Quarantine Cuisine

Cooking to feed the soul.

by Perry Continente

As we drag ourselves into a second year of this interminable purgatory, it is easier than ever to slip into an unhealthy and uninteresting routine. Some of the most insidious enablers are the plethora of food delivery apps. What could be more tempting than having a McFlurry only a few clicks away?

They certainly had a soporific effect on me, I spent a lot of money on honestly terrible food. Why pay $8 for a meal at the store when I can just stay home and pay $16 plus tip?

One of the best ways to break out of this culinary monotony is to start pushing the bounds of your palate. Maybe try a new restaurant, order something you never had, or best of all, cook something new.

It doesn’t have to be labor intensive or exorbitantly expensive, there are several little things you can do to punch up common and inexpensive ingredients.

Cooking is ultimately about transformation, it is taking the component parts of a dish and synthesizing them into something far better than they normally would be.

For example, almost every component part of a cake tastes terrible. I would never eat flour, baking powder, raw eggs or cocoa powder by themselves, but given the proper mixing, time and heat they make something extremely palatable.

Think of learning new recipes less as hard and fast rules, and more as processes, like a new shade of paint on your palate.

The following recipe features many of my favorite processes without getting too technical. This is far from beef wellington, but it is quick, inexpensive, tasty and versatile.

This recipe only needs a skillet, a baking sheet and an oven. If you don’t have an oven but do have a hot plate, the pasta portion of the recipe is still totally doable.

Photo by Perry Continente

Elevated pasta and vegetables

Ingredients:

For vegetables:

3-4 strips of thick cut bacon

½ pound brussels sprouts cut in half or quarters depending on size

Olive oil Salt and pepper

Smoked paprika (recommended but can be omitted or changed easily)

For pasta:

8 oz dried pasta, fettuccini recommended

2 cups of pasta sauce

½ pound of sausage, preferably spicy but anything will do

½ yellow onion

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

Process:

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. While the oven is heating up, rinse and prepare your sprouts. Toss them with olive oil, salt, spices and pepper and arrange them on a foil-lined baking sheet with the flat side up. This helps them get that characteristic crunch.

Cut the bacon into bite sized pieces and place on top of the sprouts. This causes the bacon to deeply flavor the vegetables. Place into the oven for 25 to 35 minutes; baking here helps the flavors intermingle and prevents the vegetables from becoming mushy and unpalatable.

While your vegetables are baking, take your ground sausage out of its casing if it has one and cook it on medium high heat in a skillet with a dash of olive oil. This promotes browning of the meat which creates a more complex overall flavor.

When your meat is properly browned, this should take 3-5 minutes, remove it from the skillet, lower the heat to medium, and add your ½ diced onion. Cook this for 5-8 minutes stirring occasionally. This begins to caramelize the onions, ultimately adding a deep complex sweetness to the sauce.

After the onions have taken on a brown color, add your minced garlic and stir in, continue to cook for 3-5 minutes. At this point it should start to smell amazing.

Add the sauce and meat back to the pan and turn the heat down to medium low and stir well.

Cook for 3 minutes then turn the heat down to low. Cook your pasta for 2 minutes less than the package recommends, add them to the sauce and toss to combine.

I like to plate this simply, with my plate split roughly 50/50 between pasta and vegetables. This is ultimately a simple dish that is elevated by improving inexpensive and common ingredients, a flexible recipe that is much more than the sum of its parts.