A Cooking-Free Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day everyone! I hope everyone had a delicious and relaxing Thanksgiving...I know I did and I definitely enjoyed the four days off from school, and the three full days off of cooking! Fortunately we were spared from hosting Thanksgiving at our house this year, so I didn't have to do any cooking for Thanksgiving except for an apple cranberry crumble pie that I brought up to my aunt and uncle's house for the big day. But I made up for my three days of non-cooking with an entire day of cookie dough-making on Sunday, all of which I froze for the upcoming party that I'm catering. I made orange cardamom sugar cookie dough, pate brisee (savory tart dough for quiche) and pate sable (shortbread dough for pumpkin pie bars) and world's largest batch of chocolate chip cookies, half of which ended up all over the walls of the kitchen.

Yes, it was a long day...I think I went through about 10 pounds of butter, 2 and a half dozen eggs and several bags of flour making all the doughs. And on top of all that, a minor slice to my pinky finger from the blade on the plastic wrap caused me to faint from seeing all the blood. That was not fun.

At school, I'm not in the family meal rotation, which means that I'm in the same group of people that I did buffet with last week, except now we are making lunch everyday for the 300 or so people who work and eat at the FCI. It sort of feels like slave work and I'm not sure I'm really learning anything except that chopping 100 zucchini is miserable work, but I think I could have told you that without the experience doing it. So, family meal isn't really my favorite. I guess they're trying to teach us how to make recipes on a mass-scale, which I seem to have taught myself this weekend trying to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies that probably wouldn't have fit in an industrial sized mixer in my teeny little KitchenAid mixer at home.

As requested, I'll start posting some more recipes of things that I've been making at home. On Saturday night after getting back from Boston around 7:30, all I wanted was a big steaming bowl of pasta, so I scrounged around the kitchen to see what I could find: peppers, penne pasta and that delicious sausage from the farmer's market that I stashed in the freezer for a moment like this. While I boiled the pasta, I browned up three hot italian sausages, added some crushed garlic cloves and then about 4 or 5 sliced orange, yellow and red bell peppers. I sautéed those until the peppers were soft and then added the cooked penne pasta along with some of the pasta water to add a little starchiness to the sauce. Topped with some chopped parsley, it was just what I was craving.

Here's the recipe:

Bell Peppers and Sausage with Penne Pasta

4-5 Bell Peppers, Red, Yellow or Orange
3 Hot Italian Sausages, casings removed
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 lb. penne pasta, or whatever you have on hand. Oreciete would also be good.
Chopped Parsley
Salt and Pepper

Heat a small amount of oil in a large sauté pan. Add the sausage and break apart as it cooks. When almost completely browned, add the crushed garlic and cook 30 seconds. Add the bell peppers and continue cooking until the peppers are soft. In the meantime, boil water for pasta and put on to cook, about 11 minutes. Reserve some of the pasta water before you strain it. Strain the pasta, add to the sausage and pepper mixture and add some pasta water to blend it all together. Finish with some chopped parsley.


Enjoy!

Elise