Cook the Cookbook Project- week 5

 

 

This week’s menu for my Cook the Cookbook Project featured Spaghetti with meat sauce, a salad, and garlic bread. The dessert for the menu was a simple fruit and cheese plate.

So let me be totally honest here, as much as I love pasta I am not a huge fan of pasta with a red (tomato) sauce. Don’t get me wrong I love tomatoes, just not a huge amount of them cooked. For me the perfect pasta has a creamy sauce of some kind or a pesto or any number of other choices. Even a pasta where fresh tomatoes are featured not cooked down into a sauce so I was not looking forward to this menu as much as some of the others in the book.

When I cook normally, meaning not when I am doing this project or trying to cook a dish for the blog or to share a recipe otherwise I don’t normally measure things like salt, pepper and other seasonings. I do a lot more by eye and taste. Even in a lot of the recipes on my blog I tell you to taste and adjust the seasonings to suit you. For this exercise I am trying to do my best to follow the recipes as they were written in this vintage cookbook. This was not a great idea this week because the predominant flavor of most of the menu was SALT, not salt, but SALT. Everything tasted way too salty and there was a lot more salt in most of it than I would have normally used.

So let’s look at each dish separately. The meat sauce took the longest to prepare and it was the “star” of the menu so we’ll start with it. The first thing I noticed when reading the recipe was that there was a lot of salt and not really much else in the way of seasoning. The ingredient list was onion, ground beef, tomato sauce, canned tomatoes, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. A very short list for a homemade sauce in my opinion. No herbs, no garlic so I would call it bland in a way. The sauce was also only cooked for about an hour total, which on the rare occasion I do make a red sauce I use a lot more seasonings and cook mine for a lot longer, like all afternoon. So we aren’t starting on the best foot here.

The instructions for the spaghetti called for cooking it way longer than I normally do and since I really didn’t want lump of mush in the end so I used the instructions on the box of pasta. So I think that was a fair change.

 

The salad was the same as the salads that have been in previous meals from the book and it was good as always. I do love a good simple oil and vinegar dressing on a salad and this one is really good. The funny thing is they do call for fresh garlic in the salad dressing so why not in the other dishes in the menu?

 

Now for the garlic bread I remember my mom making garlic bread this way when I was a kid. Normally when I make garlic bread I combine some softened butter with some grated garlic, really simple and tastes wonderful. On the rare occasions I am out of fresh garlic I use garlic powder. In the instructions for the menu they had the reader use butter mixed with garlic salt, again way more salt than I would have normally used.

For the dessert the fruit and cheese gave no guidelines as to what fruits and cheeses to use. I had planned to get some grapes but when I got the grocery store the grapes looked iffy at best so that idea went out the window. Frankly, I have been very disappointed in most the produce at my grocery store so I stuck with a safe apple and used some dried fruit that I already had on hand. As for cheese I used some of the sharp cheddar and some Swiss I had on hand and added some peanuts to round out the plate. It was really nice and probably along with the salad the highlights of this menu.

So my thoughts, it was a fun menu despite the downsides and I feel like I am seeing how differently we eat now than we did 65 years ago. We are definitely using a lot less salt and more other seasonings to make things taste good. Again the portions were a bit on the large side and after making 2 servings from the menu (as stated in the book) I had about a third of the sauce left over. I think I
will use that on a pizza/flatbread in the future so I put it in the freezer.

I am not sure what next week’s menu yet because I have been having problems finding the main part of the next menu in the book. So I might be shelving it for a while until I can pick up the needed items.