Saturday, May 22, 2010

A. Love & Special Sauce

You might not know this about me, but I make pretty good spaghetti sauce; it's a little bit spicy, with a hint of sweetness and great tomato-y depth. Well, I'm not so sure about the tomato-y depth part; I sort of made that up. It sounds good, no? Anyway, my spaghetti sauce makes Craig swoon and he's typically not the swooning type. Now, if Mario Batali tasted my sauce, he'd probably disapprove, since, according to his standards, it's not authentic marinara. However, normal people like it and that's all that really matters. Besides, the chances of Mario Batali ever tasting my food are pretty slim.




I haven't pulled out my trusty Crock Pot and made spaghetti sauce since Craig left. Caroline, who loves spaghetti as much as her dad, is entirely unopposed to jarred sauce, so that's what I've been serving her the past few months. /lazy


However, she has recently requested the homemade stuff. Yesterday, I obliged. My reasons for honoring Caroline's request are two-fold. 1.) it's my duty to oblige her every whim (or so she makes it seem) and 2.) I needed sauce for a batch of pizza roll-ups I agreed to make for the Girls on the Run banquet we attended last night.


Steamy.





The best way to test sauce for appropriate seasoning is with bread. This is not a scientific fact, because science really aint my thang, but it's what I like to do.



Oh yes, you better believe I double dipped.




The third dip is the charm.



Hey, it's MY sauce and I can quadruple dip if I want to.





For the big Girls on the Run banquet, I even dusted off my bread maker and made homemade dough.




I gathered my ingredients: cheez, turkey pepperoni, dough and sauce to assemble the pizza roll ups.





















Here they are in their unbaked form. They're like the pizza version of cinnamon rolls.




In my haste, I forgot to snap a picture of the final, baked product.

I was running around like the Tasmanian Devil last night trying to get my food + 3 girls to the banquet. Since I'm the buddy runner, I accompanied Sarah to the banquet. And of course, because we seem to travel in pacts (my honorary daughters and I), we also brought along Sarah's sister, Rachel and, of course, Caroline. The girls were, as usual, a raucous bunch, but after the banquet formalities came to an end, they had fun running through the cafeteria and flinging rubber bands at the Got Milk? posters in the school cafeteria. Poor Taylor Swift, she got beamed in the head more than a few times.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention these beauties, as no life banquet is complete without dessert.




Too bad they were all gobbled up last night, because looking at that picture makes me crave one rather intensely.


Pink paper makes cookies even more fun.





Especially when the paper coordinates with your race t-shirt.


















I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's race. If only we didn't have to be at there at 6:30 am.

2 comments:

Sissy said...

I don't really make completely homemade sauce, since I don't like it that much. I normally start with a jar and then add in what I want to make it taste better. I like two kinds: Classico Cabernet Marinara and Prego Marinara. I have been using the Classico kind for a long time, but then the Prego was on sale and I needed a bunch for Mother's Day, so I got it. Turned out to be better than what I normally use, especially when I put frozen meatballs with it in the crockpot. Tasty. I got many compliments on it.

And yes, I needed to see a final product picture! I wanted to see the sauce to dough ratio.

Alison said...

I used to doctor up jarred sauce all the time, but found a crock pot recipe, that I've sinced tweaked, when Caroline was a baby and have been using that ever since.

The actual recipe for the pizza rollups didn't call for sauce. It was just bread dough, cheese, and whatever toppings you like, rolled up like a cinnamon roll, cut into slices and baked. They suggested serving sauce on the side, but I decided to add it to the roll up for more flava.

I spreaded it on like I would on a pizza. Enough to cover but not so much that it squeezes out the sides. I made one batch with just cheese and one with the pepperoni. I put too much sauce on the pepperoni version and it was hard to keep the rolls together.
It was kind of a mess.

But, they tasted good.

The original recipe called for frozen (and then defrosted) french bread dough. It was pretty easy. You just needed to let the rolls proof for a bit before baking at 350 for about 20-30 minutes.

Ack, time for soccer. Must scoot.
Happy Saturday!