Makin' Spaghetti

Here's how Betty Canuck makes Spaghetti without using a can of pre-flavoured store Pasta Sauce. That is how her hubby does it and truth be told, Betty Canuck loves that more than this version since *he* makes the supper then! [note: recipe at the end]

Start off with a diced onion, add in any left-overs if you have sitting around. For example, from home-made pizza night!


Then add two stalks of diced celery:


Put those two ingredients in a pan with a splash of olive oil on medium heat and start the saute till tender soft. Dig in the fridge for more left-overs, add the sliced mushrooms from Pizza night:


While those ingredients are softening and the mushroom juices are cooking 'off' prepare your green peppers now. Dice them up nice, or leave them in stick form if your kids will eat them that way. Mine, obviously, wont! Since someone gave me two sad looking peppers today that clearly had not another day left in them, I ended up dicing up both for tonight but 1/2 to 1 whole pepper would be plenty on a normal night, pictured below is 1 pepper.


Once that is done, add garlic to your sauce, you have a choice, prepared garlic for $3.00 for a 4 cup jar from the Indian food store or the garlic from your Garden Share box...


Betty Canuck choose prepared tonight, and adds 2 tsp worth: (approx. the equivalent of 2 cloves)


Once the veggies are nicely softened and you start to see sticking to the bottom of the pan insert your meat. Our meat happens to have been raised by us in our previous life on the farm. Since we moved to the city, Moo-ses came along in this form:


Add your salt & pepper, approx. 1 tsp salt & 1/2 tsp pepper... okay, fine, fine, fine... truth is normally I do 1/2 tsp salt & 1/4 tsp pepper but tell my Dh otherwise and when your photog is your Dh, you kind of have to go the other way!


Now for the ingredient that once added almost promises my husband will adore the supper, 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce!


Add some herbs, typically I add 1 tsp each of basil, oregano & thyme, but I'm a little short, so I skipped the thyme here and added some of my herbes du Provencal from Victorian Epicure to make up the difference tonight. Basically this is something you need to figure out what you like!


Since I love the taste of a roasted garlic, I added a wee bit of Roasted Garlic, sorry for the photo quality!


Get out your sauce choices. Here's the scoop, you can add diced tomatoes OR ground tomatoes OR take a can of whole tomatoes and dice them up OR add two small cans of puree and add some water OR you can take 6 - 8 fresh whole tomatoes and dice them up and add them. And you can add up to 2 cups of the 'mystery vegetable.' Use more mystery vegetable with the fresh tomatoes to give it a better sauce, less with tomato paste! Tonight I added the can of ground tomatoes and 1 cup of pumpkin. My Dh was not needed for this photo, and had no clue until he saw me uploading the pictures that he had "mystery ghetti" tonight and reports that it was excellent.


So first add the frozen 'mystery.' Note: I freeze the squash, cooked, in muffin tins and my mini-individual cake pans, this time I happened to use star shaped cake pans, lol!


While cooking, be sure not to step on the assistant foot warmer. He is kept dancing while I cook! Snag your can opener and add the tomato of your choice.


Now is the time to get your water boiling to a vigorous boil. Note: I start my pan of water the minute I start making supper. Then once it has boiled, I turn it off. When we get to this point of the cooking, it takes less than 3 minutes to get back to a vigorous boil! See the mystery vegetable below?


Once boiling, add your oil and salt. If it stops boiling, then you didn't get it hot enough the first time and wait until the water is boiling as pictured above! The amounts are entirely up to you but about 1 tbsp oil is more than enough and 1 tsp salt is excessive :) . Naturally that is my opinion because that is what Mr. Canuck said to use when I hadn't posted amounts!



Next, add your noodles. I'm a wee bit anal and switched us over to whole wheat a long time ago. We love it. And honestly my kids now complain about white noodles. Dh on the other hand, just complains ;)


Insert the amount you will cook into the pot:


Use the spatula you used to empty your can to gently slide the noodles down into the water after a few seconds:


Set your timer to al dente time, it will say on the box and it changes for type of noodle, so check! Here it was for 8 minutes!


Now stir your pots, alternating between the sauce and the noodles. For the sake of tonight I used two separate tools, but often I just use the same one but it makes the noodles look gross. That's okay though as the sauce goes on them anyways!


I bet you thought I forgot something! NOW is the time to add the Green Peppers. Green peppers are often over cooked.


You want to basically cook the green peppers for no longer than 10 minutes. Just green them up pretty and leave them with a wee bit of crunch :)


Although it has only been a total of 30 minutes, your assistant is likely pooped. Slide him to the side and continue to cook:



Just kidding, the meal is ready once the timer goes, drain the noodles and quickly move the food quickly to the table. We love this served with Parmesan Cheese sprinkled on top!


Betty Canuck's Spaghetti Supper:

1 onion ~ diced
2 stalks celery ~ diced
1 - 2 tsp olive oil
1 green pepper ~ diced, note: you can add here or when noodles are put on to cook. But prepare them now.

-combine above into 3 quart sauce pan over medium heat and fry till onion is soft. You can add leftover ingredients at this point!

2 cloves of garlic, minced, or the equivalent
-add to above

1 lb extra lean ground beef
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper (can be a pinch)
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
-add to the above and fry until well browned.

1 tsp each: Basil, Thyme & Oregano or some sort of Italian spice mix
-add to above, can add spontaneous roasted garlic as well :)

Once meat is cooked, add your tomato choice and optional mystery vegetable:
2 smallish cans tomato paste plus 1 cup water OR
1 can diced or pureed tomatoes OR
6 - 8 fresh tomatoes, diced, pureed (but remove the seeds first then!), or whatever way!

and anywhere from:
1/2 - 2 cups mystery vegetable, perferably something red and squash in nature. Beets tend to be a poor choice here!

Meanwhile, cook your noodles.

Dicing Green Peppers!

First, take your green pepper, place it on its side on the board and chop off the top and bottom ends! If you want a true julienne, discard the ends now. Note: the top of the green pepper is a ring! If you don't want pips/seeds everywhere, be sure your cut off bit looks like this!


Next, take the knife tip and slice down the flesh on one side! See?:


Again, note how the stem end is basically all still in the green pepper?!
Lay the pepper down and slide the knife along and cut the core away from the sides, think of opening a letter or of carefully unwrapping a present. If you do it right, all those pips will stay on the core and you won't have to pull them off by hand!


Once done, you'll have this:


Now, I don't discard the top and bottom, I dice them up. Note: you can see that I cut the top off in such away that the stem is left on the core. I just slice it in half and then slice that up as is. The bottom, I cut hash: across one way, 90 degree turn and across the other!


Next: take the fleshy outside and cut it into strips: [julienne: cut the strips matchstick thick!]


Then I arrange them into lots I can manage with the knife. I butt them up against the knife blade to make them straight. This just makes it easier to hold the pile together when chopping. Typically I won't arrange them into piles like this but just pull a bunch chop and keep the rest off to the side. But I thought you could see my pile size.


And there you go, diced green pepper!

Another Way to Dice an Onion!

I realize by now you have probably seen a million ways to chop this root vegetable, and quite frankly many of you find it very easy to just food processor the tear-jerker! Truth be told, it takes me longer to pull out the food processor than it does to chop an onion by hand. And I love, love, love the results of a hand diced onion!

Here is how I do the deed:

[oh, and I've had loads and loads of practice, I used to work at a pizzeria and one of my jobs was to prepare the nights worth of onions!]

First, slice off the root and shoot ends:

Then, place one cut end on the board and cut right down the middle:


Now lay the latest cut side down and peel off the skin layer:


Now, slice horizontally across the onion, going from root to stem end. If you separate it looks like below once cut, if you were to separate the onion the pieces would look like little rainbows.


Next, shove the pieces back together, okay in real life don't even take them apart! Rotate the onion 90 degrees so that the root or stem end is facing you. Now you are going to cut across the onion the opposite way. Here is the key! The first two cuts must be at an angle. The first one rather severe, and the second one slightly less, the third cut can be straight up and down.


Note: in my hands were posed so I could take the picture, naturally I wouldn't be keeping my fingers there, but I do keep them as pictured below!

Keep dicing until you have a wee bit of a piece left, as pictured below:


Take that piece, and lay it so that the longest side is flat on the cutting board:


Now dice that bit too, it should be easy!


There you go, one nicely diced onion. Not quite fancy restaurant quality, but good enough :) !

Hot Chocolate

For years I was convinced that the only way you could make hot chocolate was by purchasing mix and microwaving a cup of milk and then adding the powder to the milk once it was hot. Last year, for some reason I ran out of the mix and I just had to have hot chocolate! It had been a hard cold morning of shoveling snow and I deserved my payment! Imagine my surprise and admitted embarrassment when I realized how quick, painless and inexpensive it is to make a nice cuppa Hot Chocolate, from scratch!

Naturally I can't leave you in the same situation I was, so here is how Betty Canuck makes her Hot Chocolate!

Betty Canuck's Hot Chocolate:
~serves 1 adult & 3 children~

4 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cocoa powder (or more!)
1 tsp vanilla extract (inexpensive kind is just fine!)

First, measure the sugar and cocoa powder into your sauce pan. If you are particular about lumps, pass the cocoa powder through a mesh sieve first. I'm not particularly worried! Once you have done that, stir the two ingredients together.

Then add the milk and place on medium high to high heat. IF you have 3 impatient children, place on high heat and stir frequently to prevent burning. This will cause frothing!

The frothing will eventually stop once the milk gets hot enough. Try not to let your milk boil!

Place into warmed cups, top with liberal amounts of whipping cream and enjoy!

Light and Fluffy Pancakes

Everyone needs a nice quick staple recipe. One you know you can make because you can just reach into your cupboards pull out the ingredients and within 20 minutes start placing food on your plate!

While the original recipe is one that I can always make, my modified version pictured in this post, is one for which I often have the entire list of ingredients.

Betty Canuck's Light & Fluffy Pancakes

Dry ingredients:
3 cups flour
4 tbsp sugar (optional)
1 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder

Wet ingredients:
4 eggs
1/2 cup applesauce (is actually home-made)
2 1/2 cups milk

Yield: 21 pancakes made with 1/3 cup of batter each

Mix the dry and the wet ingredients separately. Then combine together, pea sized lumps are fine! [note in picture applesauce and milk still to be added to wet]

On my skillet that has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on its heat settings, I put it at about 3.5. I found it took approximately 3 minutes for the first side and 2.5 minutes for the second side! In the several hundred times that I've made them, this was the first time I've ever timed cooking. Rather, I watch for the bubbles and turn them over when they are nice and bubbled.

As you can see, I have definite hot spots on my inexpensive Walmart brand skillet, but that's okay! We love the pancakes anyways!