The Make-Ahead Sauce Solution

What's one of the major differences between restaurant meals and the meals your mom or grandma served?

Okay, maybe your mom or grandma didn't cook like mine did, but mostly it was meat, potato, and one or two vegetables. If there was something like turkey for a holiday, there was gravy. but mostly it was three things with no gravy or sauce or condiments (well, except we had ketchup with meatloaf).

But if you go to a restaurant, there's a pretty good chance that you won't get a plate that doesn't include some kind of sauce, chutney or other flavorful element, even if it's something that's smeared or drizzled artistically over the plate.

I love sauces. I really do. But they seem like they can take more time than the rest of the meal. They seem complicated. They seem like ... not something I'm going to make on the average weeknight. I mean, yeah, I'll pull out the bottle of ketchup for meatloaf, or I'll make a simple tartar sauce for fish. But that's about where I stop unless I'm making something that creates its own sauce. Like when I braise stuff.

So, when The Make-Ahead Sauce Solution by Elizabeth Bailey landed with a light thunk on my doorstep (free to me), I was intrigued. The general idea is that these are sauces that you make ahead and then freeze for later use. Like, you could have a sauce-making day and be set for a month. Or you could make a batch that goes with dinner, then freeze the rest for later meals.

These sauces (61 of them) aren't necessarily designed to go with particular meals. Instead, there are suggestions on how much sauce you should use for different dishes. For example, the Chorizo Garlic sauce would use 2 cups of sauce per pound of pasta; 1 cup of sauce per baked potato; 1/2 cup of sauce per cup of cooked rice, or 1/2 cup of sauce per sandwich. Serving instructions are also included, like you'd spoon the sauce over your rice, then top with grated cheddar cheese. For a sandwich, you'd use it like a sloppy joe, along with cheese.

Then again, you could go completely off the rails and use your sauce any way you want to. A couple spoons of chorizo garlic sauce could be awesome on a chicken taco, when you're dealing with leftover rotisserie chicken.

Then we have the Vodka Cream Sauce that should be slathered over, or smeared under, pretty much everything, from pasta to shrimp to chicken to pizza.

I wasn't sure about this book before I arrived, but I have to say that's it's giving me inspiration. I can see making a few of these, freezing them in small hockey puck sizes, then using them during those weeks when I cook a bunch of chicken thighs to save dinner prep time. Then I could pick a different sauce every night when I heat up my leftovers. It's kind of genius, really.

Needless to say, larger families would plow through much more sauce than me, but that's kind of the beauty of the concept. You freeze in quantities you're going to use. Or, if you freeze flat in zipper bags, you can break off chunks. One caveat. It's probably a good idea to label all the bags, lest you mistake barbecue for mole or curry for dijonnaise.

Did you miss the part about me getting the book for free. Yeah, that happened.

Secrets of a Sauce Queen

I was going to pull the plug on blog posts until after the holidays, but I had to write about this book. It was published in New Zealand (which means it's a tad hard to find if you're in the states), but you might be able to track down a copy online.

Secrets of a Sauce Queen by Trudie Burnham is a danged good book. Tasty.

And sauces, while not as essential as, let's say, instructions on how to grill a piece of food without killing it, are things that can make your plain food much more spectacular.

The sauces range from salad dressing so moles to fruit sauces to hollandaise to ... well pretty much any sort of sauce you might drizzle, baste, dip, slather, mop, or use as a marinade. It's all here.

I just finished wiping the last bits of barbecue sauce off my face, and I have to say that it was a freakishly simple recipe that was amazingly good.

Sure, a lot of books include a few sauces, but I think this will be the sort of book that cooks will turn to when they think, well, I'll grill the fish ... but maybe I should make a sauce.

Definitely recommended.

Salsas and Moles

I've made my fair share of salsas, but the idea of a cookbook with nothing but salsas and moles sounded interesting. My typical salsas are .... well ... typical. Tomato, onion, peppers, cilantro. Maybe some lime.

Sometimes I'll add another ingredient, but when I stray from my basic recipe, I usually wander right back to the original the next time I make a salsa.

Yes, I'm a creature of habit.

I figured that the book Salsas and Moles by Deborah Schneider would give me some new and different salsas to try, and perhaps refine my basic salsa.

This is a small book, size-wise, but it's packed with quite a bit of information, starting with information about peppers and other ingredients. Recipes include salsas, hot sauces, moles, and a few other related items like cabbage slaw and pickled peppers.

One great thing is that for the most part, ingredients shouldn't be too hard to find for many of the recipes. Dried peppers can be purchased online, if you can't find them locally. Fresh peppers might be a little trickier, but you can certainly substitute a similar pepper. The book even suggests making substitutions if you want a hotter or milder sauce.

There are a few items that might be trickier to find, but that's true with many books. We don't all have access the same ingredients.

While my first thoughts were about making salsas, I was really happy to see several recipes for different types of moles. The first time I tastes mole, I wanted to know how it was made, but pretty much everyone I asked told me to start with a jarred mole paste. Some of them are decent, but I like to make things from scratch at least once. I'll have to wait for some fresh ingredients to show up at the market, but it shouldn't be too long.

While I'm pretty sure that I'll still make my standard salsa - because I like it - I know I'll be experimenting with a lot more of the salsas in this book as time goes on (and as the fresh produce I need shows up at the market.)