Red Meat Roast Theory

Fortunately for me, kangaroo meat is relatively easy to get in Australia. I bought this roo conveniently pre-wrapped in roast netting. These two little roasts produce enough meat for four decent servings, and the pair comes for around $7.

Roast is really simple. Throw it in a roasting pan, cover, cook. The end. But there are ways of adding a little panache to this basic meal.

Cook some veg along with the meat. For this meal, I'm just going to cook onions and potatoes, but if you want to, you can pretty much cook a whole stew by adding veggies like carrots and green beans. Click the link for an awesome way to slice onions, and for the potatoes, just cut them into cubes. In a bowl, coat the potato cubes with a little oil or melted butter/margarine.

Sear your roast. Searing means frying the outside of the meat on medium-high heat for a few minutes, on all sides. Searing helps lock in the moisture, which adds a surprising degree of tenderness to the finished product. Don't add any salt yet -- salt draws out the moisture while searing.

I just want to point out this flipper. Look at this thing! I'm going to use it to cook this meal, and then go slay some orcs or something with it. Look for this brute in my upcoming article, Top 10 Manliest Cooking Utensils. 

Alright, now the easy part. Lay your seared roast into a roast pan, toss in the potatoes and onions, and add whatever spice you want. I'm just doing salt and cracked pepper with a little parsley. Cover that with a lid, or just aluminum foil, and bake it somewhere around 200 degrees C for 30-45 minutes, until the potatoes are softened. Just poke a potato with a fork, and if it's easy to push in, you're good. If you like, you can check the roast after about 20 minutes to baste it. Basting means taking spoonfuls of the juices that collect on the bottom, and pouring it back on top the roast. This keeps it a little moister.

If you're wondering, kangaroo
doesn't taste like chicken.

Note that bigger roasts are going to take longer to cook through, but these little guys are done in 30 mins.

To finish things off, wrap the roast loosely in aluminum foil, and give it 15 minutes. Think of it as a time out. It's gotten all agitated with the onions and potatoes, and it just needs some time alone in its own space. You know, for the flavour to settle. While that's happening, pop the onions and potatoes, with some of the roast juice poured over top, back in the oven. Those 15 minutes should be enough time to put a nice, golden roast on them. Keep them in for longer if you like them a bit crispier. 

And that's it! Just your meat and potatoes. And onions. So awesome.

Onion Wedges

For roast, stew, chili and stir fry, I like onions in bigger chunks. If you like huge pieces, you can just cut the onions into quarters or eighths. Normally I slice the onion into wedges.

First, cut the onion in half, slicing through the poles. Then, slicing through the poles again, cut the halves in half. After that, it's pretty easy to slice wedges. If you want them pretty cut pretty evenly, keep slicing pieces into halves, until you get four wedges per quarter.

Here's a tip to save your eyes some pain. If you press your knife straight down into an onion, its juices spray up, right into your face. Instead, use a sharp knife and cut the onion with gentle slicing motions. If you slide your knife forward on the onion, you'll find you don't have to apply as much downward pressure to make a cut. This reduces the amount of onion juice in the air.

Pasta Sauce Theory

For most of the guys I know, if they know how to cook anything, it's pasta. That's because it takes some special effort and dedication to make a truly bad pasta sauce. Sauce is fun, smells great while it cook, and it looks so awesome when it's done. Every time I make pasta, I feel like there should be network cooking show scouts watching my performance to sign me up to be the next Jamie Oliver.

It's so easy to get creative with pasta sauce. Forget recipes. If you want to close the cookbook, pasta sauce is your best friend.

This is my food philosophy: reduce the food to its essential, most basic elements, then you become free to experiment and let loose a little. In cooking (to borrow an analogy) some rules can be bent, others broken. So, instead of looking for a recipe, keep in mind the principles of pasta sauce, and the rest is up to you.

PASTA SAUCE THEORY
1. Pre-cook your meat
2. Pre-cook your veg
3. Add sauce to the meat and veg
4. Spice it up

And that's pretty much all you need to know for pasta sauce. Chop it all up, throw it in a pot. The end.

If you really want to make a pasta sauce that will make everyone be all like, "You made this from scratch? What's in it? Garlic? I bet it's garlic," take the time to add a little panache to sign your own personal signature on the meal. Click the links above for a few tips I've picked up.

Share your own tips and tricks with me!

Finishing Touches
All that's left to do is serve your amazing sauce over whatever pasta you like! If you're using this sauce for pizza, just make it a bit thicker.

A Few Notes on Time
For better flavour, cook longer. Use the same sauce, but add more water, and simmer for a few hours. "Simmer," if you're not sure, means boil the sauce, then turn the heat down to low, but high enough so it keeps bubbling. You reduce the heat so the bottom of the pot doesn't get all burned and gunky. Put a lid on it. Check up on it every half hour or so to make sure your water's not all boiled away (just add more if it is) and give it a stir to make sure nothing's sticking to the bottom.

For the very, very best flavour, cook the sauce a day ahead of time, and reheat it in a pan. Day-old pasta sauce is incredible.

Theory, Not Recipe
Once you have your own theory of how a good pasta sauce works, you're ready to throw out the cookbook and get creative with ingredients!

Pasta Sauce: The Spice

Alright, so now you've got your meat cooked, your veggies cooked, and you've added sauce to that mixture. Your sauce is a little thinner than you want it at the moment, because you're going to give it time to boil down. Now's the time for flavour. Use any combination, or all of the following, or, get creative and see what else you've got that might taste good!


Salt and pepper If you use sea salt and cracked pepper, you'll notice the difference. Easy on the salt if you're using stock.


Basil and Oregano Just dump some in. Estimate a few tablespoons of each. Parsley works, too.


Bay Leaves work great if you've got time. They take some of the strong tomato taste out, especially if you're using a lot of tomato paste. Put in two or three. Make sure you take them out before you serve.


Stock Mix up some beef or vegetable stock (just dump a spoonful or two of stock power in a cup and pour in some hot water) and add it to the sauce. You're an instant pasta sauce hero.


Vinegar Add a few tablespoons of white, balsamic, rice vinegar, or cooking wine. Trust me. It makes a difference.


Sugar Just a tablespoon or two, especially if kids are eating. It's just more fun. You can also add margarine and ketchup (tomato sauce) for a less healthy, but more kid-friendly taste.


Spinach adds an awesome element of colour and flavour to your sauce. Tear it up by hand into thumb-sized pieces, and add it at the very end, just as you take the sauce off the heat. It will shrink up and cook quickly just from the heat of the sauce itself.


Dairy You can add cheese directly to the sauce, but you have to serve it right away, and it doesn't reheat well. Powdered parm works the best, and I find mozza is way too stringy. The easiest thing to do is just shred some cheese on the side, and let people put in what they want. You can also add cream to the sauce to make it richer, but it does look a little weird.

Pasta Sauce: The Sauce

For me, sauce comes in three genres.


Tinned/Jarred sauce Plain or pre-spiced, just open the container, dump it in the pot. The end.


From Concentrate Throw some tomato paste in the pot, and dump in too much water, until it's about 2x runnier than you want the final product. Boil it down to the thickness you want.


From Scratch Look, man, it's a bit more effort, but it's worth it. Chop up fresh tomatoes, add a few cups of water, boil into a sauce. This method, by far, offers the best taste for a sauce. Tinned sauce doesn't even come close.

When I say "fresh" tomatoes, I don't mean you have to hop the neighbour's fence and pilfer his garden. I just mean, not from a can. You can get over-ripe tomatoes for cheap from discount bins at grocers, and they work great.

Alternatively, you can do the same thing with whole or stewed tinned tomatoes, but it doesn't taste the same. If you make your sauce from scratch, I recommend adding a little tomato paste, by the tablespoon, until you get the thickness you want.

Pasta Sauce: Pre-cook Veg

For veggies, here's a list of stuff I think goes good in pasta, in whatever combination:
Celery, string beans, chickpeas or other hearty beans, peas, carrots, cauliflower, onions, peppers (capsicum), hot pepper, broccoli, zucchini (yes, there are two c's. I checked). Just pick a few. It's going to taste great.

Order of cooking may make a difference for you. Some vegetable take longer to cook than others. Also, if you throw everything in at once, the juices all run out, and you end up stewing your veg. If you want them nice and crisp and fried, keep the heat pretty high, use a little oil and butter, and add one type of veggie at a time. This keeps the pan hot enough to keep your veggies from stewing. You should allow 1 or 2 minutes between each new veg you add.

Generally, the first thing you should do is chop up onions in pretty small pieces, cook that for a bit, then add garlic. After that, it doesn't matter all that much what goes in next. If you're using celery or carrots, I'd recommend adding those earlier, and if you have peppers/capsicum, save them for last.

Pasta Sauce: Pre-cook Meat

I actually don't usually put any meat at all in pasta sauce. I like a vegetarian pasta, maybe with some meat on the side. But if you're going to put in some ground beef, you should cook it before you mingle it with anything, to make sure you get that bacteria good and dead. You can put lots of different types of meat in pasta. Beef strips, ham, salami or pepperoni chunks, chicken, shrimp. Whatever you've got around, it's going to work.

If you're using sea food like shrimp, cook it by itself, and add it to the sauce at the very end.