Food is Good

Quick-hitters:

- Some more Google Analytics keywords fun:

"pocket kings + acquired"
"emarketer williamson april 26 breakfast" <-- WTF???

- Apparently, "beefing" up one's resume is bad, but outright lying on one's resume is perfectly acceptable, says the MIT dean of admissions!!! This is a classic case of "listen to what I say, not what I do" syndrome that is all too common these days.

- I knew nobody was going to be eliminated from American Idol this week (yes, I've become an Idol degenerate). As soon as host Ryan Seacrest began talking about a "shocking result," I was pretty sure about my prediction. It makes perfect sense; why put a damper on a charity show by eliminating one contestant?

So I enjoyed Hank's blog entry yesterday--about pork tenderloins--and I was tempted to try to make that myself (by the way, Hank, thanks for putting a link to my blog on your site; I have returned the favor). I ended up making a baked spaghetti dish, with tomato sauce made from scratch.

(Tangent: I will not lie and suggest that I am an awesome chef, but I do enjoy cooking and can make a reasonably tasty dish every now and then. Most of the meals I cook, though, are simply rice- or spaghetti-based.)

I cannot stand Prego, Ragu, etc., and I only have a jar of Prego in my cupboard for emergencies--any time I don't feel like making sauce from scratch. These prepared pasta sauces are way too sweet for my taste. My sauce consists of a few basic ingredients:

• Canned tomato sauce (not Prego, Ragu, etc.)
• A can of crushed tomatoes, or about two cups of fresh tomatoes, cooked down
• Half a large onion, chopped, and sauteed in olive oil
• Fresh chopped garlic, dried basil leaves, a pinch of black pepper, and other spices to taste.

I had no canned tomatoes, but I did have some cherry tomatoes that were about to go bad, and that worked quite well.

(Tangent: I used some Del Monte canned tomato sauce, which tastes pretty bad by itself. In fact, most canned tomato sauces I've tried are pretty awful. There was one brand that I used once that was damn good; if only I remembered what brand of sauce that was. Del Monte, Hunts, store-branded...they're all quite terrible. However, adding the extra spices, onion, and garlic makes the sauce rather tasty.)

The result is a tomato sauce which I use for spaghetti, lasagna, and sometimes even pizza. I decided to make my version of baked pasta by cooking up some spaghetti that I bought from Costco for a bit less than al dente.

After draining the pasta, I tossed it lightly in some extra virgin olive oil, and then tossed the spaghetti in the tomato sauce. I decided I wanted some meat in my baked pasta dish, so I was going to make turkey meatballs. Unfortunately, I had no thawed ground turkey. Browsing through my fridge, all I found was some Kielbasa sausage. I figured that the sausage wasn't going to taste that bad, so I sliced it up, tossed it in the pot of spaghetti, sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top, and threw the entire pot in the oven at 325F until the sausage was cooked.

The spaghetti came out just about perfect, though I could have done without the sausage. I had also made myself a salad with iceberg and romaine lettuce, some unidentified greens, and some cherry tomatoes. I topped off the salad with a bit of Italian dressing. Unfortunately I never did get a chance to taste the salad, as I stuffed myself full with the spaghetti.

Ugh...I ate way too much. I feel a food coma kicking in. zzzzz...