… a hearty way to use cheap beef and canned tomatoes
(c) 2019, Davd
As published here, this technique is “for one man living alone”, who knows basic cooking but not fancy seasoning. I’m thinking of men like “Timo” whose cabin I described recently, who can cook but don’t choose to get elaborate about it. It should be possible for a fairly ordinary cook to “scale it up” for two, three, or more men eating together… in which case, the “one pan” becomes a medium to large sized cooking pot, and there will be more men fed per cooking time, but also more dishes to wash1.
This is a technique to use when you have cheap ground beef such as i found last month, or have left ground beef long enough in the fridge, that it should be cooked thoroughly. It uses canned crushed tomatoes, one of the lower cost, good winter vegetables in Canada. Pasta is generally an economical grain food and because it is made from durum wheat, is less worrisome to those who might not trust modern wheat varieties.
Cooking pasta calls for a separate pot, if you don’t have cooked pasta waiting in the ‘fridge. Half-fill a pot of water for cooking it and start that heating, with the dry pasta standing by2. A wee bit of oil in the pasta cooking water helps prevent sticking. Cook enough pasta, if you haven’t any waiting in the fridge, that the next time you want pasta, you will have. (It can always become pasta and cheese, or pasta salad with olive oil or mayonnaise, and I’ve written up an easy way to cook chicken cacciatore.) When you have eaten the pasta you want for the meal, the rest of the water can be poured through a strainer before it gets cold, leaving the pasta in the strainer for easy transfer to a ‘fridge container.
My one-man batch of pasta sauce began with a ball of lean ground beef, slightly smaller than a tennis ball. I heated the stainless steel pan, flattened the ground beef when the pan was just hot enough to make a sizzling sound, browned it, turned it and browned the other side, then crumbled the meat, turned down the heat, and cooked it slowly with maybe a quarter that volume of chopped onion, a teaspoon or less of dried oregano and of dried basil, a wee bit of crumbled dried celery leaf, and a generous teaspoon of paprika. That was the basic sauce before the tomatoes went in.
I chose to add 3-4 small mushrooms because they had been on special that week; and when the mushrooms were cooked, added 1/2 can [almost 400 ml, or a scant two cups] of canned crushed tomatoes. When they began to bubble, I took the pan off the heat and added cold or lukewarm cooked spaghetti, which brought the near-boiling temperature down to warm for eating. Really quite tasty, a hearty way to use cheap beef and canned tomatoes, which cooked the beef very thoroughly and the tomatoes (which were already fully cooked) just enough to combine their flavour with the beef, mushrooms, and herbs. The amounts used here would make one man two small meals or one big one.
The mushrooms were optional, and if i had foraged lots of mushrooms last autumn, rather than buying, i might have used more. The celery leaf could have been chopped celery trimmings or a quarter to half an outer stem, the ones that are a bit coarse for eating raw. The paprika was also optional, i usually use paprika because I seldom have surplus sweet peppers, and this year and last they have been more expensive, per pound or per kilo, than the meat was that went into this meal. That red rather than black pepper flavour seems to me to make the sauce better; but you need not agree. Please the men who eat the meal, eh?
I ate the meal out of the stainless steel pan, which was easier to clean than a cast iron pan would be: When I finished the meal, I let Fritz lick the pan (I don’t let him lick plates and bowls, but a frying pan works at and above boiling temperature.) By using this bachelor trick, I gave Fritz an extra treat, and he helped slightly with washing the pan.
This technique is most valuable when there are no tomatoes in the garden (in most of Canada, the first garden tomatoes ripen in August) and none in the spare room ripening after first frost. Canned tomatoes, in the dead of winter and in the spring before local outdoor tomatoes can ripen, taste better than ‘fresh’ tomatoes which have reddened in trucks hauling them north3 … and they cost less. Beef is such a good source of iron that physicians have advised me to eat beef at least once, preferably twice or more per week4. (If you can get moose meat or venison, they should have all the merits of beef.)
This month, next month, and July, you can use this technique to take advantage of the fact that canned tomatoes cost less and have more flavour than trucked ones. Come late summer and early autumn when the fresh tomatoes are abundant, you can enjoy them with a different technique, and then come back to this one in October or November. Tomatoes and red meat are foods worth eating so often, that two ways to make pasta sauce with them are better than one.
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1. I cooked this meal, late this winter, in a stainless steel frying pan, ate it from that pan, and let Fritz lick out the pan when I finished. There are disputes about how good canine saliva is as a disinfectant, but nearly everyone who cares, agrees that boiling heat kills nearly all unhealthy bacteria; or in a two word slogan “Boiling sterilizes.” Frying pans operate at least boiling hot, often hotter; so I scrub out the pan in a kitchen sink, rinse, and use it normally — boiling hot or hotter.
2. Spaghetti works fine, fusilli, rotini, and linguine do also. Penne and elbows, i’d use for something else; and vermicelli is too thin, really
3. I find that canned diced tomatoes and cooked rice, eaten together, perhaps with a little salt, are quite tasty but not likely to make you over-indulge. I doubt that “fresh” truck tomatoes, cooked briefly, would taste good enough. Have beans, lentils or peas for protein balance and quantity, in a separate dish, and you have a high-fibre, fairly high protein, meatless meal.
4. I eat legumes as alternatives to meat, 4-8 times per week. If i had an abundant moderate cost supply, i would eat salmon and trout more often than that.
