Taco Soup

Taco Soup - Linda Mastantuono Van Poperin (and an old WW Recipe)

1 lb ground beef

1 large jar Great northern beans or 4 or 5 cans of beans with liquid-use all the same or mix them

1 can diced tomatoes

1 can corn with liquid

1 pkg taco seasoning mix

1 pkg Hidden Valley Ranch mix

In a large soup pot, brown the beef and drain the fat. Add the beans, tomatoes, and corn. Add one or 2 cans of water depending on how thick you want the soup. Then add the 2 pkgs of seasoning mix. Stir well and simmer for ~ 15 min.

 

That's it - quick and easy. I like to serve this with grated cheddar on top or a big blob of sour cream. 

Other topping suggestions : chopped onion or jalepenos

Serve with corn bread or tortilla chips or Fritos

 

This is good for a crowd b/c everyone can have fun with the toppings.  Hopefully we'll be able to be part of a crowd again soon!

 

Also - important for days like we're living in at the moment when having shelf stable ingredients is important.  Can make it w/out the beef and it's still good!  Quarantine Food!

Wine and Vinegar Green Salad by Linda Mastantuono Van Poperin

Ingredients

2 tomatoes cut into wedges

Red Onion slices

Celery diced with leaves

Lettuce (Butter, Bostin Bib, or the like)

Cucumber – we prefer baby seedless

Additional Veggies we like:  Sweet red pepper, carrots, radishes

In the bottom of a salad bowl, add cut up tomato, onion, celery, carrot.

Once around the bowl with Olive Oil

Healthy Splash (okay, 2 splashes) of Red Wine

Apple Cider Vinegar (amounts below)

Instructions

Salt the bottom of a salad bowl.

Add the prepared "bottom" veggies:  Tomatoes, onions, celery and leaves, carrots

Salt again and stir.

Add Olive Oil

Add 2 splashes of red wine

Stir (slightly muddle)

Add enough Apple Cider Vinegar to almost cover the veggies.  

Stir.

Add more red wine until the color is "right".  See picture

As the dressing sits, put serving utensils over it in the bowl.  (See pictures).   

Pile in lettuce and other veggies like cucumbers and sweet peppers. The crossed serving utensils will keep the  lettuce and soft vegetables from wilting in the dressing.

Can be stored in the fridge, lightly covered, for most of the day.

Take it out about half an hour before serving.

Notes: 

Bottom vs. Top Veggies -  The dressing is made from slightly muddling the bottom veggies with lots of salt.  LOTS OF SALT.  Seriously.   The bottom veggies are tomatoes, onion slices, celery, carrots.  Then pouring olive oil, red wine and apple cider vinegar.  Amounts are approximate, again it’s more about the process and then you can adjust to taste..

This salad is a great big dinner salad because you can make it just about any point in the day and let it sit until you’re ready to serve.

Sunday Sugo

Sunday Sugo by Linda Mastantuono Van Poperin (and countless other Italian women)

Summary

We love this recipe for may reasons.  One of which of course is the rich family history of smelling sauce cooking all day Sunday and begging for Pan e Sugo all day long. Now as an adult, I love it because while it's isn't quite "set it and forget it", all the work is up front.  Once you do the initial flurry of chopping, browning, and opening cans, all you have to do is stir occasionally for the rest of the day.   Make it with our Wine and Vinegar Green Salad and have your afternoon almost free of the kitchen for an epic family meal. 

I sat down with my mom today and made this together today.  I did my best to capture the little tips and tricks.  It is a simple and very flexible sauce if you follow the basic instructions.   The Tips and Tricks are longer than the instructions!

Ingredients:

¼ c Olive oil 

4 cloves of garlic, peeled, sliced in half

1 medium onion, yellow, chopped

Approx 8 Large Cans Tomato Sauce

1 small can of Tomato paste

Sauce Meat – mix beef and pork (notes above)

1 heaping tbsp. Crushed Red Pepper.  Adjust later to taste.

½ tsp salt.  Adjust later to taste.

Instructions:

Using a large sauce pan (stock pot), pour in 5 or 6 cans of sauce.  HEAT GENTLY on low.  Will take a while.  Stir occasionally.

While the sauce is heating….

Pour olive oil in large skillet.  Add garlic and brown GENTLY.  Flip, when all browned, discard for purposes of the sauce.  (Or save and eat spread on bread.)

Turn up the heat in the skillet, med high.  Brown the meat.  We’re not cooking it through, just a quick browning.  As it browns, put in the sauce pan.  Will probably have to work in batches depending on how much meat you use.

Once the meat is out of the skillet and into the sauce pot.  Put the diced onion in the now empty skillet.  Soften (do not brown) the onions over medium heat.  

Once the onions are soft, add the tomato paste gently scrape up the “goodies” from the pan.  Then scrape the whole thing into the sauce pot.

Add 2 or 3 more cans of sauce to the sauce pot.

Add crushed red pepper (pepperoncini) and salt.

Turn temperature up to just above low.  Sauce should gently pop bubbles - a very gentle simmer.  Stir all darn day here and there.  Every 20 minutes or so depending on you, on your pot, on how much patience you have.  This has been made for 100s of years and has a lot of flexibility once you do the basics. 

Cook about 5 hours. Remove the meat with a slotted spoon or spider and serve.

Tips and Tricks:

• 6 large cans tomato sauce TO START, in order to cover the meat.  Likely will use about 8 and you may as well b/c you can freeze or share the sauce.
• Use plain-ish tomato sauce.  (not Ragu, or Prego whatever.)  Star Cross, Cento, Dei Fratelli.  NOT Italian Sauce.  Better quality sauces start with tomatoes, not tomato puree. 
• Garlic.  Cut the hard part off the base, then bang it a little and the skin will come right off.  Leave the garlic in big pieces because it’s not going to stay in the sauce.  Brown it in the oil to flavor it, but then it comes out.  Garlic burns quickly, so do it gently.
• Save one of the cans to use as a spoon rest and to put the garlic in when it’s done.  Olive Oil should be cold pressed.
• Alternatively, use rendered salt pork instead of olive oil.  That creates quite a different flavor so if you’re going to try it, let me know!
• We use a mix of beef and pork.  Depends on what you like both for flavor and/or to eat as part of the meal.  Country style pork ribs with bone are good for flavor and to eat.  Plain spare ribs are GREAT for eating as well.  For beef flavor, just something with a bone in it like beef neck bones or short ribs.  Chuck roast, boneless or not, is good for both flavor and to eat.  Sometimes finding the meat is hard so try to make do.
• Yellow onions work great. Use sweet onions if you can’t find yellow.
• An alternative and even easier sauce that Mom likes….https://food52.com/recipes/13722-marcella-hazan-s-tomato-sauce-with-onion-butter.  Use as it, or add it to some browned ground beef and make “American Sauce.”
• We recommend indulging in Pan e Sugo (Bread and Sauce) to taste the sauce throughout the day.  You’ll be able to tell when the sauce starts tasting more cooked.  Also look for the sheen of olive oil on the top. 
• Pasta shapes are named after actual things.  For example, Farfale is Butterfly.  Vermicelli is Worm.  Linguini is tongue.  Capelli is hair!  Orecchiette are called Priest Ear’s in mom’s dialect,  “recchie d' privte.”

Sunshine Torte

Swedish Sunshine Torte

From Kay’s Great Great Grandmother

This cake is all real.  Butter.  Sugar.  Flour.  Eggs.  That’s it.  Kay recommended adding vanilla, so of course I did, and it was wonderful.  We joke that most Swedish recipes begin with either fish or pickling something, but boy do they know how to do desserts right.

This Bundt cake is so dense and heavy and heavenly!  It’s like eating cake batter inside a buttery crispy cake crust.  I remember Kay serving this when I was a kid and I always thought it looked too brown on the outside, but I was wrong.  The cake is indeed a darker brown than I would want from a regular cake, but here it caramelizes and gets crispy and chewy with an intensely smooth interior.  It crumbles just right and is just the right amount of sweet.  I was instructed to serve it in thin slices, not hunks, because it’s better that way. If someone wants more, they can always get it.  Kay says that my Great Uncle Irvin was a big fan and would try to take a chunk at a time.

This recipe boasts that it’s a pound, a pound, a pound and pound of each of the ingredients.  Kay was smart enough to convert that to conventional measurements that work well for the recipe.  I’ve included both below.

The recipe felt weird to me at first because you cream the sugar with the eggs and then separately you cream the butter, and add flour to the butter.  Now I think it is the secret to the velvet insides and epic crust.

Recipe for Sunshine Torte

1 Pound of Sugar (2.5 cups)

1 Pound of Eggs (6 eggs)

1 Pound of Flour (3.5 c of Cake Flour or All Purpose)  (Kay doesn't bother sifting)

1 Pound of Butter at room temp  (Kay uses salted, but she says it doesn't matter)

Splash of Vanilla at the end  (Optional, but I wouldn’t argue with a master!)

Preheat Oven to 300-325 degrees, only you know your oven! 

Let Eggs and Butter come to room temp before starting.

She says the secret to this recipe is to beat beat beat beat beat beat and then beat some more.  Everything should be very very very very very very well mixed.

I used an electric beater.

Cream Sugar with Eggs until light. Keep on beating and beating.

In a separate bowl, beat the Butter until smooth.  Add Flour to Butter gradually until smooth.

Gradually add creamed Sugar and Egg mixture to the Flour and Butter mixture.  Secret is to mix and mix and mix with beaters.

Beat well.  Then beat some more.

Then add some vanilla.  I have awesome vanilla from Mexico and I added a capfull.

Butter and flour a Bundt cake pan.  Teflon!

Will be smooth, not runny, when done.

Bake at 300-325 for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

When it's done it's slightly pulled from the edges.  It will still keep cooking when you take it out because it's so dense.  The outside will be fairly brown.

To Serve:

Sift powdered sugar over it. 
Slice thinly.

Frequently served with berries on the side.