread.

Okay, here's a new feature at the Cookbook Junkie - the Question of the Day. Just my way of trying to encourage more comments. Okay, today's question is:

What kind of soup reminds you of your childhood?