I made my tomato sauce yesterday, and I didn’t mess it up! To amuse myself I took pictures throughout the process.
First I got together the canned/bottled ingredients.
Then I added 1 Bay Leaf, 1 teaspoon Oregano, 1/8 teaspoon Margoram, 1/4 teaspoon Thyme, 1/2 teaspoon Hot Red Pepper, 1/4 teaspoon Basil, and 1 pinch Sage. I mixed that all up nicely with the onions and garlic for a couple minutes. Then I added the two 28oz cans of peeled tomatoes.
I stirred and let that mix together and simmer for 5 minutes. Then I added the 2 28oz cans of tomato sauce (as seen on the ingredients picture, this is plain sauce of tomatoes sold for putting into more complex recipes such as this one). I let that simmer for an hour. Then I added the tomato paste and simmered for another hour. Then I added a tablespoon of grated parmesean cheese. I should have added 2 tablespoons of red wine at this point too, but it’s such a hassle to get wine, and I didn’t have the cash on me to walk down to the wine and spirits shop in town. Crazy PA, not allowing people to buy simple cooking wine in a grocery store, come on! Anyway, after adding the parmesean I let it simmer for another half hour.
Then the sauce was done!
It’s a bit more spicy than I remember, I might not add the hot red pepper next time, but I’ll have to see what Michael thinks. You mean he didn’t get to try it yet? Nope! Unfortunately he was stuck at work until almost midnight %(
So I made myself a salad and some garlic bread and pasta, and enjoyed a dinner all by myself around 7 pm last night.
Other than that, I did a lot of catching up on things. I upgraded firefox recently, and was very annoyed to discover that yet again it had issues. Now this time was the upgrade to 1.0 pre, so I should expect issues, but if I have to reinstall my extensions one more time I’m going to kill someone %) I ended up backing up my bookmarks deleting my .mozilla/firefox/ directory, restarting it, and reinstalling all my extensions. Then I learned that the new find function doesn’t work right. Bah! I loved the old popup window find option, why’d they need to go and change it? I still just use firefox as my rss reader though, so my normal surfing and searching with good old mozilla is fine.
I went to rip a cd yesterday, and was a bit annoyed to find that the cd skipped when I tried to play it. I tried to play it in other players in linux, still skipping. So I booted into windows, played on windows media player, still skipping. Oh no! Then I thought I’d try and rip it, but
I was in Windows, how do people rip things in Windows these days? A couple questions in a music channel I lurk in lead me to Exact Audio Copy, which is free to use, and pretty nice. I had to install LAME separately, but then the wizard makes it pretty straight forward. I was able to play the CD in EAC fine, no skipping, strange. So I ripped and encoded it. The program only crashed once, and I fear that really was because of a CD flaw (it kept crashing on the same track). Now it did take some time to do all this ripping and encoding, I don’t see what people mean when they say linux does it so slowly, if you want good quality music files it’s going to take a while no matter where you are *shrug*