What's Cookin'?

As enthusiastic and fairly accomplished cooks, Marcelle and I often spend hours in the kitchen together, creating and cooking dishes that we both enjoy ourselves and serve to guests and friends. Depending on the dish, we take turns as head chef and sous chef, one preparing while the other cleans up etc. Generally, I do the actual final cooking just before a meal is served. Marcelle finds getting the timing of everything to be tedious, whereas I, being somewhat OCD, have it all down to the second. :)

Today, in an attempt to minimize the amount of canned goods we will have to pack for our upcoming move, we decided it was time to cook up a whack of spaghetti sauce. Over the years, we've been lucky enough to put together a really good collection of kitchen tools, such as a set excellent Heinkel knives and an electric sharpener. I started off this morning sharpening the set and then we dug in to do all the chopping etc.

 

 

This time around, it was our intention to prepare the sauce first without any meat, as we are expecting company that includes a vegetarian. This will allow us to package some of the sauce into Ziplok freezer bags that will be suitable for vegetarian use, after which we will then sauté up the hamburger and hot Italian sausage meat to add to the remaining sauce for the meat-eaters in the group.

 

There's nothing quite like being in the kitchen, with the redolent aromas of sweet onion, spicy red, green and jalapeño peppers and crisp celery sautéing in hot butter and garlic! We then add sliced carrots, zucchini, mushrooms and tons of tomatoes to the sauce mixture. We like lots of vegetables in our sauce.

 

Oregano, basil, rosemary and Italian seasoning are added for herbs, and then crushed red pepper flakes and black pepper combine with the jalapeños for heat. We virtually never add any salt when we cook, preferring to allow people to add it if they wish when it is served.

 

Dessert was also on the agenda today, and Marcelle baked a pie of fresh local blueberries with a "mystery" ingredient of almond extract, all nestled under a crumble topping!

 

Well, I'm starting to drool on my iPad screen now, so I should finish this post and go and sauté up the meat to add to the sauce. Work, work work!

 

Photographer's Notes: All images by iPhone 4S, processing on iPad using Snapseed and Painteresque.