I work as a professional firefighter, which puts me at the station for 24 hour shifts every third day. At my fire station, we’ve got 11-14 people working on a normal day, depending on students or guests or whatnot.
Dinner gets cooked on a rotating schedule, so when it’s my turn to cook I want something that can feed plenty of people, reheat easily if everyone catches a run, and doesn’t taste like old sawdust.
Today, we’re going to talk about the staple of firehouse meals: spaghetti.
Now, I know I’m going to offend somebody’s old nonna with my recipe, but it’s something that you can slap together in the morning and let cook all day. In the oven, on the stove, in the slow cooker, it all works out in the end.
First, let’s have that ingredients list.
1 – 12oz Can Tomato Paste
1 – 28oz Can Petite Diced Tomato, drained
1 – 45oz Jar Spaghetti Sauce (I prefer the Prego brand, but this is to taste).
1-2 – 15oz Can Tomato Sauce
16oz Baby Bella Mushrooms, sliced thickly
1 – Large Yellow Onion, minced
6-8 cloves Garlic, finely minced
2lbs Ground Beef
2lbs Italian Sausage (out of their casings)
Fresh herbs to taste – Oregano and Basil by the handful, crushed and finely chopped
Salt and Pepper to taste
3lbs No. 8 Spaghetti
Okay, so I always start by browning my meat in a large cast iron Dutch oven. Turn the heat up as high as you can and let it get nice and caramelized, really seal that flavor in. Once it’s cooked through, be sure to drain it thoroughly. In the same cast iron, sauté the onions and garlic in a little olive oil, scraping up the nice leftovers from the seared meat, and then add the mushrooms. If you add salt to the mushrooms, they’ll release their water faster, making for a less soupy finished sauce. Let your mushroom, onion, garlic mixture cook until most of the liquid is gone. Here, you can choose to deglaze with some nice red wine if you have some available, but be sure to let that simmer until most of the liquid is gone. Add back the meat, and throw in the herbs. Now, when it comes to herbs I recommend using a couple different types of basil and oregano if you have the luxury of a home garden, but dried herbs work nicely in a pinch. You cannot add too much at this stage, just go nuts with it.
Now it’s time to add the tomatoes. If you’re a better person than I am, you may have made your own sauce from scratch using real San Marzano tomatoes. I applaud your dedication. The rest of us are buying a premade sauce base to fill out the rest of this and moving on with our lives. Next, throw in the tomato paste. This is the single most critical ingredient in any spaghetti sauce. Not only is this where the flavor is at, it also helps to thicken and bring together the sauce in a delightful finish. Add those diced tomatoes, but be sure to have them fully drained. The last ingredient is the plain tomato sauce, which is just going to bring you to whatever final amount you’re looking to have. At the station, this is usually one or two cans, but if you’re cooking at home you may not even need anything else.
Once all of your ingredients are mixed, you can choose how to finish it. In the slow cooker on low for eight hours, on the stovetop for at least two hours on the lowest simmer possible, or in the oven at 225 Fahrenheit for at least six hours. You can stir it if you like, but I typically don’t. This is more of a benign neglect kind of meal, where I can ignore it for most of the day.
You may now be realizing that this is a monstrous recipe, with proportions to feed any army on the go. Don’t panic. The sauce freezes in gallon Ziploc bags for easy meals in the future. A gallon bag feeds four to six people easily, or use smaller portions for fast meal prep for the week.
My last bit of advice here is to salt your water before boiling your pasta. And by salt the water, I mean don’t be afraid of the salt. If you haven’t been doing this, I promise it’ll change your life.
Reports from the Department of Intangible Assets
Book One
Robert Gainey
Genre: Detective Fantasy
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Date of Publication: June 28, 2021
ISBN:978-1-5092-3658-9 Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-5092-3659-6 Digital
ASIN: B095GNZJCN
Number of pages: 254
Word Count: 69,377
Cover Artist: Debbie Taylor
Tagline: Overworked. Underfunded. Outgunned. Sometimes the greater good needs a little help from a lesser evil.
Book Description:
“Dragon is hard to overcome, yet one shall try.”
– Nowe Ateny, Polish Encyclopedia, 1745
Diane Morris is part of the thin line separating a happy, mundane world from all of the horrors of the anomalous. Her federal agency is underfunded, understaffed, and misunderstood, and she’d rather transfer to the boring safety of Logistics than remain a field agent.
When a troupe of international thieves make off with a pair of dragon eggs, Diane has no choice but to ally with a demon against the forces looking to leave her city a smoldering crater.
Facing down rogue wizards, fiery elementals, and crazed gunmen, it’s a race against time to get the precious cargo back before the dragon wakes up and unleashes hell.
Excerpt
I guess there’s always been a Department of Intangible Assets, in some
way or another, since humanity first banded together against the dark. Ancient
orders of knights, sects of religions, monasteries and their like had been the
first real organizations determined to hold off the things that bled into our
world from other realities. Great and epic individuals did a lot of work in the
past, though more often than not mere pawns as one ultra-powerful being played
against another. Gilgamesh. Solomon. Miyamoto Musashi for a while even worked
as a kind of Japanese defender against the supernatural. Things must have been
easier back then. If somebody had a problem with a corpse rising from the
ground and eating people, or with creatures slinking out of the mountains and
taking children, they could talk openly about it, and people would fit it
neatly into whatever cultural narrative they had. No press releases concerning
carbon monoxide leaks, no awkward local police trying to stutter their way
through an ogre rampage by blaming gang violence and drugs. If you were a 17th
Century farmer in the Tajima Province of Japan and tengu started picking off
your village one by one, Musashi would come by one day, cut down all those dark
spirits, and then leave. You’d replant your fields, mourn your losses, and tell
warning stories about warding off evil. And, probably, pay him whatever he
wanted.
Modern times gave way to a general idea that reason and logic were
enough to stop something from dragging you into the sewers and wearing your
skin to protect itself from daylight. It’s easy to see why: it doesn’t happen
to a lot of people, therefore it must not happen. I see it all the time, people
who say things like “I’ve never seen a ghost, so they must not exist.”
Oh yeah? Because if spirits did exist, they’d all be tripping over their ghost
dicks to haunt you? Do you understand the preternatural forces that conspire,
the circumstances that line up, to create any kind of ghost? Let alone one that
shows up in your room at night and moans about revenge or betrayal or rattles
some chains and teaches you a valuable lesson about being selfish?
“Well, there’s no such thing as Bigfoot. All those pictures are super
blurry and grainy,” they say, their voices nasally and snobby, like all the
knowledge of the world is pumped directly into their tiny brains through their
tiny phones. I don’t care to get into whether or not any of the literally
thousands of kinds of entities that flit in and out of forests would like to be
called “Bigfoot,” but just because you haven’t left your couch in twenty years
doesn’t mean there’s not something out there you don’t understand. Go stand out
in a remote Colorado forest one night.
Turn off your phone, open your eyes and ears, and wait. When you feel
those eyes watching, and when you know, deep in that primitive monkey brain,
way, way down inside, that there’s more than just the animals you have names
for sharing that clearing with you, then you can call me to tell me that there’s
no such thing as Bigfoot.
That is, if you live to turn your phone back on again.
Robert Gainey is a born and raised Floridian, despite his best efforts. While enrolled at Florida State University and studying English (a language spoken on a small island near Europe), Robert began volunteering for the campus medical response team, opening up a great new passion in his life. Following graduation, he pursued further training through paramedic and firefighting programs, going on to become a full time professional firefighter in the State of Florida. He currently lives and works in Northeast Florida with his wife and dogs, who make sure he gets walked regularly. Robert writes near-fetched fantasy novels inspired by the madness and courage found in everyday events.
1 comment:
Thanks for having me on your blog today!
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