The Yum Yum Factor

I have been making tons of pasta in my Instant Pot but the final frontier, for me, was to make meatballs with sauce. I will apologize now for the lack of beautiful photos but, sometimes, I am truly just making stuff for our dinner and so there wasn't much time and the next thin I knew the whole batch had been gobbled up. Take the lack of beautifully staged, lit photos as a sign of it's irresistible deliciousness. My recipe for Rigatoni with Meat Sauce  is probably my most popular Instant Pot Recipe so far at home and online. Although I get tons of great feedback on this one from readers,  it's also a recipe that I make, myself, at least once a week for Shack. Because the Instant Pot has made it feasible to make this during the week he tries to trick me into making it more often but nobody needs to eat this kind of rib sticking pasta more than once a week and until he can figure out how to work the pressure cooker properly, he still needs me to make it for...

So, recently, I finally made  Marcella Hazan's buttery tomato sauce and, unlike the other 98% of the food world, I didn't totally fall in love with it. I found it a bit too rich and buttery (if that can even happen) and missed the olive oil taste in my marinara. I didn't dislike it, I just didn't love it beyond all other sauces. What I did like was the silky texture the butter gave it and the ease of preparation and I wanted to try it again with less butter and some olive oil replacing the lost butter, finally settling on a ratio of 2 tbls butter/3 tbls of olive oil. This mix gave me the rich, silky texture but the olive oil flavour I was missing so much. Shack woke up on Sunday morning with a craving for cabbage rolls but, unfortunately, he didn't share that with me until early afternoon. Cabbage rolls are not something you can just whip on on a whim. My mom, who was famous in our family for a couple of dishes, made a mean cabbage roll and I miss them treme...

So, as a food blogger, you can't escape food trends. You wake up one morning and suddenly every man and his dog is making one pot pasta and then a few months later it's nothing but cake pops as far as the eye can see. Sometimes you get lucky and you are one of the mavericks who makes boozy popsicles before the trends catches on and you can feel like a rock star for two minutes but you usually just sit there wondering where in the hell these trends are manufactured. On the whole, I tend to shy away from many of them unless they truly intrigue me (which is also why I tend to stay away from holiday themed posts because, lets be honest, with 3330000000098898.43 food blogs out there making halloween themed recipes, do you really need any more from me?) With the recent passing of Marcella Hazan, the grandmother of Italian cuisine who taught generations of North Americans how to cook Italian food, we are seeing a retrending of her famous tomato sauce. This sauce c...