Sunday's Plate

One of our young teachers asked last week if I would help her with some recipes and guide her through some of the processes of cooking. I was delighted to have another convert!

In a too fast world that's begging for instant gratification, cooking often gets traded for instants and "store boughts." Yesterday, as I was filling out a questionnaire for Schnuck's, the question, "How often do you use prepared food" appeared many times in different forms. I answered "Nearly never, never, never again, and lastly, practically never!" Prepared means: processed, expensive, possibly contaminated, and not my ingredients. And therein lies the difference between cooking and place and press tiles. It's food of a sort, but not the best food.

So helping someone to understand that making a spaghetti dinner does not entail picking out a sauce, is the first step. The other thing to remember is that if you have canned tomato sauce, canned tomatoes, spices, and pasta and cheese, you don't need to go to the store to make a dozen different kinds of meals quickly and tastefully.

Quick weekly shopping list to include several "red sauce" meals: ground beef, ground pork, sausage, chicken, 3 cans tomato sauce, 3 cans diced tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, Parmesan cheese, cottage cheese, gnocchi, whole grain pasta of choice, and pasta sheets for lasagna, 2 onions, 2 green peppers, and some mushrooms of choice.

Here are some of the meals you can make with this shopping list:

1. Lasagna
2. Spaghetti with beef sauce
3. Pork meatballs and gnocchi
4. Pizza
5. Chicken caccatore
6. Meatballs and spaghetti
7. Stuffed shells and meat sauce
8. Pork patties, pasta and sauce
9. Soup
10. Chicken and gnocchi

And the ease of prep? It should take no more than 30 minutes to make any of these meals.

Making a red sauce is easy. You cook your veggies and your spices in olive oil, and then add the canned tomato sauce and diced tomatoes and then spice to taste. Da, da! Perhaps 10 minutes if you take your time.

Meat? That depends on what you are cooking. Chicken caccatore? Cut chicken to desired pieces and slide into bubbling sauce.

Gnocchi? That's a potato starch. Boil gnocchi for about a minute and it's ready to slide into sauce or have sauce poured over it.

When making lasagna, mix cottage or other drippy cheese with eggs and Parmesan cheese. Place your pasta sheets in the bottom of your baking dish. Add a little sauce, the cottage mix, another layer of pasta sheets, your sauce, and your shredded mozzarella. Bake 25 minutes.

Soup? Dilute sauce with chicken or beef stock made from bouillon. Add baked or quickly stir fried meat.

See how simple? And the name of the game is choice. Today I really feel like lasagna, and tomorrow pizza. It doesn't take a lot of effort to always buy 2-3 cans of tomato sauce and diced tomatoes and to keep cheese on hand. Buy meat that's on sale and looks great!

Once you've practiced your sauce, you can be creative and inventive. Bon appetite!