Creating Tomato Base for Tomato Onion and Butter Sauce

Penne Covered In Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter By Marcella Hazan

Food and Beverages6 Comments

For a late lunch this afternoon, we decided to make Marcella Hazan’s famous Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter.  This comes out of the Italian cookbook recommendation I made last week and can be found on page 152.  It’s not what you think of when you conjure up visions of a traditional marina sauce for spaghetti so be careful not to compare the two; they are different, though I am so fond of this incarnation that I find it hard to desire anything else.  If you prefer heavier sauces, this might not be your cup of tea.  You will never know until you try it.

Jamaican Rum and Caramel Cooking Banana Slices

Gordon Ramsay’s Scotch Pancakes with Caramelized Bananas

Food and Beverages14 Comments

The front page of Reddit yesterday had a Gordon Ramsay recipe for Scotch Pancakes with Caramelized Banana.  For my fellow Americans, that translates into a dessert made of buttermilk pancakes drizzled in caramelized bananas that had been flambéed in a dark Jamaican rum topped with vanilla bean ice cream.   [mainbodyad]Any time you combine fire with a drink made famous by…

Julia Child Soubise with Cream and Blackened Chicken

The Peasant Dishes Continue with a Cream and Chicken Soubise

Food and Beverages1 Comment

The parade of so-called “peasant dishes” from classic cuisine continues!  A peasant dish (a term somewhat offensive to my American sensibilities), is a meal made up of low-cost, widely available ingredients that are improved with specific cooking techniques and spices.  Peasant dishes evolved out of centuries of experimentation by working-class families in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and England; the by-product of cooks, housewives, and head chefs improvising, experimenting, adjusting, and modifying the foods they had on hand to create something extraordinary with limited resources.

Sinead O'Connor Catholic Church Abuse

Doing the Right Thing Can Be Hard – But You Should Do It, Anyway

Philosophy9 Comments

Twenty one years ago, in a time long before it was common knowledge, a now-devoutly religious musician discovered that the Catholic Church had become what essentially amounted to the largest and best funded pedophile ring on the planet, shielded by the good-natured willingness of communities to give the benefit of the doubt to those they saw as authority figures and a hierarchy filled with men who were more concerned about protecting reputation than saving children. Rapists were shifted from town to town, city to city, with no mention of their undisclosed molestation to parents who allowed their innocent sons and daughters to be around these monsters.