What to do with leftover tomato sauce? Make a soup!

Fall has arrived this week in Chicago and I am stoked about it! Fall is my FAVORITE season. The clothes, the food, decorating for Halloween, it all gets me very excited. Of course, Chicago autumns do not last for very long so I try to maximize all I can get from this oh so romantic season. I had so much leftover tomato sauce from my weekend tomato adventure that I knew I had to make a hearty fall soup to kick off the season. 

My recipes are never exact and I tend to just use what I have in the fridge and make it up as I go. Chop three or four carrots roughly for that "rustic hearty" look, thinly slice a zucchini, mince about a tablespoon of thyme, peel and smash three or four garlic cloves, and chop half an onion. You'll need a can of cannellini beans, rinsed, about a cup of small pasta of your choice, a few ladles of the tomato sauce, and a carton of the lowest sodium chicken broth you can find. If you have a leftover Parmesan rind (once they're used keep the rind in the freezer for this very use) use that and a handful of Parmesan for seasoning. I also like heat so I add red pepper flakes. If you don't have the fresh tomato sauce, no worries, either use bottled sauce or canned tomatoes.

Soften the onion in a drizzle of olive oil over medium low heat.

Toss in the carrots and and saute.

Toss in the garlic, thyme,  and red pepper flakes and saute until fragrant. Sauteing herbs and spices helps the flavors to bloom. Drizzle some balsamic vinegar to scrape up the fond at the bottom of the pan.

Add the carton of chicken broth, tomato sauce, Parmesan rind, and bring to a simmer. 

Add the zucchini, the beans, and the pasta and simmer until pasta is cooked. Once soup is finished remove the Parmesan rind and the garlic cloves, add a handful of grated Parmesan and salt to taste. Drizzle some balsamic vinegar over the soup to brighten the flavors. I find that adding an acid at the end of the cooking process brightens up and deepens to flavors in a way that nothing else can.

 The flavors of this soup actually get better each day but the pasta will end up soaking up some of the broth, so when you reheat it for leftovers be sure to add a little water to your bowl. This will not affect the flavors at all. The best side for this dish is Parmesan crostini: sliced French bread drizzled with olive oil, garlic, and Parmesan and baked at 450 until toasted. This soup is sure to warm your soul and melt away your stresses.

Slurping Turtle

Last weekend, Jessie and I went to Slurping Turtle in River North for dinner, which has been open for less than a year. It's Japanese comfort food and I'd heard recently that they have good ramen. We decided to go early because I had also heard there can be long waits on the weekend, but we arrived at around 5:15, right after work, and the place had basically just opened. However, the service was incredible and our servers gave awesome advice on what to order so we mostly stuck with that and they did not disappoint. In fact, I got to talking to one of our servers about our recent trip to Big Star and he highly recommended Antique Taco in Wicker Park, which just opened this summer, and which I've been dying to try. Hopefully, that will be an upcoming blog post!

Turtles are a symbol of longevity in Japan and slurping is encouraged when eating ramen because you are supposed to get both broth and noodle with each bite.

This drink, whose name fails me, has an egg white in it and grapefruit and rosemary, but the rosemary cannot be detected. It tastes mostly like grapefruit juice, strongly spiked grapefruit juice.

This drink, whose name also escapes me, is much like the aforementioned drink in that it tastes like pure lemon juice, strongly spiked lemon juice. Stick with beer or wine if you eat here.

This is hamachi tuna tartare in taro root taco shells with hamachi roe. These are incredible and I cannot wait to go back to have them again. The crunchiness of the taco shell with the softness of the tuna and the salty soy sauce marinade really works well together.

I'd read that their duck fat fried chicken was a star on the menu and it does not disappoint. It is very rich and, thankfully, a very small dish for that reason.

This is the pork belly snack, which is really tender pork belly on top of a steamed bun with a pickle on top. Texture in Japanese cooking is just as important as flavor and this dish is texturally off. The steamed bun and the soft pork belly just scream for something crisp and the pickle does not deliver.

These Brussels sprouts are so salty and meaty and crispy and the addition of the frizzled shallots is heavenly. This is another dish I will be going back for.

The tonkotsu ramen is a pork broth with braised pork shoulder, mustard greens, wood ear mushrooms, egg noodles, and those oval things, which are fish cakes, and happen to taste more like nothing than like fish. This is another winner. The mushrooms are cut in similar shape to the noodles so they take on the same texture and mouthfeel.

The an mitsu is a Japanese sundae of green tea ice cream, red bean paste, fruit, and agar agar cubes. The agar agar cubes (basically flavorless Jello) overwhelmed the dish. I get that they are there for texture but they detract from the dish for me.

We also split three macaroons: yuzu, which is a citrus fruit, caramel soy, and red bean. The yuzu is by far the best macaroon I've ever tasted. The others just made me long for the yuzu!

Cooking lesson: fresh tomato sauce

I spend the entire year anticipating tomato season; the kind you get at the grocery store, shipped from thousands of miles away, and which end up being watery and mealy, are hardly worth the label tomato, so I rarely get grocery store tomatoes. That means, for spaghetti sauces, I use canned tomatoes, and bide my time until late summer when the juiciest, meatiest, tastiest tomatoes come out from hiding. Because the season is going to be ending soon, I decided to savor it by making off with an abundance of Roma tomatoes from the Lincoln Square farmer's market last week with the intent to turn them into a sauce. So, dear reader, let me bestow upon you my love of cooking by giving you your first ever Chef Shelley lesson.

My tomatoes still had dirt on them so I washed them thoroughly and then set them out to dry.

Set a large pot of water on the stove to boil and then make shallow slits in the form of Xs on the bottom of each tomato.

Once the water is boiling and all the tomatoes have slits in them, drop them a few at a time into the water and let them sit there for approximately 1 minute or until you see the skin starting to peel back.

When all tomatoes are removed and cool enough to handle. Start peeling off the skin. This part is really messy so wear an apron!

Once all the skin is removed and discarded you may give the tomatoes a rough chop. No need to be precise because they're going to break down anyway in the cooking process. Make sure to place the colander over a bowl so you can collect all the flavorful tomato juice!

These are the ingredients I use in my fresh tomato sauce. Anchovies, dear reader, may be scary but once they are minced and melted in the pan, they impart a salty, meaty flavor known as umami and provide greater depth of flavor. Anchovies do not taste "fishy" at all, but if you are too freaked out by them, leave them out!

Mince about 5 or 6 anchovies, half of a carrot, 4 or 5 garlic cloves, and chop half a yellow onion.

Heat olive oil over medium low and toss the onion in the pan.

Once onions are sweated - you don't necessarily want to caramelize them - toss in the anchovies and carrot and turn the heat to low (if you haven't already). Once the anchovies are melted and the carrots are deeper in color, drizzle a little balsamic vinegar in the pan and scrape up the fond (browned bits) on the bottom of the pan.

Add a 10 ounce can of tomato paste and stir it in. Let cook about three or four minutes until it has deepened in color. I add red pepper flakes at this point for heat.

Add the tomato juice that has accumulated in the bowl beneath the chopped tomatoes.


Dump the colander of chopped tomatoes into the pan and squish them with a potato masher.



 Because the tomatoes are so juicy, the sauce can be a bit watery, so simmer the sauce with the lid off for an hour to an hour and a half so that it reduces. Be sure to stir while simmering. And once you're ready to eat it, toss some pasta (linguine is my favorite) into salted boiling water and cook. To the sauce, add some salt, pepper, a handful of parmesan, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Then toss with the pasta and eat!


I like to sprinkle some goat cheese on my spaghetti to add tang and creaminess to the dish.

Hash House A Go Go

One of my best friends celebrated her birthday a couple weeks ago with a Saturday brunch at the newly opened Hash House A Go Go in the Gold Coast. This restaurant has been around for about a decade in San Diego and has expanded only to Las Vegas and Chicago. Its forte is "twisted farm food," except nowhere in the restaurant or on the menu is it explained exactly which farms this food comes from. In a city teeming with farm to table restaurants detailing exactly where each component to a dish is sourced, it's hard to believe the people who run this restaurant are anything but poseurs. But, I digress. I arrived at this place before anyone else did, so I did what any normal person would do, settled in at the bar and asked for this:

A meal in itself, this is the BLT Bloody Mary (that set me back 13 bucks), and comes with a slice of bacon, tomato, lettuce, and a piece of bread. But, as amazing as this looks, I've had better Bloody Marys (hello, Joe's Stone Crab). The bacon was obviously made ahead of time, the bread also toasted ahead of time, and the Mary itself? Bland, watered down, one dimensional flavor. Looks can be deceiving.

They are famous for their sage fried chicken so I knew I had to get that. I ended up ordering the fried chicken with maple reduction, 2 eggs, bacon mashed potatoes, and biscuit.

And this is what arrived. Glutton! Party of one! An explosion of food on a plate - portions that could easily feed a family of four. I will admit the flavor of maple syrup over chicken is kind of awesome but I couldn't taste any sage in the chicken itself and the "bacon" mashed potatoes were merely mashed potatoes with two strips of bacon laid on top. The biscuit was overworked and too floury and I'm still not quite sure what the watery tomatoes (in peak tomato season no less) were supposed to add. The flavors of the dish just weren't quite there - no zing.

The birthday girl, Becky, ordered the S'more Mocha, which came with grilled marshmallows and a shot of espresso. She loved it.

Nina ordered the smoked salmon hash, which literally came in one of those Lodge cast iron skillets - yes this is for one person!

This place is also known for their fried chicken and waffles, which comes with frizzled leeks and is piled as high as it can be without tipping over. Every dish is impaled with a tall stalk of rosemary. Yes, this place is twisted.

Big Star

One of my favorite places in Chicago, not only for the food, but for the atmosphere, as well, is Big Star. Built a couple years ago in the old Pontiac Cafe space in Wicker Park, it has quickly become one of the most crowded places in town. Waits can be really long (we recently waited two hours for a table) but we came straight from work, put our name in at 5, gave the host our number, walked around to the awesome stores on Milwaukee Ave and sipped on some cocktails at nearby Rodan. We were seated by 7 - perfect timing for our bellies, which were ready to be filled with delicious tacos.

Becky and I had drinks at Rodan around the corner from Big Star while we waited to be seated. This bar has been a favorite since I was the tender age of 21. Normally, I order beer wherever I go, but cocktails are made so well in Chicago right now, I had to try the Ginger Hibiscus Margarita, which was fantastic and strong. Becky had the Lychee Royale, which has been on the menu as long as I've been coming here. It's lychee juice and Cava, a Spanish sparkling wine.

Big Star has a pretty small menu, which means they can focus more on doing everything well. I've tried almost every single thing on it, except for that hot dog, which is on deck.

My favorite drink to order here is a chelada, an ice filled glass with a salted rim, lime juice, topped off with Tecate. It is a pretty refreshing drink for a hot summer day and super easy to make at home (which I have many times).

Since I've been coming here there is only one kind of taco I crave and that is the taco al pastor. Al pastor, or 'shepherd style,' is a Mexican dish with middle-eastern influences. Seasoned pork is roasted on a vertical spit all day. Usually, there's a pineapple at the top of the spit and as the spit heats up, the juices run down the meat tenderizing and seasoning it. It is by far my favorite Mexican meal and I crave it pretty much every other day. Not going to lie, I dream about this stuff.

If you ever find yourself in a taqueria with a vertical spit order this on corn tortillas with cilantro and onions. You will not be disappointed.

They make great frijoles charros (stewed pinto beans with bacon and poblano peppers), too.

I am a sucker for anything pickled. You can get this whole bowl of tangy, spicy pickled vegetables on the side for an extra buck. Done and done.

Queso fundido, a melted cheese, poblano, chorizo fondue, is a must.

Kickin' back on one of the best patios in the city is the best way to spend a late Chicago summer night.