Cheese and Pears » sauces

Soup Recipes: Peas with Onion and Bacon Bits

C&P — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:50:38 +0000

Peas with Onion and Bacon Bits

This is a grey area of soup recipes. Is it a soup? Is it a second course? Is it a pasta sauce? No need to decide. This is a real like-mamma-used-to-make classic I cooked for myself the other day as main course, and used as pasta sauce the day after (not suitable for spaghetti, choose a smal-sized short pasta).

2 tablespoons olive oil
½ onion, chopped
50g bacon, diced
150g peas
250ml vegetable stock
½ glass of white wine
dry rosemary (optional)

Put the peas for the soup 4-5 minutes in boiling water if frozen. Heat the stock in a separate pan.

Heat the olive oil with the bacon, and sauté the onion until it’s lucid and tender.

Add the peas, turn up the heat and pour the wine. When it’s evaporated turn down the heat and add a ladle of stock.

From now on it works like a risotto: add a ladle of stock at the time and wait for it to be absorbed before adding the next one.

When the peas are cooked enough for your taste (after 20-25 minutes), the soup is ready season with salt and pepper and serve.

Did you like this soup recipe? Try more vegetables

Test answers:

You order beer (or water, or coke). Pizza is a salty dish, you want to drink something that quenches your thirst.

You get vegetables. The word peperoni (with one p) does NOT mean sausage, it means peppers.

You ask for olive oil. Parmesan doesn’t melt enough, and ketchup, no, please just don’t.

Pimp my tomato sauce II

C&P — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:26:47 +0000

Another pimped tomato sauce. More than a week without a post: it had to happen sooner or later. The thing is, last week-end I traded the cooking frenzy with a relaxing spa break in Donegal, and this has been St Patrick’s week, and the next is quarter end, which usually means doing a lot of hours of overtime and having a more intense relationship with SAP than with my oven.

Anyway, with very little time to cook, and in an effort to make a virtue out of necessity (fare di necessità virtù, we would say), the only possible outcome could be a second pasta sauce pimping, which means, taking a regular tomato sauce and adding some flavour.

The recipe is like the one for the basic pimp my sauce, but with some salami sausage. I used the German one coated in pepper they sell at Lidl.

Dice 4-5 slices of this salami, and add it to the leek at the beginning. The taste of this sauce is a bit stronger, you’ll love it.

Pimp my pasta sauce

C&P — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:37:44 +0000

Can this pasta sauce be called a recipe? Let’s say it’s something less than a recipe and something more than a ready meal. This is the idea: let’s take Lidl’s tomato sauce, which is excellent, and pimp it.

For a basic tomato pimped sauce for two people you’ll need:

½ jar of ready tomato sauce
½ leek
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper
about 10 olives

I guess you already know what to do, right?

Heat a pan, add the olive oil and the finely chopped leek. Sauté at low heat until it’s lucid but not yet brown, then pour the tomato sauce and the olives. Let it go for 10 minutes and this pasta sauce is all pimped and ready.