Cocktail Sauce Recipe

We splurged on New Year’s Eve and had some fresh crab and shrimp.  I mixed up a homemade cocktail sauce recipe for the shrimp, and mixed some with a fair bit of mayonnaise for the crab.  The joy of making your own is that you can adjust the seasonings to make it as spicy or mild as you like.

• 1 cup ketchup or 1/2 cup ketchup and 1/2 cup chili sauce for a spicier version
• 1 Tbs lemon juice
• 1 Tbs horseradish sauce
• 1 Tbs minced onion
• 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/4 tsp dry mustard
• Tabasco sauce to taste

Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and mix well.  Chill 30 minutes or so to blend the flavors.

The next day I made crab cakes with the leftover crab and mixed some mayonnaise with the last of the cocktail sauce to top the crab cakes. Delicious!

I was so excited to receive a copy of this cookbook to review: The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook: 200 Recipes for Quick, Delicious, and Nourishing Meals That Are Easy on the Budget and a Snap to Prepare

I’ve been following Erin Chase’s blog 5 Dollar Dinners for some time. I track my overall food budget, and used to track it even more carefully than I do today. That’s why I started CheapCooking.com. But I love the idea of setting a “do not exceed goal” for dinner, the highest cost meal for most of us.   She set that price based on what she felt were reasonable goals for a healthy dinner for her family of four where she lives, basically $1.25 per person for dinner, and her overall goal of less than $300/month for her family of 4.

Obviously, your own goals may vary, depending on where you live and how many you are feeding. But the idea of setting a goal for dinner is a great one, as I think most of us spend more on dinner than other meals. And having an overall monthly target lets you vary a bit week to week, as special occasions arise. Certain months you may stock up a bit more based on sales and other months, hopefully, come in a bit under.

Living in the San Francisco bay area, I find myself drooling over her sale prices. But don’t let your own circumstances derail the idea. Track your prices. Stock up on sale prices.  Use coupons where they make sense. Have a great repertoire of recipes that you can use for healthy balanced meals.  Where I live, there are no stores that double coupons, for example, but I bet you can cut your grocery bills substantially by following her guidelines, even without using coupons, and you will find some great recipes to add to your regular favorites.

Just the day after I received this book to review (meaning I didn’t pay for it, but that did NOT influence my review here, I would have bought it regardless so was thrilled to get a review copy! And if I get a review copy of a book I don’t like, I generally just don’t review it…), my youngest asked for spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.  We had two extras for dinner that night if I recall, and I still ended up with leftovers.

I had everything I needed in my freezer and pantry. I have a great meatball recipe handed down from my Italian ex-MIL but opted to follow Chase’s recipe so I could do a good review. The major differences would be fresh garlic over garlic powder  (I grow my own garlic so count it as nearly free at this point since you replant it every year but did cook this up with garlic powder just to test the recipe) and if I want to splurge I use a mix of ground pork, ground veal and ground beef. You can sometimes find this at reasonable prices but I use pure ground beef when I cannot and used that the night I made these.) I think the key is good Parmesan, which is cheap on a per serving basis since you need very little for maximum flavor.

I also make my own breadcrumbs whenever we have bread going stale, so always have a stash in the freezer.

Italian Meatballs

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp Italian seasoning (or use some basil and oregano)
• 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (splurge here I say!)
• 1 egg
• 2 Tbs olive oil

Mix all the ingredients together and form into 1 inch balls. You can use a small cookie scoop if you prefer but I find the meatballs stay together better if you “pack” them a bit with your hands. I use my KitchenAid 5-qt. Stand Mixer to mix stuff like this. but then form the balls with my hands.

Preheat the oven to 350 while you’re forming the meatballs (and perhaps making the sauce!).

Heat a skillet with 2 Tbs olive oil and brown the meatballs over medium heat, turning periodically to brown evenly for a few minutes. Then put the meatballs in a lightly greased baking dish and bake at 350 for 15-20  minutes.

Serve with your favorite spaghetti or marina sauce (see below) and 1 pound cooked spaghetti. This will serve far more than 4 in my house, but we love leftover spaghetti and meatballs for lunches or leftover spaghetti and sauce in meatball sandwiches as well.  (Just toast some bread or rolls, preferably with some garlic and butter, then load up some meatballs and sauce, top with some provolone or mozzarella cheese and broil a few minutes.)

Marinara Sauce

• 1 28-ounce can of crushed or pureed tomatoes
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 Tbs dried basil
• 1 Tbs dried oregano
• 1 Tbs dried rosemary
• 1 Tbs olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

I grow rosemary year round so used 1 tsp fresh chopped rosemary instead.

Combine everything and simmer at least 15 minutes, longer is good too. Just stir now and then and leave it at a very low simmer.

Store the sauce for a week in the refrigerator or 6 months in the freezer.

If you can grow any or all of the herbs and garlic that cuts the cost significantly and improves the flavor.

Review Recap

The girls love my normal meatballs and sauce recipe but declared this really good, as did our guests.  I do think meatballs are better with some ground pork and/or veal but that might knock it out of your budget. For pure ground beef, these are delicious! And I think if you had 1/3 each of ground beef, pork and veal, you’d have a killer recipe.

I  play around with marinara sauce so much I don’t know that I have a “normal” but this is a great one. You might think about adding some fennel if you’re into a stronger Italian flavor but that’ s purely a matter of what you’re used to.

I’ve gotten pretty good at reading recipes over the last 18 years of cooking and can say that most of these recipes read well, even if I haven’t cooked them all. Some are very similar to some of my old favorite recipes and others are new but sound great.

I served this meal with some garlic bread and a Caesar salad. I did use a store-bought dressing but made the croutons from a leftover hot dog bun (coat with some butter and sauteed in a bit of  butter with some herbs).

Updated to add: If you’d like a chance to win a copy of the cookbook, which just hit the stores today, post a comment. I’ll randomly draw a winner on December 29.

If you don’t win, you can buy this from Amazon by following this link: The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook: 200 Recipes for Quick, Delicious, and Nourishing Meals That Are Easy on the Budget and a Snap to Prepare or look for it in your local bookstore or ask your library to buy a copy.

Eggplant and Green Pepper in Miso

This is from Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen which I’ve been enjoying.  I just used one small Japanese eggplant and half a green pepper because I was only feeding two people, and I cut back a bit on the sauce ingredients as well. It came out quite good. Well, I liked it. My youngest wasn’t so crazy about it but then she likes neither eggplant or green peppers, so I didn’t have high expectations!  I’ll post her quantities below since I winged and eyeballed my adjustments.

Oh, I just realized I forgot to garnish mine with the sesame seeds and oil!  Still tasted good.

• 1 pound Japanese eggplant
• 2 Tbs mirin
• 2 Tbs red miso
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp sake
• 1 cup canola oil
• 1 green pepper, cored and seeded, cut into bite size pieces
• 1 tsp toasted white sesame
• 1/2 tsp sesame oil

Soak the eggplant in some salted water while you prepare the sauce.

In a small bowl, mix together the mirin, miso, sake and sugar. Set this aside for the end of the recipe.

Start the oil heating in a wok if you have one. I used a medium saucepan so I could get by with using less oil and still having some depth. Drain the eggplant and blot dry with a paper towel. You want the oil about 350. If you drop a cube of bread in, it should sizzle.

Gently slide some of the eggplant pieces in and fry a few minutes until golden brown and cooked through. (A fork or skewer should easily go through.) Remove and drain on paper towels as small batches are done.

Now if you’re not frying anything else, drain the oil from the pan and reserve for another use. Since I was also going to fry some chicken, I just added a small bit of oil to a small frying pan.

Cook the pepper until crisp-tender, about 2 minutes. Add the eggplant back to the pan, then stir the miso sauce over it all and cook while stirring a few minutes to blend flavors and coat the vegetables.  Transfer to a serving dish and garnish with the sesame seeds and sesame oil.

You can see my whole menu here.

I didn’t feel like going out and lighting the barbecue as I had just put the cover on it, expecting rain tonight or tomorrow.  I thought I’d try the George Foreman Grill for this and it worked great! (Note: I do not have the one with the removable plates but I would get that one were I to get a new one.)

• 2-4 Tbs Penzey’s Sate seasoning
• 2 Tbs water
• 3 Tbs soy sauce
• 1/4 cup peanut oil
• 2 Tbs rice vinegar
• 2 pounds boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut in 3/4″ cubes

Mix together the water and sate seasoning and let sit a few minutes to blend.

If you’re using wooden skewers, throw those in the sink and cover with water and let soak. This is probably less important on the George Foreman grill but very important if you grill them with a live flame.

Add the rest of the ingredients except the chicken to the sate seasoning and water, mix well, then stir in the chicken. Cover and refrigerate at least an hour, preferably two. I only did an hour.

The chicken will only take a few minutes to cook, maybe 4-5, so estimate how long it will take you to skewer the chicken and start some rice going at some point. I made saffron rice in the rice cooker and it came out great.

Put the chicken chunks on the skewers while the grill is heating. Cook 4-5 minutes.

Serve with some dipping sauces if you’d like. I used a bottled Thai peanut sauce that I had around.  This one would probably work good:

• 1/3 cup peanut butter
• 3 Tbs hot water
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 2-3 tsp plum sauce

These would work well as appetizers at a party but we served them for dinner, with saffron rice and a green salad.

Pesto from homegrown basil

I am going to freeze some of this pesto, so I left out the cheese in the main batch, following my former mother-in-law’s rule as well as Mark Bittman’s advice in How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, one of my favorite go-to cookbooks. I’ve added some as I went using this on some chicken breasts the other night but will freeze the rest without the cheese.

My basil this year is the best I have grown yet. It is flavorful and produces plenty of leaves! I’ve used in Thai curry, tomato caprese salad, pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil, etc.   But somehow I hadn’t yet made pesto!  So I will be making lots of pesto over the next few weeks. The plant is starting to flower a lot and I don’t want to lose it all!

homegrown basil

I picked a huge branch of it and trimmed the leaves off, not worrying about the smaller stems but definitely discarding the woody thick ones.  I left a few flowers in.  After trimming, I rinsed them all off in a salad spinner and then spun them dry.

• 2 cups of loosely packed basil leaves, rinsed and dried
• a bit of salt, to taste
• 1-2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• 2 Tbs pine nuts (you could lightly toast but I skipped this)
• 1/2 cup olive oil, maybe more
• 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, if you’re using immediately

I used my food processor, first blending the basil, salt, garlic, nuts and half the oil. I had to stop and scrape the sides down a few times.  Then I added the other half of the oil and finished blending it all together, tasting to adjust the salt.  As I said, earlier I did not add the cheese yet since I was planning on freezing.

Note: if you don’t have pine nuts, you can use walnuts or just leave out the nuts. My MIL used to just mix the basil, salt, and oil together, then freeze in plastic bags laid flat. She could break off a pinch here and there as she wanted some fresh basil flavor in a dish.

What’s your favorite use for pesto, other than on pasta?

Tonight we used it on some burritos made with some leftover bbq’d steak, black beans, and sliced avocados.

• 2 large beefsteak tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 1/2 small onion, diced
• a handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
• a few good squirts of lime juice
• 2 small cloves of garlic, minced
• salt to taste

Stir and mix, taste and adjust seasonings as per your tastes.

Lots of tomatillo recipes I saw online called for starting with the raw tomatillos but Daniel uses the canned ones so that’s what I did.

2 small cans (12 oz) or one large can of tomatillos
a bit of liquid from the tomatillos
4-5 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 onion, chopped
1/4 – 1/2 cup fresh cilantro
salt to taste
a pickled jalapeno or one fresh jalapeno, chopped
a squirt of lime juice

Pulse the tomatillos in your food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients and blend till it has the consistency you like. Taste and adjust the seasonings. I added the onion (not in the original recipe) and upped the garlic and salt a bit. If it’s too thick, add a bit of the liquid from the cans of tomatillo.

This was fantastic with some chili verde that I made as the birthday dinner request from my youngest.  Then this morning for breakfast I scrambled up an egg with a bit of grated Cheddar cheese and topped with the salsa verde. Mmmm!

First, was the Sunday Gravy from The Soprano’s cookbook, modified only slightly to make smooth sauce rather than chunky. I put the whole tomatoes in my VitaMix and blended them up. You could also chop with scissors or just leave them whole and let them fall apart a bit as they cook.

• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 1 pound meaty pork spareribs
• 1 pound veal stew meat
• 1 pound Italian sausage
• 1 pound meatballs, preferably made from pork and beef
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
• 1 small can of tomato paste
• 3 28-oz cans pureed tomatoes or whole peeled tomatoes
• 2 cups water (use the cans to rinse out all the tomato juice!)
• salt and pepper to taste
• fresh basil, 6-8 leaves torn or chopped into small pieces

Heat the oil in a heavy pot large enough to hold everything. Brown the pork, turning now and then, about 15 minutes. Take the pork out and put it on a plate. Brown the veal, about 10-15 minutes, turning periodically, then take it out and add it to the plate. Brown the sausage, 10-15 minutes, then take it out and add to the plate.

Drain the excess fat, leaving about 1 Tbs in the pot. Cook the garlic one minute, flattening and turning now and then to flavor the oil. Take the garlic out and discard it.

Add the tomato paste, tomatoes, water, salt, pepper, and basil leaves. Stir until the paste is mixed in well.  Add the meats back in. Bring to a simmer, partially cover, and cook for 2 hours or so. Stir periodically.

Add the meatballs and cook another half an hour. If the sauce becomes too thick, add some water. If it’s not thick enough, take the cover off the last half an hour.

At this point, you can serve take the meats out and serve the sauce over cooked pasta, with the meat as a second course or alongside. Or make lasagna with the sausage and meatballs and sauce and save the pork and veal for another meal.

I made lasagna.

• 2 Tbs oil
• 1 Tbs butter
• 1/2 an onion, chopped very finely
• 1/4 cup celery, chopped very finely
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 15-oz cans tomato sauce
• 2 6 ounce cans tomato paste
• 2-3 Tbs grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 Tbs chopped fresh basil
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 bay leaf
• (and 1 tsp fennel seed if you want to try that!)

Heat the oil and butter in a saucepan large enough to hold all the tomato sauce without spattering too much. Add the onion, celery, and garlic and saute 5-10 minutes over low until very soft. Add the tomato sauce and tomato paste and stir until smooth.

Add all the rest of the ingredients and stir while bringing to a simmer. Turn it down to a very low simmer or it will spatter all over. Cover partially and cook at least half an hour, longer if you’d like. (I think I ended up at about 45 minutes to an hour.)

Take the bay leaf out and spread the sauce over your favorite pizza dough. I like to prebake my pizza just a few minutes before spreading sauce.

1 1/2 cups ketchup
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup brown sugar (firmly packed of course!)
2 Tbs butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbs Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp steak sauce (like A1)
2 tsp honey
1 tsp mustard (the liquid yellow kind, not the dry)
1/4 tsp or more cayenne

Mix everything together in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Simmer, partially covered to avoid horrid splatters on your stove, about half an hour, stirring frequently.

I cooked ribs to go with this, it being Memorial Day weekend and all.

I went looking for my rib recipe to link to and realized I’d never posted it. I like to do a dry rub of some kind on baby back ribs and then grill over very low indirect heat (less than 300 degrees F) for a few hours. I serve the sauce on the side, rather than risking burning the ribs.