Back from the holday break and bristling with New Year’s resolutions, one of which is to update this site more often, and the other of which is to cook a meal from a new recipe once a week. How legal I choose to be about “new recipe” depends entirely on me, and I think that I won’t mind adding some freestyling in there, along with actual written instructions.

This week I chose to improvise, and naturally it has me off to the worst possible start. I don’t know what it is about absolutely basic recipes that escapes me — I am totally retarded with omelettes, for instance, and helpless at simple tasks like cooking spinach — but I am consistently defeated by the most ordinary things. Roast a turkey breast? Hey sure! Bake a fritatta? Bring it on! Pour a bowl of cereal? I guess, but be ready with that fire extinguisher.

Pasta salad definitely falls into the category of simple foods that completely escape me. I’ve tried about three times at pasta salad, including again tonight, and no matter what I do it ends up tasting like… well… a bowl of cold noodles.

This week’s attempt included a dressing that was based on a pre-mixed balsamic vinaigrette that included rosemary and chili pepper, and an awful lot of vegetables: Green, white and red onion; celery; tomato; parsley; lemon juice and a bunch of herbal seasoning.

For a little garnish, I grated some cheese on top and added fresh black pepper to the mix. It’s a thing of beauty.

And it still tastes like a big bowl of cold noodles. To be totally accurate, it tastes like spicy cold noodles, because the chili-infused oil added a heat that kicks in exactly two seconds after any given bite — long enough to add body without actually contributing flavor.

God damn it. The sandwich at least is enjoyable. You cannot miss by adding cranberries to a turkey wrap, and the whole wheat wrap just made things sweeter. And just as soon as I figure out how to make a pasta salad that doesn’t make me want to cry, this will be as fun to eat as it is to look at.

Sometimes the simplest meals are the best, especially if you can get about two or three strong, complementary flavors together to combine for a dish so good you wish you were eating it again two hours later. There are plenty of combinations that do this well: Pasta and garlic; poultry and tomato; liver and onion; pork and apples; beef and mushrooms.

Generally speaking, though, the word “sausage” does not leap to mind most times. This is because it’s a popular euphemism, and striding into work in the morning exclaiming things like:

• “I had the best sausage last night!”
• “You should have seen the sausage in my kitchen yesterday!”
• “I enjoy eating sausage!”
• or “Cheap jokes are often achieved using the word ’sausage’!”

…discourage even the hardiest souls.

More importantly, there’s an image in most people’s minds that sausage is represented by either the tiny, horrid, gristle-loaded tubes that come with your eggs, or else the thing at the hot dog cart that costs a dollar more and takes way longer to cook. But, when made with the proper respect and garnished properly, they can make a savory dinner.

First thing’s first, though: Sausages are pork. You can get turkey sausage and other stuff, but if you’re going for Oktoberfest, hot Italian-style or really anything traditional, you’re looking at ground-up pig. That means two things: That I am immediately marginalizing the Muslim and Jewish elements of my audience today, and that the rest of you had better make sure you cook these things properly. So, do not think that you can just take them out of the wrapper and throw them on the grill, unless you’re willing to wait for a long time or you’re keen on a pet tapeworm.

That said, “proper cooking” does not have to translate to “grilling until meat transmutes to hardened clay.” A simple, easy step can be introduced that will thoroughly cook, flavor and even plump up the sausages before you grill them: Boiling.

Yeah, I know. Boiled sausages look like a vampire’s colon, all pale and grody and jiggly. It doesn’t have to be that way, though, if you do more than simply stick them in a pot full of water. Oktoberfest sausages boil really well with beer, and even better with the old skunky beer that you’d rather not have to drink; honey garlic sausages benefit really well from whatever fresh herbs you throw in the water, particularly the strong ones like fennel.

Again, boiling anything isn’t quick, but the results are well worth it: The pork is flavored and safe, you get a little prep time for whatever garnishes you want to get together, and your kitchen ends up smelling fantastic. If for some reason you’re actually hosting people (meaning that you are way ahead of me and god damn your good fortune), you cannot underestimate the value of an aromatic kitchen — smell alone is enough for people to declare your permanent supremacy as a cook.

Overcooking is a bit of a hazard, so I turned to my Bible, The New Best Recipe, to find out the proper approach… and was stunned to find that they had no information whatsoever for me. I should have known that the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook would come through for me instead:

1. In a deep skillet, fill 2 inches of water and bring to a boil. Add sausage and reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
2. For smaller sausage, drain water and brown the meat for 2-5 minutes, turning often.
3. For 3/4 inch or larger, transfer to grill and brown over medium heat for 7-10 minutes or until juices run clear, turning as necessary.

Yesterday’s meal was garnished with three items: Grated parmesano reggiano, chopped Vidalia onions, and sweet yellow mustard. I picked up a couple of fresh submarine rolls on the way home, which were worlds better than the mass market sausage buns I find at the supermarket. The freshly-grated cheese added a strong flavor to match the hot sausage, while the onions and mustard added some sweetness to balance out the dairy-porky funkiness.

One important note: If you put ketchup on your sausage, you’re some kind of Communist. You can say all you like about lycopene and tomato and sweetness and whatever, it’s just that… well, you’re clearly a Soviet. Ketchup on a sausage simply isn’t done, everyone knows that, and the only people who wouldn’t are foreign agents from a nefarious alien power, clearly untrained in the finer delicacies of civilization.

So, don’t be afraid to do something simple, and do it right. Done badly, and you’ll reveal yourself as a Communist; but done properly, you end up with a tasty meal that you’ll miss when it’s over.

Okay, I’ve been delinquent for a couple of weeks, for various reasons. Consequently I will give you not one, not two, but three recipes to atone for it. To wit, tonight’s menu:

• Chicken parmesan sandwich on ciabatta
• Cranberry-Clementine spinach salad
• Sweet poppyseed dressing
• Goats Do Roam, 2005

Before I go on, I should note that despite my failure to report on it, I have been keeping up on my Sunday dinners for the last couple of weeks. After the spaghetti puttanesca, I actually visited with my parents to have a Sunday dinner with them; last week, I took full advantage of a friend’s recipe for Moroccan chicken to feed a date (with a girl! I know! I can’t believe it either!). Neither situation lent themselves very easily to photography — not without confusing and alarming people — but now we’re caught up, and everything is okay.

The chicken parmesan recipe comes from my mother, who credits the Kraft foods website as her source. In fact, even when you get past the recommendations to make everything with something that rolls off of the Kraft assembly line, there are some surprising and stupidly easy recipes to be found there. I would recommend it, particularly to someone who has about a twenty minute window between arriving home from the gym and resorting to eating light sour cream with bread crumbs in it.

Someone like me, in other words.

So, bless Mom’s heart, here’s her complete recipe:

Whoever cooks at your house will love this. It’s fast, easy and really tasty and you only dirty ONE dish. We got two dinners out of it and we both loved it. You can prepare it ahead and just fling it in the oven when you’re ready.

Easy Chicken Parmesan

700 ml Pasta Sauce (1 large can - Hunts, etc.)

6 Tbsp. Grated Parmesan Cheese

6 Small Chicken Breasts (about 750 grams or 1-1/2 Lbs.)

1-1/2 Cups Grated Mozzarella

Preheat over to 375 degrees.

Place sauce in a 9 x 13 baking dish. Stir 1/4 cup of parmesan into the sauce.

Add chicken, turning to coat both sides. Cover with foil.

Bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil.

Top with remaining parmesan and mozzarella cheeses.

Continue to bake until cheeses melt and sauce is bubbly - about 5 minutes or so.

Serve over cooked pasta.

*** Note: If using larger breasts, cut in half lengthwise. You can also just open them up down the middle to flatten them out.

Because I can’t leave well enough alone, I made a couple of changes to this:

You could argue this is because I wasn’t in the mood to boil pasta, but honestly I just wanted to have something that I could eat in front of the television. It’s messy, and man is it ever cheesy, and just about perfect to eat in front of a surprisingly good football day.

The cranberry-clementine salad is one that I owe to my ex-girlfriend, the Dental Hygenist. I used to make it for her all the time, though because I’m obsessive pleaser I would use fresh oranges instead of the ones from the tin, and I added dried cranberries to offset the nuts.

Ingredients are simple, but the trick is to balance things out:

• Pine nuts (though you could easily do almond slivers, or even walnuts)
• Baby spinach, now that it’s not poisonous any more and you can buy it by the bag again
• Dried cranberries
• Clementine oranges (fresh in season; tinned out of season)

When I made this for her, I did insanely careful things like wash the oranges to get rid of all the pith — and while they do look prettier, frankly it doesn’t change the flavor much. In truth you just want to make sure that the cranberries and nuts are in roughly equal proportion, and then add the oranges as you like.

Raisins would be a bit weird with spinach, I think, but if you’re feeling truly experimental you could hazard into other dried fruits: Cherries and blueberries are available in the same places you’d find dried cranberries. You might notice, however, that they are sickeningly expensive, so I’d probably reserve those kinds of ingredients for a special occasion.

Besides, dried cranberries taste pretty good on your cereal the next day, and spare you the sinking feeling of pouring $25/kg. dried cherries on your All Bran.

I learned how to make the dressing over the course of the same activity (that is, making dinner for the ex), though this particular edition is a little sweeter than others I’ve made:

Half a cup of sugar is going to seem like a hell of a lot when you pour it into the bowl with everything else. Keep in mind, though, that when I was trying to clean out my fridge when I first moved into my house, three people recommended apple cider vinegar as a cleaning agent. Let me say that again: Apple cider vinegar is an effective cleaning agent for stainless steel appliances. Don’t worry about the sugar.

All the same, don’t be too liberal with the dressing, either. You have little seedless oranges and dried fruit there to help you with sweetness, so you don’t need to worry too much about strong flavors.

To accompany all of this, I went with a wine that I know and love. Goats Do Roam is a cute name for a very good, popular red wine from South Africa that boasts a “Rhône-style blend but with a Cape flavour.” It plays very well with the chicken, settles down the mixes of sweet and bitter in the salad, and is more or less perfect with a dessert of fruit and the leftover mountains of cheese I bought to make all this.

You really can’t lose with this one. It makes a hell of a lot of food that you can use in a lot of ways — on a good absorbant bun in a sandwich, over pasta in a more traditional dish, and if you’re feeling really creative (read: lazy) you could chop the chicken, throw it all in a pot with some vegetables and make a soup. The dressing keeps forever, and even if you don’t feel like screwing around peeling oranges or investing in cranberries, it works just as well over plain spinach or any other vegetables you feel like.

Good food that you can eat all week, and turn into all kinds of other goodness. What more can a single body ask for?

I was talking to my boss, who is the kind of cook I always hope to be, and I mentioned what I’d made for dinner. Of course, I couldn’t remember the name.

“Starts with a p… puh? Puhhhh…”

“Oh!” she said, “Puttanesca! You know what that means, right? Slutty.”

“I’m… sorry?”

“Yeah, it means ’slutty.’ It’s kind of weird, they all mean different things. Arrabiatta means upset or irritated, and puttanesca means slutty.”

I laughed, and paused. “I wonder why it got that name?”

“Maybe something to do with all the strong flavors,” she answered. I was just staring at her, so she went on, “Strong flavors? Slutty? I don’t gotta draw you a map, I hope.”

I think I am going to enjoy my leftovers tonight with a whole new appreciation for Italian cuisine.

The menu:

• Spaghetti Puttanesca (source, The New Best Recipe, pp 248-250)
• “Middle Eastern” brand pita bread (no kidding)
• President’s Choice Roasted Red pepper dip
• Rocca delle Macie Chianti Classico, 2004

And since I enjoy them so much, here’s another list, this time of things that I have never purchased or even attempted to prepare in my kitchen before:

• Anchovies
• Capers
• Kalamata olives

…which basically means all of the ingredients that give a puttanesca sauce its very ballsy flavor. I don’t mean that it tastes like balls literally, though it might have if I’d been concentrating any less on it, but rather that I’m extraordinarily timid when it comes to dealing with heavy-duty flavors — and even moreso when I’m dealing with so many things that would invariably conflict.

Also there’s a lot going on when you make a sauce, and it ought to be said that while The New Best Recipe takes its job very seriously about telling you the Best Way To Do Something, it is very important to remember that “Best” and “Simplest” are not always the same thing.

For example, the recipe notes:

The pasta and sauce cook in just about the same amount of time. If you like the fruitiness of extra-virgin olive oil, toss 1 tablespoon into the sauced pasta before serving.

Yeah, which is great. Except you’d better have your shit together making the sauce, or else you’re going to spend the whole time panicking that your noodles are going to merge into a brick or else dissolve entirely. I know it’s invigorating to have a deadline, but it’s not the most fun when you’re trying a recipe for the first time with ingredients you’ve never used before.

Happily, all’s well that ends well, and this turned out very well. The anchovies and garlic practically melted into the sauce and gave it a full base, while the capers, olives and tomatoes all brought bright strong flavors, and the red pepper flakes gave it a solid heat throughout. The recipe didn’t suggest a garnish, but it could probably be well-served with crumbled feta and black pepper, just to make it prettier.

Thank God I picked a bold wine, though. If you’re going to attempt anything full-flavored like this, it’s going to tackle most wines and kick the crap out of them — a good, full-bodied wine is what you’ll need to go with it. I’ve had the Rocca Delle Macie chianti before, and it has the added benefit of being just as drinkable after dinner, when you’re writing on your weblog and watching the World Series.

If I’d had my act together sooner, this would be an extremely easy recipe that you could easily use to feed a dinner party with relatively little effort. All you need to make sure is that you have some of the more exotic ingredients on-hand (not everyone keeps anchovies on-hand all the time), and you can easily pop out a novel, memorable and enjoyably different spaghetti dinner than your guests might ever expect.

The menu:

• Roast turkey, tomato, green onion, sauteed mushrooms, and feta on rosemary foccaccia; topped with feta and rosemary, sage and thyme mayonnaise
• “The Wedge of Light” roasted potato wedges (source: Looneyspoons, p.141)
• 20 Bees Chardonnay, 2005
• Baked apples (source: Simple Baked Apples, Allrecipes.com)

I had a bag of white turkey meat left over from Thanksgiving last weekend, which probably has at least a few of you shuddering right now. I have had the experience of holding into turkey for too long, I have known the eye-watering stench that leaps up and punches your nose when you open the bag, I have fought the battle of clearing the air again afterwards.

Happily, the turkey passed the nose test this morning, so I knew I had at least one more good day out of it. The question was, what to do with just enough poultry to make a couple of good sandwiches, but not enough to make anything else in the slightest?

My usual dietary source of turkey is a little deli near where I work, the tiny but incredibly delicious Agincourt Bakery & Cafe. For about six bucks, you can buy a sandwich there that’s as thick as your arm and as big around as your head. Made by a little Italian woman who will start building your sandwich, observe you maternally, conclude that you are too skinny, and then double the meat portion, the food there makes me sad that I was born with only one stomach.

Tragically, I don’t have even one maternal Italian woman living in my house, so it was up to me to pick up the game while I was at the grocery store. The only thing I had to add to the usual shopping was a loaf of foccaccia and some feta cheese, and since my local food depot caters to the Italian demographic, I had a good set to pick from. The rest — the tomatoes, green onion, mayo, various herbs — were all on-hand already or kicking around the vegetable drawer, begging for sweet release.

As for the side dish, if you don’t have Looneyspoons, Crazy Plates or any of those series, you really owe yourself the time to look them over. They are fraught with completely cheese-dick humor, and it’s totally embarrassing to recite the names of the recipes; on the other hand, they’re all very healthy, and they make a special point of illustrating how to compensate for a lack of fat with a wealth of flavor. The potato wedges have been a standby with my family since they got a hold of the books, and so I figured they were worth a try.

They were worth a try, and good God, so was the sandwich. With the oven hot already from the potatoes, I stuck the sandwich in for about five minutes just to toast the bread lightly and warm the sandwich, which was well worth the wait. I sliced it four ways, and ended up wrapping half of it. Because I’m a total glutton, I had the other half of the whole thing tonight; over the course of the week, though, I expect I’ll end up eating only quarters.

The wine turned out to be really good, incidentally. I know I had expressed my doubts about it earlier, particularly because I don’t love Chardonnay all that much to begin with. It ended up being sweet, light and flavorful though, without the oak-barrel burn that I loathe so completely.

I don’t actually eat dessert all that often, but I bought some Macintosh apples last week for 99 cents a pound, which probably should have been a clue. They were mushy and gross, getting mushier and grosser through the week, and so today it was either throw them away or find something useful to do with them. Baked apples are a pretty easy recipe that doesn’t add too much more than sugar, and it’s pleasingly autumnal to have the house full of the smell of cinnamon, sage, cloves and apples as they bubble away in the oven.

The apple recipe is dead easy and takes about six minutes to throw together, if you’ve got everything in the pantry already. I screwed it up, so it came out looking more like baked barf than browned apples (and thus no picture - I love you too much). All the same, though, they taste like apple pie filling in all the right ways. You know the only thing more pleasant than smelling sweetened apples and spices floating from the kitchen? Happily eating them while you’re watching the baseball game.

Happy Sunday, and I hope you’re eating well.