Other Peoples Food – A Sausage and Veggie Odyssey of the Sauce

by Kevin F   |   May 19, 2015   |   10 Comments

Since my honorary bro-in-law and soul brotha is also my cooking buddy and 83.6% of our chats consist of food porn, we decided to start a weekly (when we aren’t being lazy) series of recipe posts where he contributes to my site!!  This is his first post, enjoy!

First off, I got  all the veggies from this really cool farm share thing I found out about. I didn’t know what Lizzy meant when she said that “the eggplant is so sweet” until I cooked this up. Everything was really good. The zucchini was like buttah.  The sausage I got from a friend’s dad from http://www.hebertsspecialtymeats.com/ . Crazy good flavor. They said it was the best meat market in town so I’ll need to go myself and get a bunch of stuff to try out.

• Cut it in half lengthwise and oil/salt it. Then put them facedown for about 40 min at 400 degrees (or until it looks like it’s caving in on itself). That’s when the gushy creamy goodness happens.

• Blend 4 big tomatoes and start reducing. The whole process will probably involve about 20min of it on the stove top while you do the below steps.
• Add 3 cloves of crushed garlic, salt and some purple and Thai basil from your garden.  Save a piece or two to dice up and put over the cooked dish to make it all fancy.
• 1 of those tiny cans of tomato paste to help thicken it and a quarter of the glass of red wine you have that’s gotten too warm anyway.
• Let it simmer until it gets to the consistency/flavor you like.

• Cut the onions in half at the root so they stay together, and slice the zucchini. toss them together in a plastic bag with granulated garlic, olive oil, thyme, oregano, crushed red pepper, sea salt and coarse ground black pepper. These we’ll just grill on mid/high heat for around 10 minutes or so. Careful not to burn the little onions. You need to eyeball when to flip/turn (Quarter turns before you flip are VERY important for some reason).

• I sous-vide for an hour and a half at 140F. I finished them on the grill but didn’t get the crisp skin I normally like to get. I sous-vide because I had a work call that night and wanted to get a jog in. It probably would have been just as easy to grill them though. I’m guessing around 8 to 10 minutes each side.

• After everything is ready, scoop out the eggplant and put both of the fillings into one skin and toss in the tomato sauce and drizzle some balsamic vinegar and the diced basil you set aside earlier for what I’m calling presentation at this point. I was trying to give it a twice baked potato look. I’ll need to get a real camera one day…

Then… plate it all on a baller

Noritake Kona Wood 12-Inch Square Plate

The plates are big, so be careful not to eat too much, but I really like the rustic look on them. I saw Chef’s Table on Netflix a little while ago, and decided to start thinking about plating every once in a while. It also got me to start a little garden so go watch it immediately.

I’ll try to practice giving measurements, but for now just stick to the rule, it shouldn’t look buried in seasoning but you should be able to tell it’s there . And slowly salt, you can add more later a lot easier than taking some away. Oh, and then fill a big corner of your plate with the rest of the tomato sauce, because the sauce it boss and good on everything. always. even ice cream. maybe.

Here is a pic of your chef Kevin on this post!  Oh, and me.  He’s a giant… or maybe I’m just small….