Sausage-stuffed Manicotti

Enter the second half of my buy one get one free spicy italien sausage deal. I had a rather inexplicable desire for stuffed pasta, so I proceeded to check the literature. Something I found that was in disagreement was whether the manicotti should be cooked before the stuffing occurs. The shells are brittle and prone to cracking before cooked, but extremely easy to tear afterwards. The manicotti obviously needs to spend more time in the oven if they are not boiled beforehand, with some suggesting to mix in some water with the sauce. A few recipes suggested what seemed to me a very sensible solution, boil the pasta for half the time.

The stuffing for this dish was made up of browned sausage, sauteed onions, garlic, ricotta cheese, and bread crumbs. The half cooking the manicotti worked out very nicely, as it ended up easy enough to stuff, but not so tender that it tore. The shells were nestled between two layers of spaghetti sauce, with plenty of mozzarella cheese sprinkled on top, and baked at 350 for about 30 minutes or so. Spicy italien sausage is still pretty much the greatest thing ever, and worked really well in this.

Italian Sausage Fettucini without a Creamy Tomato Sauce

I know. The meal pictured above does not really look that exciting, but somehow I thought it worthy to recieve its own blog post. Well that's because almost all of the time I'm starting from some base recipe. I always make variations, often significant, but the base is always still there. This time however, I was acting on total whim. I was in the grocery store and came across something I had previously believed would never occur. Spicy italian sasuage, was on sale. Finding it impossible to resist, I quickly picked some up and decided I had make something out of it. As I was already at the store, I had nothing but my own ideas to work with.

To be honest, the dish was exceedingly simple, containing only the sausage, tomatoes, onions, garlic, fettucini, and various spices. In fact, it looks very simliar to the very first food I ever posted on here, minus the cream sauce. But somehow it feels important, perhaps because it represents the hope that eventually I'll be able to come up with my own recipes from nothing at all.

Southwest Stuffed Chicken

Since my last stuffed chicken went so well, I thought I'd try something similar. I was planning for a chicken stuffed with pepper jack cheese and chilies. However I was unable to find any green chilies, so faced with several choices I ended up selecting serrano peppers, thinking them less spicy than jalapeños. As this ended up being far from correct, it seems a perfect time to stop and explore the Scoville Scale, the measure of piquancy of a chili.

The hotness of a pepper is caused by a chemical compound called capsaicin (8-Methyl-N-vanillyl-trans-6-nonenamide). Capsaicin irrates the chemoreceptor nerve endings, particularly in mucous membranes, causing the familiar warm, burning sensation. This is gauged by the Scoville scale, with some common values below.

15,000,000–16,000,000 - Pure capsaicin
2,000,000–5,300,000 - Pepper spray
350,000–580,000 - Red Savina habanero
100,000–350,000 - Habanero chili
30,000–50,000 - Cayenne Pepper
10,000–23,000 - Serrano Pepper
2,500–8,000 - Jalapeño Pepper
100–500 - Pepperoncini

So it ends up that the green chilies I was looking for where probably somewhere in the 1500-2000 range, meaning the peppers I ended up with were a mere 5 to 10 times hotter.

When stuffing chicken I used to cut the breasts in half the short way and then pound them thin. But this seemed a little silly to me so now I cut them in half length-wise, simliar to butterflying, and no pounding is required. The breasts were sprinkled with salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes, then layered with pepper jack cheese and the serrano peppers. I knew by this point that they were hotter than I had orginally thought, but I didn't really know how much it really amounted to, so I ended up putting a bunch on. The chicken was then rolled up and secured with toothpicks and dredged in butter and a bread crumb mixture with a generous amount of chili power and more red pepper flakes (I figured why not, the thing was already like a 6 billion on the scale). Finally the rolls were baked at 400 for about 21 minutes.

It was in the end not nearly as spicy as I was expecting. I'm not totally sure why. It was hot enough to have me get a little sugar to help relieve the burn, (capsaicin is not water soluble, which is why water doesn't help), but not anymore then some hot wings. I was a big fan of the cheese though, so I was pretty happy with it overall.

Penne with Caramelized Meat Sauce

I thought browning beef was a pretty simple process. All you had to do was heat up a skillet to medium or a little higher and throw the beef in there, moving it around some until there wasn't any pink left. Honestly though this really shouldn't be called browning, because the beef ends up grey. But I was reading today how beef for a meat sauce should actually be brown, that is to say, caramelized. I had never even really heard of that before, and it intrigued me enough to try it.

Caramelization is the culinary term for the oxidation of sugar. It generally occurs around 320 F and releases a whole new set of chemcials, resulting in its distinct flavor. For the meat in this dish I used a cast iron skillet with the stove turned almost all the way to high to provide the necessary temperature. The bottom of the skillet was littered with salt and small chunks of ground beef were dropped in it, and not moved. I fought the impluse to lower the temperature as a generous amount of smoke started to swirl up from the pan. After a few minutes, I flipped the chunks and found that the bottoms were indeed well caramelized, with the distinctive dark brown patches. The meat was let brown on the other side and then mixed with some onions and garlic that had been sautéing simultaneously. A good amount of fire-roasted, though admittedly canned, tomatoes were added, along with the spices that might be expected, salt, pepper, basil, oregano, and thyme, along with some red pepper flakes and sugar. The sauce was let simmer for a while then mixed with penne pasta.

The caramelized beef was definitely noticeable, and I thought very enjoyable. It seemed to add an entire new dimension to the typical meat sauce I had previously made with only "grey beef." I wonder how it would spice up hamburger helper?