Jeff's Sloppy Joes
Speaking of Sloppy Joes, which I was last week ("Beef & Mac"), that's what we're having for dinner tonight. It's on the stove simmering even as I type.
When I was young, way back in the last century, I had a recipe for Sloppy Joes in my first cookbook, a smallish volume for kids published by someone like Betty Crocker — my memory grows dim on the details. It had a simple, no-fuss recipe for Sloppy Joes, and I prepared it with some frequency. It made Sloppy Joes that tasted the way Sloppy Joes were supposed to taste.
Then years passed and I cooked no Sloppy Joes. Then, sometime in the last year, I had a hankering and I started looking around for recipes. My goodness, but finding something that would make Sloppy Joes the way they were supposed to taste was well night impossible, so gussied up the recipes had become, no doubt in a misguided effort to "update" the recipe for "modern" tastes. Puh-lease.
The closest thing I could find to a real Sloppy Joe taste came from 500 Treasured Country Recipes, a pleasant and useful cookbook by Martha Storey. I had to make a few alterations, some of which look suspiciously like updating for modern tastes, but please believe me that this was what it took to create something that tasted the way it should for where my taste is today. It's yummy. By the way, the plain yellow mustard is a critical ingredient for my taste, and I would not substitute some fancy Dijon mustard or English-pub mustard in this case.
Recipes will usually insist that one drain the ground beef after browning; I usually don't unless it's unusually fatty, because it enhances the taste and the mouth feel, and it gives the bread something good to soak up. I serve the Sloppy Joes open-face over potato rolls. It makes enough for four pretty hearty appetites.
Jeff's Sloppy Joes
- 1 chopped onion
- 2 pounds ground beef
- a couple cloves worth of chopped garlic
- 1, 15-ounce can of tomato sauce
- about a cup of cheap red wine
- a few good blobs of plain, yellow mustard (about a tablespoon, maybe 2)
- several dashes of Worcestershire sauce (probably 1 or 2 teaspoons)
1. Brown and crumble the ground beef with the onion; cook until the onion is translucent.
2. Stir in the garlic and tomato sauce; use the wine to rinse the tomato-sauce can and dump it into the mix.
3. Stir in the mustard and the Worcestershire sauce.
4. Simmer for 15 minutes or so.
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on Saturday, 9 June 2007 at 20.51
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A friend and I have recently experimented to put together our favourite recipe for basic pasta sauce, and these are similar to yours. I hadn't thought of adding dry pasta to it, though — this would need further tweaking, clearly, especially since our sauce is best if you let it simmer for an hour or three.
What surprises me is your allotment of garlic. What are you aiming at? The merest hint of garlicky overtones?
Anyhow, my latest batch had something like this: 1 pound of ground beef (Euro pounds, ie 500g), one large red onion (should have taken two), a little less than half a head of garlic, one small can of peeled tomatoes, one small (much smaller) can of concentrated tomato paste, one baby eggplant, generous helpings (a few tablespoons) of dried thyme and oregano, plus a bit of "mixed Italian herbs" from my flatmate's herb rack , a few dashes of cheap red wine, salt, black pepper, olive oil, water etc. The preparation is much like yours except for the 1-3 hours of simmering, and the pasta prepared apart. Cover with Parmesan shavings (I use a potato peeler to shave my Parmesan).
This freezes extremely well. Next time I'll do a much larger batch and freeze it in portions.
on Saturday, 9 June 2007 at 23.05
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For this recipe: yes, just a hint of garlic. My goal, after all, was to recreate a taste I'd been longing for from my youth, and I'm not sure it had any garlic in it, but to my today-tongue a bit of garlic seemed called for.
However, if we're talking pasta sauce, the garlic gloves come off! When I was in graduate school (c. 1980) I decided to create my own spaghetti sauce, and I wasn't very sophisticated about it. From recipes I'd thought I'd seen, most seem to call for 1 or 2 cloves of garlic. Well, my initial feeling was that 2 "cloves" looked like quite a bit, so I stuck with 1 "clove".
Naturally, the punch line is that I thought a "clove" was what turned out to be the entire head of garlic. Ta da! Thus it is that my own pasta sauce always gets an entire head of garlic, and I've never had complaints. It sure tastes good that way, too.
As for adding the pasta directly, I think the secret is nothing more than making sure there is enough liquid to be absorbed by the cooking pasta. I'm zeroing in on getting an idea of just how much that should be, but it doesn't seem an awful lot is necessary. (The past actually absorbs far less than the quarts and quarts of water people like to cook past in, where the goal is to dilute the starch that comes out during cooking.) Maybe the way to get the right amount is to add some if the sauce starts to get too thick. As for long cooking, one simply adds the pasta for the last 10-15 minutes I imagine.
My goal on that is to have, someday, a tuna-noodle casserole that uses dry noodles and adds them uncooked to the oven-ready dish.
on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 at 20.51
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I actually have a copy of the original Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys and Girls, and I must say your recipe strikes me as a *significant* improvement. The recipe, in its entirety:
on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 at 20.53
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Alas, the last did not make it. I'll try again.
Take "ground beef, catsup, tomato soup, hamburger buns. Brown the meat and crumble it with a fork. Stir in catsup and tomato soup. heat until it bubbles. Serve in buns."
That's it.
on Monday, 9 July 2007 at 00.37
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Wow. I wonder whether that might be an even earlier edition of the cookbook, because the recipe you relate sounds even more basic than I remember it. It does have the virtue of simplicity I have to admit.
Well, you're quite right that my version is no doubt a rather significant change, but there you go. At least it served to arouse my nostalgic taste buds.