ITALIAN WEEK

Monday, September 26, 2005

When I was making my first attempts at meal planning, I often ended up buying lots of ingredients that I used only a little of, and then I wouldn't know what to do with the rest before it went bad. This resulted in expensive grocery bills and a crowded fridge. One of the ways that I learned to compensate for such excess was to plan a week's worth of meals using similar ingredients and flavors. Planning this way also allowed me to become comfortable with one method of regional cooking by practicing on it for a whole week. Italian week was one of my earliest themed endeavors, and it has stuck around. Tomato-based sauce is so versatile, and so I make a ton of it at the beginning of the week, and use it for different dishes as the week goes on. This week's menu also serves to prove that I can, indeed, go at least one week without cooking chicken!

Here's the basic sauce recipe, and then, as the week continues, I'll tell you how I modify it:

Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce

3-4 large tomatoes, chopped

Olive oil

Kosher salt

Cracked black pepper

1 large yellow onion, chopped

4-5 cloves garlic, chopped

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes (I like the Contadina roasted garlic ones)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Arrange the tomatoes on foil-lined baking sheets in a single layer. Drizzle olive oil onto the sheets, and then toss with your hands to make sure all the pieces are coated with oil. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Roast for about 45 minutes, until beginning to blacken around the edges and fall apart. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a large saucepan (this will hold all of the sauce, so use a big one). Add the chopped onion and garlic and cook over medium-low heat until very soft, but not brown--about 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. If they soften before the tomatoes are done, turn the heat off. When the tomatoes are done, scrape them and all their juices

into the pan with the onion and garlic. Turn the heat back up to medium-low, and stir, pressing the tomatoes with the back of your spoon to crush them. Add the canned tomatoes, and simmer this mixture for about 20 minutes.

This sauce will serve as the foundation for all the other mixtures this week. For the lasagna, you will need about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce:

Italian Sausage Lasagna

1 1/2 pounds Italian sausage links (I buy a package of 5 links and use 2 1/2 of them)

2 cups oven-roasted tomato sauce

9-12 uncooked lasagna noodles

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 pkg. sliced provolone (6-8 ounces)

2 cups shredded mozzarella

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Remove the sausage links from their casings, and cook in a large skillet over medium heat until brown, breaking them into small pieces as you cook. Drain off all but about a teaspoon of the grease from the sausage, and add the tomato sauce to the skillet. Cook and stir for about 5 minutes, so that the flavors are combined.

Cover the bottom of a rectangular baking dish with 1/4 of the sausage-sauce mixture. Lay 3-4 noodles directly into the sauce, pressing a bit to make sure they are nestled down nicely in the liquid. Onto each noodle, spoon a few dollops of ricotta cheese. Lay Provolone slices on top of the ricotta, pressing to flatten it. Cover the Provolone with sauce, and start the layers over again. End with the ricotta, and cover the whole dish with the shredded mozzarella. Cover tightly with foil and bake for about an hour, until the cheese is beginning to brown around the edges and bubble.

This is an easy recipe to double and either freeze or take to a neighbor or friend. If we were in Jackson, I'd take the second one to Jessie and Jerrod, but we aren't, so I took it over to my next-door neighbors who have been housing refugees from New Orleans. I usually make it in a disposable aluminum pan, cover with foil, and write the cooking directions on the foil. That way, the recipient can cook it whenever she feels like it, or freeze it for another occasion.

Reserve the rest of the sauce for the linguine marinara, calzone, and eggplant parmesan.

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