What's Vegeta?

Vegeta is a guy from Dragon Ball.

Which Meatbomb apparently killed, chopped, and ate with his spaghetti.

Vegeta is a salt substitute.

I was gonna say that Meatbomb! You forgot the big doobie in the ashtray next to the stove, on which you must draw deeply between each of the above steps, it sounds like.

Do I have to tell you everything? Do you want me to fucking eat it for you too?

Thanks, I needed that :)

I don't understand step #9. Can I just ladle it directly into my mouth?

This doesn't look too far off from the meat sauce my mom used to make. Loved it as a kid but moved to a simple vegetarian red sauce long before I gave up meat. But I've never been 100% happy with my red sauce, anyone got a killer one?

kodama: simple is good.

But I've never been 100% happy with my red sauce, anyone got a killer one?

Ahem.

Saute a chopped onion in some olive oil. When the onions get translucent, add 4-5 cloves of chopped garlic. Cook for a few minutes. Add 1 or 2 teaspoons each of dried basil and oregano, along with some crushed red pepper and a teaspoon of fennel seeds. Also, salt and pepper.

Now, add half a can of tomato paste. Stir, stir, stir, so that the tomato paste gets a bit brown. When it gets carmelized, deglaze with 1/2 cup of nice red wine. (You can skip the wine if you want.)

Add a 14 oz can of tomatoes -- either the diced kind, or the whole kind that you've chopped up -- along with the juice. Stir. Add about 4 cups of water. Simmer for 40 minutes or thereabouts, until it's the consistency of good tomato sauce.

Today seems to be the day to type up my favorite vague recipes.

Thanks mudpuppie that sounds great. Not too far from ones I've tried, but the fennel - that could be the trick. I think vague with sauces is the usual deal - I always do them "to taste" so actual amounts and times and such are all on the fly.

Also thanks for that link Triode. That one also sounds pretty good, I like that it calls for fresh Basil, I always try to cook with fresh these days. BUT no red wine? That goes against all I stand for :)

I'll definitely try one of these next time I'm in the mood. Pasta with red sauce is such a late fall/winter dish for me. The rest of the year I just use pesto or my recent favorite: grilled vegetables heavily basted with olive oil.

The red wine goes in separately, silly!

Once you've got the fennel seed on board, y'know what can take red sauce to another level? A diced pear. Chose a nice firm one that will take some heat. Also, the barest pinch of ground cinnamon can bring some fun to the party.

KEEP STIRRING THE SAUCE, KAREN!

Ahem...

You take the 1/4 pound of pancetta (a kilo is a thousand grams, so whatever the fuck that is in non-drug conversions) and chop that into little tab of acid size pieces. Watch out it's greasy.

You dice up two or three carrots (peeled), two or three stalks of celery (decapitated) and a large white onion (or two medium onions). In a large cast iron pan (preheated for 3-5 minutes on high) you reduce your pancetta (stir for the love of god) and then you throw in your diced carrots, celery and onion. The French call this mirepoix and it's the entire foundation of their shit (other than butter, fries and goose liver)!

Stir and cook until everything is sweated down and translucent and then add what your pan will hold (usually for me about three quarters to a pound each) of ground beef, ground pork and ground veal (if you can't hang with veal find something else ground or double the pork), turn the heat up and almost brown it, but don't really, don't make a taco or a sloppy joe, get it cooked through and just a teeny bit thinking about edging towards brown. Pour off most of that gross meat water, carefully all the while, never let it get dry but don't boil it in its own gross meat water. Add about a thing of fresh rosemary, chopped up pretty fine (you can't really add too much, in America we get it in a package mostly, so almost a thing and half really), omit the stems. Turn down the heat to medium low!

Salt and pepper, right?

Stir, quickly add a small can of tomato paste (can and a half maybe, I like a can but this is flexible, turn the meat orange and a little gluey), stir, mix it up. Stir. After about 15 minutes or less add half a cup to a cup of half and half, heavy cream or regular milk (I think that's a million hectares of milk, but you might want to check that) and stir, keep your heat medium low and cook this until it's sticky, with the heat low enough you can cook it for two hours or more, but a solid hour stirring every five minutes is fine. What you need to arrive at is not a sauce, but a ragu, like a sticky, wet but not liquid situation, it makes a noise when stirred, you know? A wet reluctant noise.

Cook a pot of thick linguini, fresh please (salt the shit out the pasta water, please). Mix everything together in the pasta pot after you've drained the pasta and put it back in the pot, serve with grated fresh parmesan in big white bowls, with some just ok Italian red wine if you have it. Hopefully it's kinda cold outside. If your constitution allows you to smoke dope, do so early in the process, otherwise just imagine you've smoked dope, that's what I do. Be a Bolognese winner, cooking the final mixture together on low heat for as long as possible is the secret. Yell out aphorisms in a broad caricature of an Italian accent throughout and listen to roots country music or some gypsy punk. ROSEMARY, early and often.

Also you can add a little red wine in the last hour of cooking, but not too much, two or three glugs at most, stir!

Hee! I could read a whole cookbook of your recipes, Divino; and I love your metric conversions.

That seems like a lot of carrot to me, though. I'm suspicious of carrots because they tend to make things taste sweeter than I like. What would happen here if one used only .0025 hectometres of carrot?

I smell a book deal pitch here ...

I'd buy it, so that makes two with taz. How many sales do you need to make a book cover the publishing costs?

The carrot is basically lost totally in the other flavors, it and the other vegetables just provide a base really. Usually you need to sell about half of what you printed to cover costs, so if we print four we just might be ok.

Let's do it.
i'll pretty up my motherloaf recipe or some other thing. We cold just do it like a zine run where people can print it out and donate.
i'll do drawings and offer my snickerdoodle recipe.

When i was a kid and made zines in grade school, i always had recipes.
Let's go old school!

But yeah, also, you could lose a carrot and a stalk of celery and everything would be ok, you want basically a big heaping double handful of chopped vegetables. My hands, which are long and elegant, but surprisingly strong. If you have different hands just figure it out.

It's true, his hands are like a brace of Portuguese water dogs sleeping by the Chesterfield.

Add the basil at the end, it loses flavor with cooking. For cinnamon I drop in a stick and pull it out after a while, and then reuse it a few times.

and then reuse it a few times

Cheap bastard, or environmental steward? You be the judge.