Playing ‘Chopped’ at Home
I love a good cooking show and with 50ish seasons under its belt, Chopped qualifies for me. Racing against the clock is something I would never enforce upon myself at home, but I have most definitely stood in front of the fridge and wondered what I could make out of the clusterf*ck of items looking back at me. The category for me always being ‘healthy, good protein, comforting, and won’t give me heartburn’. Usually, one of the main triggers for heartburn (especially at night) is something acidic like tomato based sauce.
Recently, in an effort to streamline my grocery spending a little, I signed up for Hungry Root. Pros, you can choose your choosies. Cons, if you forget to take the extra step to save your choosies, you end up with their suggested meal plan. Granted, they come up with this meal plan based on a survey you take when signing up, but I’m that annoying person that never wants to follow the recipe completely and instead tailor things to my own whims. So anyway, my box arrives and it has the components for a recipe involving pasta with marinara sauce. I was dismayed.
My saving grace ended up being a container of ricotta cheese that I had bought earlier in the week for making breakfast toasts! I googled “marinara sauce and ricotta” to see how people usually incorporate these two ingredients. It seemed like most people would dollop on the ricotta after preparing the pasta and sauce, but I had visions of a creamy marinara sauce. Anyway, I cooked the pasta while I simmered onion, garlic, thyme, and my marinara with some snap peas. Then combined the two in the warm pan and mixed in my ricotta. I topped it off with the fresh herbs at my disposal (cilantro and mint). The end result? It was SO F*CKING GOOD. This will happen again. The sweet salty ricotta mellowed the acid of the tomato for my sensitive tummy, it was very comforting, and I did not get any heartburn or acid reflux.
If desired, I can approximate the recipe, but to be honest I hardly ever work off of recipes, so my measurements are estimates at best. In any case, I now will not shy away from tomato based sauces at night as much as I used to, so long as I can have a hand in mellowing it out a little!
