Food, Home and Style

Cookin’ for Love: Hot Tomato

When the hot blond fitness blogger peeks over her Us Weekly and purrs from the couch, “Baby, I’m in the mood for a little Italian,” a keen, anticipatory pleasure takes over all 5-foot-6-inches of me. Often though, all K-Food (as she will heretofore be known) really means is that she wants me to make tomato sauce.

Tomato sauce is easy enough to cook, especially for someone raised on it. But I like to reach into the immigrant’s cucina povera cookbook for an alternative to pouring it over pasta. You should too–face it, you may not be an immigrant, but odds are you’re working the whole cucina thing because you’re a lot closer to povera these days.

This recipe doesn’t have a name. It showed up at my mother’s house regularly in the 1970s, and reappeared in the Cobble Hill co-hab I share with K-Food—right around the time I noticed my fellow Conde Nast executives actually reading budgets rather than just nodding and checking out each other’s shoes.

Combining a quick tomato sauce, frozen peas, eggs and polenta, this dish is surprisingly yummy and—important in these troubled times—includes a cheap, high-quality protein. Homemade sauce is an imperative; there is no excuse besides a nuclear holocaust to EVER eat sauce from a jar.) Start by sneaking a 10-spot out of your girl’s wallet—that’s all this is going to cost—but make sure it’s not the last of her money.

Ingredients

28-ounce can of crushed or whole peeled tomatoes
4 eggs (if you’re making it for two; if her bi-polar, woman-who-loved-too much co-worker comes by, make it 6)
1 roll of polenta
1 bag of frozen peas (preferably petite)
You’d better already have garlic and onion in the house.

Make the sauce:
Chop a half of an onion and two or three medium cloves of garlic.

In a shallow pan, sauté them in olive oil until they soften.

Toss in the tomatoes (if you get the whole ones, you may want to mush or chop them a little)

Season with salt, a dash of black pepper and (big) pinch of sugar.

Bring to a boil, introduce roughly half the bag of peas into the sauce, turn the flame down and cover the pot.

Meantime, you’ve already started to hard-boil the eggs, which I like to cook for 15 minutes.

The polenta is even easier. In our Top Chef-addled minds, we think we need to make it from scratch—but remember that you’re just faking the cucina povera, you’re not living through another occupation of Sicily by the Nazis. So buy a roll of pre-cooked polenta, and slice it into disks. Place those on an oiled baking sheet, brush on some more olive oil and put that in an oven heated to 350 degrees for about 15 minutes or until golden.

Peel and halve the cooked eggs and place them in the sauce for a few minutes (just to get some of that saucy flavor on them).

The key here is the presentation; it makes a very simple dish look special. Arrange the polenta disks in some eye-pleasing way, strategically place the eggs on top of it, and ladle on the sauce. Of course, you want to grate some parmesan on top. (Try what’s called a SanCor parm, which comes from Argentina. It’s cheaper and tastier than all but the most expensive Reggiano.)

Dan Colarusso, who was managing editor of Condé Nast’s Portfolio.com until the end of 2008, is now managing editor of The Business Insider. This recipe is from his yet-to-be-published (or even written, actually) Cookin’ For Love: A Regular Guy’s Guide to Feeding His Women.

Tags: eating, Food, Home and Style, spending