Recipe: Dutch Oven Tomato-Pork Sauce

I've been trying to eat healthier. I think it started after we had that cardiovascular lesson in nursing school. Well, I know that's when it started.

Most of the time I use recipes I find on the Cooking Light website or in their magazine. (They have some tasty recipes!) In addition, I've been using an online calculator to figure out my calorie intake.

Lately, though, I've been trying to make up my own recipes with things I have on hand. This evening I spontaneously put together something that turned out especially delicious. It tastes fattening as heck, but it isn't! It's full of vegetables! It also takes a couple hours of simmering to get the texture of the meat right. I hope that whatever readers I get enjoy this recipe as much as I do!

You may notice that I like to use large amounts of herbs. The flavoring masks the lack of oils. I also really like to chop vegetables coarsely. It calls attention to the flavor of the vegetables and makes the sauce more rustic.

Dutch Oven Tomato-Pork Sauce
This recipe is influenced by my husband's and my trip to Florence, Italy earlier this year. You will need a Dutch oven.
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 3 hours and 15 minutes
Serves 4 (1 cup per serving)


1 28-oz can of diced tomatoes
1 1-lb pork tenderloin (or other lean pork will do) sliced into 1-inch square chunks
4 stalks of celery
1 cup of carrots
1 medium sized onion
1/2 cup of fresh parsley
1.5 tbsp Balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp dried basil
3 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp hot sauce
1 chicken bouillon cube
1 cup water


1. Pour the entire can of diced tomatoes into a Dutch oven. Now, coarsely chop the celery, carrots, and onion. Add them to the pot. Add the pork.


2. Stir in the Balsamic vinegar, kosher salt, half of the black pepper, hot sauce, bouillon cube, and water. (I'm too lazy to dissolve the bouillon cube separately as directed on the package directions. Directly into the pot, I say!) Rip up the cup of parsley coarsely with your hands and throw it into the pot, too. Stir it all together.


3. Cover, and put the goodness filled Dutch oven on the stove-top and cook on high until it boils. Let it boil for about 5 minutes. 


4. Then move the lid of the Dutch oven so that the pot is slightly vented. Reduce the heat to low. Cook for another 2 and 1/2 hours, or until meat is falling apart and the water is reduced by half, stirring every 30 minutes or so. 


5. Add the garlic powder, dried basil, and the other half of the pepper. Cook for 30 minutes more or until the sauce is the desired thickness.


To serve: Spoon 1 cup of sauce over 1/2 cup of spaghetti. The meal should have about 330 calories but taste like many more. If you're using whole wheat pasta, you should also be getting about 10 grams of fiber, 7 of which are from the sauce. Yay!


YOU'RE WELCOME!

Rooting for Success! Part 3

Well, I can't believe it. Luckily, I was lazy about throwing my rose cuttings in the compost bin! I went out on my porch and noticed that one of them is still alive. It's the one in the cruddy dirt! (All dirt is cruddy, but by cruddy here I mean not expensive and special.)

Those white fungi = roots!

I think I'm going to leave it alone just like I had been doing. I hadn't looked at it in about 2 weeks since I had final exams and papers to write. That thing just grew all by itself. I'll post pictures some time soon!

Clearly the best thing to do is this: Stay out of nature's way!

Refined Flour Skills

I love to bake. When the summer is at its hottest I start thinking about September and those cool autumn evenings that are perfect for baking.

Baking has always been special for me. My earliest memories include my Sicilian great-grandmother baking bread in the kitchen. She would bake the smoothest, fluffy little buns of sweet tasting white bread for Sunday dinners. I don't have anything material to remember her by. What I do have is the ability to make fresh bread and enjoy the smell of it while it bakes. This reminds me of her. (The other thing that reminds me of her are turtle or frog soap dishes. I don't remember if she actually had one of these. I do know they must have been pretty popular when I was a child. I could have just seen one at another relative's house sometime in the early 1980s and thought it was hers.)

Baking also makes me think of my dad. He shares my love of baking. When I was little he used to make chocolate chip cookies almost every week. I would sneak cookie dough from behind his back whenever I could. For the record, my mom did the same thing! Oh, and so did my sisters.

I got pretty sick off of at teaspoon of cookie dough about ten years ago. I wish I could say that made me stop eating it...

My dad also makes the best ever spread of Christmas cookies. He makes buckeyes, mini-cannolis, and pumpkin rolls. All are great.

I've been trying to develop my own cookie spread. As it is, I've been copying a variety of recipes at Christmas time and other times. I'm starting to think I'd like to learn how to bake well enough to make my own recipes based on ingredients I have on hand. So, with that in mind, I've been looking for a really good learn to bake book. That way I can learn some techniques beyond what I'm using now.

Hopefully, I'll find one before September.

"Rooting" for success! Part 2

As expected, all of the rose cuttings I took a few weeks ago have died. They seemed to turn black from the soil line and rot from there.

After the first one died, I tried changing out the soil on the remaining healthy cuttings. I kept it moist but not quite as moist as I had before. This only delayed the inevitable. The last cutting that hung on was in the soil that I'd initially thought to be the worst. That is, while four of the cuttings were placed in a nice seed starting soil (the bag said it would optimize root growth) this last one was placed in a rather clumpy cheap potting soil that had some pieces of wood in it. I thought it would die first, but it died last and differently from the others.

Instead of turning black, it softened from the base and some small off-white fungi grew along the stem.

I'm going to try this experiment again, but this time I'm going to use two different kinds of roses and put them directly in the ground with a bell jar over them as described in the article I linked to in my last post. Right now, things here in Ohio are very dry and very hot, so I don't think conditions are optimal.

I do have two roses getting ready to bloom that should have stalks ready for an attempt in a few weeks. Oh, boy!

As a side note:
You know, after this super wet spring I've had more trouble with fungi than ever before! I wonder how many others out there are having the same problems. I don't want to spray fungicide. All of my hollyhocks were decimated by rust. (I've read it's not supposed to affect the blooms...but it sure did! After a good start, the blooms stopped opening.) I tried cutting out the affected leaves but it kept getting ahead of me. My peony didn't bloom this year and research showed that it was affected by a fungal disease called botrytis blight, so I plan to dig it up and thoroughly clean out the area this fall. Hopefully that will work because I love peonies, and missed it so much!

My beautiful black hollyhocks before the rust overtook them.

These are supposedly what Thomas Jefferson grew at Monticello.

One thing doing really really well: coneflowers. Those look fabulous this year. I think I want some more and in different colors. I already have them in three different flowerbeds. They're just so great! They've shown no signs of distress and I've barely touched them. They're doing well in half sun locations and in a mostly shady location. *swoon*

My coneflowers: 2011 saviors of my garden.

"Rooting" for Success!

As I mentioned earlier, I love roses. They're a challenge to grow and I love how they smell. (Well, some of them are a challenge. Some of them grow like weeds.)

Just Joey Hybrid Rose

My favorite rose in my garden is my Just Joey rose. It has a sweet fruity fragrance and an ethereal apricot glow. Every spring as the thick blanket of snow recedes, I poke around the bush looking for evidence of life. It greets me as little swollen red protuberances on the rose's stem. It occured to me this year, after a particularly hard, cold winter, that the rose may not return every year. Some day, maybe next April, after removing the snow and sheltering leaves, I may uncover a dead plant; a bit of scrap for the compost bin.

Well, a summer without Just Joey...I dare not think about it!

That's when I heard about rooting cuttings from roses. Every place I consulted said a cultivar should be more than 20 years old to be legally rooted from a cutting. The lovely Just Joey was first introduced in 1972.

My initial source is the website located here. Now, I didn't read the directions very well. Basically I just read the word "mason jar," looked at the pictures and went for it. My steps were as follows:

1. I waited for the first roses of the summer to bloom and fade.

2. When they started to look a faded with some petals falling off, I watered them a whole lot at night.

3. I took the cuttings in the morning when the plant would be most hydrated.

4. I did follow the directions in that I cut below some leaves and wounded the stem a little bit.

5. Immediately let the cuttings float in a large bowl of water and took my mason jars full of seed starting dirt. I poked holes in the dirt with a pencil.

6. Next, I dipped the cut ends of the cuttings in rooting hormone and gently put them in the pre-made holes.

7. Finally, I over-watered them and put a sandwich bag over each mason jar with a cutting to keep the humidity in.

8. I have misted them every day for two and a half weeks now.

My initial cuttings looked like this:

I made a total of five cuttings. Two of them I watered less, and one is in this really lumpy potting soil with a lot of pieces of bark because I ran out of the seed starting stuff. One has died of some sort of mold infection. It was one of the ones I over-watered. (You can see some evidence of my over-watering in the jar closest to the camera.)

I repotted the others two that were over-watered in some dry soil. Some of the leaves had turned yellow and I cut those off, but they are, thus far, alive. When I repotted them I didn't see any roots yet even though one shows signs that it may put out growth soon. I reapplied rooting hormone and returned them to their jars with new, dry soil. I'm trying to leave them alone this time, because it's possible that I was loving them to death.

This experiment may be a failure, but it has been fun. I'll keep you posted!