January 31 st Spaghetti and Comments on Boxed Wines

January 31st – Spaghetti and Meat Sauce (Again) and Comments on Boxed Wine

I had some sauce leftover from the other night so I decided to just use it up and make spaghetti again. Not surprisingly, the sauce was better than a few days ago and made me sit and think, why don’t I make this more often? I did break down and get some inexpensive red wine to go with it. It was a California Malbec that had pleasant fruit but had a weird oakiness that made me think it probably spent a lot of time sitting on oak chips. At $6 it definitely hadn’t spent time in real oak. But with the food, the fake oak quality was subdued and it had a slightly rustic quality I like in wines with tomato sauce.

One of the better cheap wine alternatives I’ve found, actually, is boxed wine, particularly those from Australia, which is where boxed wine was invented. Other wine snobs may cringe at the thought, but it seems that the average box of Australian wine is generally head and shoulders over many other $6 wines. Plus it keeps longer than anything in a bottle. Sometimes you just need an inexpensive but drinkable glass of wine. Most of the Australian wines in boxes are softer styles that accentuate fruitiness and easy drinkability. They are not profound wines and they’re not meant to be. For reds, shiraz and cab seem to be the best bets. For whites, chardonnay and semillon seem the most common. It’d be nice to find a good sauvignon blanc, with it’s melon fruit and crisp acidity, but I haven’t come across any. Most of the brands I’ve tried, Hardy, Jacob’s Creek, and Banrock Station have all been fine. Again, these are everyday drinking and cooking wines, but they have their place and are actually a good buy. There are more and more boxed brands available from other parts of the world and some that I’ve tried have been quite good, but as a general rule, I’ve been happiest overall with the ones from Australia. This last bottle of malbec made me realize I should have invested in one of the boxed alternatives. And yes, I still consider myself a wine snob.

January 28th - Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

January 28th – Spaghetti and Meat Sauce
I like meat sauce but don’t seem to make it much. It doesn’t take much time, but I still don’t always do it and don’t really have a good answer as to why. Every time I do make it and eat it, I wonder why don’t do more often. I’ll never figure it out. My stomach was still a little uneasy, and despite the acid in the tomatoes, spaghetti and meat sauce is comfort food.

Everyone has their own version of making meat sauce and I’m no different. Mine isn’t complicated and I think what makes it so good is that it’s so basic. I learned how to make it from my mother and while we’re not Italian, my mother learned it from a friend who was Sicilian, and, from what we’ve been told, it’s a typical Sicilian sauce. My sauce uses ground beef, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, olive oil, garlic, basil, oregano, and a pinch of sugar. Pretty basic. It’s not a Bolognese sauce, it’s just plain meat sauce. In fact if you’ve seen the Godfather, you’ve pretty much seen this sauce being made. In one scene during the gang war, the men are all hiding out in an apartment and Clemenza is cooking. He says to Michael:

“Hey, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; ya make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs. And a little bit o' wine. An' a little bit o' sugar, and that's my trick."

I normally don’t add the wine, and I brown the meat in the pan as opposed to adding meatballs and sausages, but that’s it. (If I did use meatballs and sausages I’d do it like he said. Like most braises and stews, this improves with time, but it can be a great sauce even if you only simmer it for an hour, which is what I did this time because I was pressed for time.
I love inexpensive red wine with spaghetti and meat sauce but had none in the house and didn’t feel like pulling a big gun. So I went with the spiced tripel instead. Not a great substitute and not a great match, but it has the brawn of a rustic style of red wine and that was a s close as I was going to get. And as I sat there eating the pasta and sauce I wondered why I don’t make it more often.

January 25th - Spaghetti with Shrimp

January 25th – Spaghetti with Shrimp

More proof that my cooking goes in cycles. A few days ago I was saying that I hadn’t cooked pasta in a while and now we have two pastas dishes a few nights a part. I had gone into work early and was supposed to get out of work early, but things didn’t work that way. I shouldn’t complain because I was able to scoot out a few hours early last week, but I got home in a crabby mood but still wanted something good to eat, but didn’t want to stop at the store on the way home. I knew I had some shrimp in the freezer and started to thaw them cold water while I came up with a plan. Before you give me grief about using frozen shrimp, be aware that most shrimp that’s sold commercially has been frozen. If you buy it non-frozen at your fish monger, ask if it was previously frozen. Most of it has been. Shrimp doesn’t hold well unfrozen, so unless you live near a shrimp region, chances are you’re paying premium dollars for something that was already frozen. My advice, and also that of such people as Mark Bittman, is to buy shrimp frozen. It’s normally cheaper because you’re not paying someone else to thaw it for you. I normally thaw it in cold water. Sometimes I add some salt to brine it a little, but most times it’s just a quick thaw in plain old water.
I thawed the shrimp and realized that the fastest thing to do was probably to make some pasta. I chopped some garlic and added it to a pan with olive oil and a little bit of crushed red pepper, while I got a pot of water boiling for the pasta. I cut the garlic into large slices so it would have a chance to flavor the oil before it burned. When the garlic was golden brown I pulled the pan form the heat. I added some spaghetti to the boiling water and let it cook until just before it was al dente (since it will cook in the sauce). I grabbed a little bit of the pasta water for the sauce in case I needed some liquid.
While the pasta drained, I threw the thawed shrimp into the pan on high heat so it cooked through in about 1-2 minutes. Then I added the spaghetti and tossed it. It need a little of the pasta water to smooth it out. Then I finished it with some lemon juice and (in a most un-Italian fashion) parmesan cheese. I had more Belgian Golden ale because it has worked so well for the tuna and capers with lemon a few nights before. A quick meal and on the table in the time it took to cook the pasta.