Friends are like penne from Heaven

Friends are incredible gifts, and I have been blessed with many over the years. Fortunately for me, most of these friends are incredible cooks. Put us in the same room, and we'll soon be talking about food. We even talk on the phone before we get together about the food we are going to eat when we get together. We love to prepare and eat food!

After one of our recent food conversations, I got an idea. Wouldn't it be fun to spotlight guest chefs on this blog? Most of my girlfriends know more about cooking than I do so why not share their experience and knowledge with my dear readers so we all can benefit from each other.

Today’s recipe is from a friend I played soccer with 25 years ago. Laurie and I were on a women’s team called the Goal Diggers. I was one of the worst players on the team, Laurie was one of the best. She has carried her soccer skills into the kitchen. Instead of dribbling soccer balls, she’s drizzling olive oil, and a whole lot more.


This meaty penne pasta dish is a family recipe that Laurie has tweaked in her own stylish way. Like many great cooks, she doesn’t often use printed recipes. The knowledge is in her blood and she goes by instinct. These measurements are approximate, so feel free to increase or reduce the ingredients to your liking.

PENNE FROM HEAVEN

2 -28 oz. cans Tomato Sauce
½ cup Red Wine
1 lb. Ground Beef
1 lb. Ground Italian Sausage
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium White Onion
4 cloves Garlic
Fresh Rosemary Sprig
Fresh Oregano Sprigs
1 lb. Penne pasta

DIRECTIONS FOR SAUCE
Brown beef and sausage in a frying pan, drain fat, and set aside.

Mince onion finely in food processor

Saute minced onion and chopped garlic in olive oil. Once onion is translucent, add tomato sauce, stir to mix. Add desired amount of red wine, salt and pepper. Add browned beef and sausage. Add whole sprigs of rosemary and oregano. Cook on low heat for 2-3 hours. Sauce always tastes better heated up so I usually prepare the night before, let cool in fridge overnight, then put back on the stove the next day. Prepare penne pasta al dente. Before mixing sauce with pasta, pull out the herb sprigs.

Serves a crowd.

Mom was peachy-keen in the kitchen

My mom was a wonderful cook. She could throw a meal together in 20 minutes and it would taste like she spent all day preparing it. We marveled at the speed and versatility she showed in the kitchen.

When she passed away a few years ago I was blessed to get her recipe collection. Well, blessed and cursed. She had half of her pantry filled with cookbooks, magazines, index card file boxes, accordion files, shoe boxes, and binders, and they were all stuffed full with recipes.
I didn’t have room for them all, so the curse was in having to decide what to keep and what to give away.

After much thought, I settled on a scientific method of deciding which recipes to keep. My mom was a very messy cook (I inherited that quality), so if the recipe was stained and dirty, and appeared well used, I kept it. If the recipe was in good shape, it probably didn't get used much, so out it went.

This method worked on most of the recipes, except for the recipes that were written by mom in her own hand. I couldn't part with the ones bearing her handwriting. It is a connection that's important to me. I continue to feel her presence in the kitchen when I’m following one of her handwritten recipes. I'm not ready to let that feeling go. The handwritten recipes stayed in the "keeper" stack.


This peach cobbler recipe was on one of those handwritten and stained recipe cards. What I like about this cobbler is that it is easy, easy, easy... I can still see my mom's hands whipping it up in record time.

PEACH COBBLER

4 pounds peaches, peeled, pitted, and cut into bite-sized chunks
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. granulated sugar
1 tsp. lemon juice

1 cup flour
½ cup sugar
½ tsp salt
½ cup (1 stick) cold butter, cut into 8 pieces

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter 2-quart baking dish. Mix peaches, cinnamon, 2 Tbsp. brown sugar, 2 Tbsp. granulated sugar, and lemon juice together and pour into buttered dish.

In a food processor, mix together ½ cup sugar, salt, and flour until blended. Add slices of butter to processor and pulse until mixture resembles wet sand. Sprinkle crumbly mixture evenly over peaches. Bake until crust is golden brown, about 45-50 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream, if desired.

SERVES 8

Being creative with tomatoes

Since I am on a tomato kick I must share another fresh tomato recipe. A while back Carla, a friend and co-worker, showed me a cookbook she picked up on an Alaskan cruise with a picture of a wonderful salad built in a hollowed-out tomato. It looked so elegant and fun that I had to try creating my own.

I found some long skinny mushrooms at the local farmers market that added contrast and added sliced orange bell peppers. What I found was using leafy vegetables with different colors.....dark green, light green, purple...made the tomato boats more appetizing. The more color, the better. I used several tongs of spring mixed greens along with one head of leafy lettuce. You won't need a large quantity of lettuce, just a variety of greens with different textures.

INDIVIDUAL TOMATO BOAT SALADS

6 medium ripe tomatoes, home-grown if possible
Variety of colorful lettuce with different textures and stalk heights
1 orange bell pepper, cleaned and sliced in long strips
1 handful fresh green beans, cleaned and briefly parboiled
12 asparagus spears, briefly parboiled
small bunch of enoki mushrooms, if available.
1 bottle Ken's Lite Accent spray on balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing
Fresh cracked pepper
Shredded Parmesan cheese, if desired

Hollow out one tomato with a 2 1/2 to 3 inch opening cutting straight down sides, leaving the walls thick for support but not cutting through the bottom. If the opening is too big the ingredients will not stand upright, so experiment with one before you cut all 6 tomatoes. Spritz inside of all tomatoes well with dressing and lightly salt inside before you stuff them. Stuff the taller leafy greens in the back and work forward with other ingredients, balancing colors and weight as needed. Tomato boats can be assembled earlier in the day and refrigerated in large deep covered dish. Spritz well with dressing immediately before serving. Top with cracked pepper and shredded parmesan cheese, if desired. Serve with knife and fork.

When using freshly picked vegetables with lots of flavor I prefer to not use too much dressing as it drowns out the fresh clean flavors of ripe produce, but most people prefer more dressing than I do, so be generous with the spritzing and have more available on the table.

Serves 6

There's great joy in cooking, entertaining and sharing

With this first posting, I'm going off on a new adventure and writing about my passion for cooking and entertaining. I want to share some of my recipe successes and even failures so that we can learn from kitchen disasters. I hope to make this a community conversation on this subject and hope you will join with me in offering your pearls of wisdom.

For me, cooking is fun, therapy and a creative outlet. I like to experience flavors, colors, textures in my cooking. It gives me joy to share all this with my friends, and I hope to make many new friends through this blog. I have many friends who are great cooks and I plan to share some of their experiences in this blog.

Feeding those we love is one of the basic things that women do. It's in our genes. That's why entertaining has to be part of the equation. We love to cook and we love to share that cooking with others. So we'll be talking a lot about how to entertain.

I love baking (probably because I like sugar so much), but I like all forms of cooking. So we'll discuss everything that relates to cooking and the cooking experience. I live in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which is the most productive farmland in the world. I expect that I will be talking often about using locally grown products in my cooking. I also have a vegetable garden and that will be part of our discussion.

This is going to be exciting. Join with me in this experiment. I think it is going to be a lot of fun.