Simmer for how long?

Tonight's dish comes from a compilation of recipes that go along with a CD. You are supposed to cook the dishes as you listen to the music. We own Smooth Cooking with smooth jazz music and Pleasures of the Caribbean with Calypso and Reggae music. We chose a recipe from Smooth Cooking but chose not to listen to the smooth jazz CD. Pappardelle with Bolognese sauce. As always, the recipe seems easy. Make your own pasta sauce and add the store-bought pasta.We went to the store and met our first hurdle, no Pappardelle. It is a short, fat pasta so we bought the closest thing: Linguine.

We began to make the sauce, pureed the tomatoes, mixed the spices and cut carrots and celery and then we read this: Reduce heat to low and simmer for 11/2 to 2 hours! Let's just say that we did not factor this into our time line.
We tried an aggressive simmer for 20 minutes to try to get the right consistency in the sauce. It turned out alright. The carrots were a bit crunchy, but in the end we would totally make it again. Linguine with Bolognese sauce:

Two days, two dishes!

Hello everyone! Sorry it's been a little while, but things have been a bit hectic of late. Unfortunately, our need for energy in other parts of our lives (mostly in taking care of our probably-epileptic dog) has sapped our energy in making difficult, advanced food in the kitchen...

But that didn't stop us from making some (sort of) easy stuff! First off, Sausage and Pepperoni Calzones:

These were modified from a Cooking Light recipe we've used before, but with many modifications. Originally, the recipie was for a chicken and basil filling inside Pillsbury pizza dough. We've tried that before and didn't like either iteration very much (we tried one version with ground turkey and one version with ground chicken), so this time we just went with stuff that was guaranteed to be good: Mild Italian Sausage and Pepperoni.

Once again, we split up prep duty, each of us taking on a task as we were best able to do it. This really just meant that it took me way longer to chop the sausage than I thought, so Sarah did everything else. When everything was prepared, we sauteed the sausage with some onions and minced garlic. Then we threw in the sauce, brought it to a simmer, then let it sit for a while to cool down so we could manage putting it into the calzones. The shells are super easy to make; you just cut a Pillsbury pizza dough can into 4 squares, then fill each one and pinch together the ends. Tada! You have a calzone. Bake in the oven until they're golden brown and you're set to go!

...Unless you forgot the cheese you're supposed to put inside. Which we did. Oh well, it works equally as well sprinkled on top. To add to our wonderful meal, we had a wonderful dinner guest, Merida! She is awesome and brought Peanut Butter and Jelly Cupcakes. Good thing there's a gym here.

Dish number 2!

This is really just an appetizer, but dang if it doesn't deserve to be in here. We made potato chips with a blue-cheese dipping sauce for our Small Group meeting tonight. We had tried oven-frying potato chips before, but to great, great failure. This time, we were armed with better knowledge (pat the chips dry before you bake them) and powerful new weapon: the Mandolin.

For those of you who don't know what a Mandolin is, it's a board with a blade in it that you slide something against (potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, fingers) to create paper thin slices of that object. It works about 1,000,000% better than a knife for stuff like this.

Once we sliced the potatoes to bits, we just coated them with some PAM and salt and let them get nice and crispy in the oven. The sauce was a mixture of blue cheese, mayo, and some other stuff that Sarah put in before I got there. The result was as great of a success as the previous attempt had been a failure. The chips were gone in about 15 minutes and we are left with some delicious dipping sauce for whatever we have lying around...or just a spoon.