Sweet and Spicy Tomato-Squash Pasta Sauce

A perfect way to get some extra fall flavor into a simple warming pasta dish. I know a lot of people who don’t like winter squash very much. I blame this on the fact that most winter squash (think pumpkin, or any squash with meaty orange flesh) is served sweet with pie flavorings like nutmeg and cinnamon. I was pretty ambivalent about pumpkin in anything other than pie before I learned how to use it too. Some pairings I’ve found that work well with winter squashes are rosemary, ginger, bacon (as an aromatic).

But these flavors rely on the squash to take center stage. If you’re still not sure about squash (or you’re feeding someone who isn’t), you can use it to give body and just a mild flavor to a tomato sauce, and complement it with bit of chili or cayenne pepper. In this recipe, I use butternut squash, because I find it one of the most flavorful and easy to break down. Any winter squash would probably work well here. Kabocha slices are pictured above, and cubes of butternut squash are visible in the second image.

This is my go to sauce. It helps me use up any squash I have laying around the house, and makes a regular pasta/sauce night a bit more exciting and nutritious. It makes a great cheesy non-dairy dish.

Recipe: Tomato-Squash sauce

Makes 6-8 servings

• 1 1/2 lbs fresh tomatoes or can of crushed tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cup raw butternut squash, chopped (or 1 cup cooked and pureed)
• 1 red onion, chopped fine
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 cup of water, vegetable or chicken broth
• salt and pepper to taste

1. If using fresh tomatoes, cut an X onto the bottom of each tomato and then blanch in a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds (less if they are small, more if they are very large). Then, shock them in an ice water bath or under a cold water rinse, before trying to peel. Remove the skins. Slice the tomatoes in half and scoop out the seeds. Feel free to chop the tomatoes into smaller pieces for the sauce if you do not plan on pureeing. 
2. Add oil to a saucepan and bring to low heat. If using raw squash, add the cubes to the pot, and saute until they begin to soften. Stir frequently When you can poke through pieces easily with a fork, you can move on to the next step.
3. Add the tomatoes (and all juices), onions, garlic, and cayenne. Allow the mixture to stew for 10 minutes uncovered, stirring occasionally so nothing sticks to the bottom. If the mixture is dry, add about 1/2 cup of water, vegetable stock, or chicken broth to give the vegetables a place to dissolve. 
4. If you are not planning on pureeing, you can stir or mash until the squash dissolves. Otherwise, now is when you will want to puree the mixture. Add salt and pepper and taste. 
5. If the sauce is too thin for pasta, allow to reduce until it reaches the thickness you prefer. If it is too thick, add more water/broth until it reaches the consistency of pasta sauce. 
6. Mix pasta of your choice into the sauce, or pour the sauce over the pasta. Enjoy! 

Sometimes I add a bit of browned spicy Italian sausage crumbles to the mix to give it an extra kick, but it is just as wonderful without the meat. 

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Luscious, Unbelievable Beets and Ricotta

I’ve always loved beets: their color, a magenta that still seems unnatural every time I see it; their texture, tender and meaty; their flavor, bright, earthy and fruity. As a beet fan, it doesn’t take much to convince me that something with roasted beets in it is going to be delicious.

But because I enjoy them au naturel, I don’t usually do much to dress them up. I’ll generally roast them (or buy them already prepared), slice them and throw them on a salad or just eat them as a side with some salt and pepper.  So I somehow never thought to chop them, mix them up with ricotta cheese of all things, and stuff them into pasta. Why complicate something that’s so good when it’s simple? Because it’s ungodly good, that’s why.

That’s what I found out last weekend, when my friend Emma from Follows The Sun visited. She brought along this recipe for Casunsiei (Beet and Ricotta ravioli), which reminded her of a formative summer she spent interning at the restaurant that is famous for them.

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Sweet and Spicy Morocco-inspired Tomato Sauce

After spending a weekend in a place even colder than New York, I really can’t help but dream of warmer places. Maybe it’s just me, but nothing warms me up like the deep seductive flavors of the Mediterranean. Thinking of food that even hints of places like Morocco seems to usher in a premature summer. At least for a moment. I think that my imagination is one of the only things getting me through this bitterly cold winter.

I was introduced to this dish by my host mom in France. She would let it stew in a makeshift tajine, with pieces of chicken folded into the sauce to soak up all the flavors. The scent of cinnamon, honey and tomato would waft warmly through the house. It was the perfect way to end a blustery Parisian day. We would eat it ladled over a mound of couscous, or just sop up the sauce with bread, licking it off the chicken and our fingers.

Since then, I’ve made a lot of changes to this recipe. Sometimes I add slivered almonds, I almost always add spicy roasted chickpeas, and I’ve even toyed with swapping out eggs for chicken for a shakshuka inspired dish. I usually have rice around more often than couscous, so I pour it over rice instead. Like many tomato sauces, this one is quite versatile, so try it and enjoy it any way you like.

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Homemade pasta and buttery tomato sauce

I know, pasta with tomato sauce doesn’t sound very exciting. And it isn’t, usually. But when you match recipes from two of the highest quality food bloggers on the internet today, how can you go wrong? Those were my thoughts exactly.

Let me tell you, this dinner was so far from going wrong, I was asking entirely the wrong question. I underestimated how good both of these recipes would be, probably because of their delightfully simple list of ingredients. The pasta? Just egg and flour, and a dash of salt for the boiling water. The sauce? Canned tomato, onions, and butter. Instead of asking what could go wrong, I should have asked what could be better.

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Surprise! Lamb and lemon are a match made in heaven

We had a leftover batch of the old standby Velvet Lemon Pasta Sauce that we were both avoiding using due to last month’s lemon overdose (you haven’t seen the last of those lemons yet, I promise). I was almost thinking it would go bad before we would be in the mood for lemon sauce again, but then Jen was hit with a bolt of inspiration. She revived the sauce with some fresh red onion sauteed with some ground lamb from our freezer, a splash of water and a bit of dried basil. All this on some whole wheat penne.

If she had told me she had added lamb (or red meat of any kind really) to the lemon sauce before I ate it, I’m not sure I would have been able to anticipate the combination of those two flavors. Somehow, surprising to me at least, the lamb lent a light but duskier meaty flavor to the creamy tartness of the sauce. I’m not keeping score but I think this sauce deserves several more points in the versatility category. I’ll never let it languish in my fridge again.

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Warm Creamy Peanut Chicken Salad

This isn’t the prettiest chicken salad out there, but really what chicken salad is? This salad is really easy to throw together after a long day and is great warm or cold. You can go as gourmet or as instant as you like by using fresh chicken, fresh grated ginger and garlic, or canned chicken and dried spices, respectively. No matter how you do it (I’ve whipped up dozens of variations myself), this chicken salad packs a satisfyingly flavorful punch.

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Velvet Lemon Pasta Sauce, Revisited

Earlier this week I was invited to an impromptu potluck event for a large number of people. I wasn’t sure what other people might be bringing and knew I would have less than 2 hours to cook and get over to the event. I had no time to shop and still not very many fresh ingredients in the house due to the move.

When I got home, I looked around to see what I had an abundence of. I had a quarter of a very large red onion, a big bottle of “real” lemon juice, vegan “chicken” bouillon and a LOT of pasta due to a recent trip to Costco. I decided to whip up a big family-sized batch of my Velvet Lemon Mushroom pasta sauce. I followed the general procedure, but swapped out garlic powder for fresh garlic, and dropped the mushrooms and white wine. I also quadrupled it and made a big pot of this lemon gravy. I left the onions a bit uncooked which led to crunchy delicious pink-purple onion bits throughout.

Then I poured half of it over a pound of rigatoni,  gave it a good mix and off I went to the potluck. The dish was a hit and one of the few vegan entrees among savory meat dishes and many desserts. The bowl was empty by the time the event was over.

The other half of the sauce was used last night when I added it to a pound of rotini and threw in some meatballs. I’m enjoying the non-dairy creaminess as I type. This just goes to show that a very basic sauce can be adjusted for any number of circumstances. I know for a fact that the same sauce goes great on chicken too!

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Tangy Pineapple Shrimp with Okra

This post is a companion piece to a recipe I wrote as guest blogger on Just Bento, Curried Lentil “Risotto”. Please check it out there and let me know if you enjoy it. Together, these have been some of my favorite recipes lately. Thank you Maki for giving me a little space on your awesome blog in which to share them.

These shrimp were a bit of improvisation for something light and indulgent to have with my curried lentils, which are a bit heavier and fibrous. Together with some simple couscous these made a delightful dinner and an even better lunch box the next afternoon. I haven’t tried yet, but I imagine that this would be quite delicious with some fried tofu instead of shrimp, along with some actual pineapple chunks.

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Velvet Lemon Mushroom Sauce

Sauces are perhaps my favorite type of food to cook. They can be so versatile in flavor and texture. They liven up ordinary ingredients. This velvety lemon mushroom sauce can be used as an ingredient in many recipes, simply poured over a bowl of pasta, or served aside a warm cut of meat or a bowl of dark green vegetables. This would also work quite well as the liquid in a casserole.

Don’t be deceived by the seemingly “light” nature of lemon sauces. This sauce is thick and flavorful, and personally, I enjoy it quite often paired with a robust red wine despite general wine pairing conventions (put very simply: dark sauce = red wine, light sauce = white wine).

This recipe was adapted from one of the first dishes my mother ever taught me to make. Her dish is a bit more like a lemony soup into which she adds Syrian meatballs (among other slight differences), and we eat it over rice.

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Cheesy Macaroni with Baked Acorn Squash and Tomato Sauce

Tonight we revisited a successful dish we had found on the Food Network’s website once when we had an abundance of acorn squash. Basically, you fill baked acorn squash with pasta, sausage, tomato sauce, red onions, cheese, and re-bake. We followed the recipe pretty closely the last time we made it (using ditalini shaped pasta instead of rigatoni and halving the recipe). I really liked this dish, except that I found that there ended up being a bit too much squash per serving for my tastes. The squash tasted best to me when it had come into contact with the pasta and sauce, so the deeper areas of squash flesh were left a bit too “squashy” for me. We remedied that issue this time.

The adjustments we made to the recipe were to make it like a big casserole. We followed most of the instructions (except we were low on sausage so we supplemented with some meatballs, and we halved the recipe again). After the squash baked, I scooped it out of its skin into the big pot where we had combined all of the other ingredients. Instead of having the beautiful little servings of pasta inside the squash, the squash flesh is now a part of the sauce. Less adorable, but far more tasty and practical. We thought about baking the entire pot of everything but it was still very warm and we were hungry, so we dug in right away. We also have a ton of very portable leftovers from this dish to take for lunch tomorrow.

I’m quite glad we returned to this dish after 2 years. It doesn’t look like much but its packed with flavor, and thanks to the squash, more varied nutrients than any regular bowl of pasta in tomato sauce.

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