Getting Saucy...

I rarely get weekends entirely to myself lately. Between traveling to Virginia and having friends visit me in Connecticut and seeing family, there are few weekends when I blissfully have nothing to do. This weekend happened to be one of those rare occasions so I decided to commit myself to making several of the tomato sauces in Everyday Italian.

Saturday was spent running around doing errands including a trip to the grocery store (they are beginning to know me by name there) to stock up on everything I’d need to make GDL’s Marinara Sauce, Tomato Sauce with Olives and Vodka Sauce. I had every intention of waking up early on Sunday and getting straight to work on my sauces but a gray, rainy morning was too good to pass up. I slept in and woke up only to spend the remainder of the morning in front of CMT with a pot full of coffee and a coffee table full of glossy magazines.

By two o’clock I was so well rested and amped up on caffeine that I darted into the kitchen and started chopping vegetables like a karate kid on crack. GDL says that her Marinara Sauce is so versatile that she doubles the recipe and freezes it to use later. I thought it wise to do the same. Not to mention, it was the base for the other two sauces I was attempting that afternoon.

So four celery stalks and carrots, four garlic cloves and onions, two nicks, one losing-a-finger-close-call, and countless onion tears later I was ready to throw everything in the pot and add the canned crushed tomatoes. As the sauce simmered, I turned on my DVD player and spent the afternoon with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck pretending I was on a Roman Holiday.

An hour later, the sauce was thick and gorgeous and my little apartment smelled divine. I ladled the sauce into several two-cup containers for the freezer, set aside three cups for the Vodka Sauce and left 4 cups in the pot for Tomato Sauce with Olives. As previously stated, I’m not a fan of olives. I want to be. It seems like something I’d like. But alas, I have not developed a taste for them. So I sautéed the olives in oil and red pepper flakes half-heartedly.

Combined with the Marinara Sauce and a lot of basil, the olive sauce wasn’t half bad. But on to my grand sauce finale- Vodka Sauce! I’ve always been a fan of this creamy sauce but never did it occur to me how much actual booze was in it. For three cups of Marinara Sauce you add one cup of vodka. Standing over the simmering mixture, I had flashbacks of my twenty-first birthday party and that dreaded night at Mohegan Sun when I’m sure I drank all the vodka on premises.

After ten minutes I was supposed to add the heavy cream, Parmesan, spices and that’s all she wrote but I took a quick taste test and… hello I’m drunk. Isn’t the alcohol supposed to burn off or something? I didn’t think Giada wanted to get me hammered so I figured I’d let it simmer ten minutes longer and up the heat a bit. Just two minutes later I heard a sickly burping noise coming from my kitchen and ran in to find my stovetop and page 67 of Everyday Italian looking like they spontaneously burst out in a saucy case of the chicken pox. OK, no more heat. Half a cup of heavy cream, Parmesan, seasoning and it looked just like my jarred Classico and… tasted even better. GDL says it looks like a heavy dish but “the vodka kicks in and heats up the back of your throat to cut through the heavy cream.”

And I’m not even hung over.