Accordingly, I am posting a recipe for a universal entree sauce. I have been working on permutations and uses of this sauce for 15 years. Please let me know how yours turns out.
The basic:
1 Medium sized eggplant 2 medium sized yellow onions olive oil 1 of those little cans of tomato paste 1 of those medium sized cans of crushed tomato
Dice the onions and cube the eggplant. It's ok to leave the eggplant skin on. Saute the onions in olive oil, maybe 1/4 cup, 4 tablespoons, whatever works, buy don't be tight: I lost 40 lbs and never gave up olive oil. When the onions are turning transparent, add the eggplant. Throw in some kind of italianish seasoning such as oregano, garlic powder. Fresh spices are always nice but you don't need them. Hot peppers if you like them. Add 1 cup water and cover. Cook on medium heat till everything is very gloppy and cooked down (20-30 minutes, depending on what you consider a "medium heat"), stirring occasionally and adding water if necessary to prevent burning. Stir in the little can of tomato paste when the eggplant and onions are gloppy. Add the can of crushed tomatoes. Cook for an hour and serve over al dente pasta, preferably though not obligatorily a heavier type pasta like rigatoni, and it's usually a good idea to go with an Italian import. Italy has been certified as the Least Effective Imperialist Capitalist Country Since the Fall of Rome by the First International Congress of the Committee on the Subjective Evaluation of Competing Imperialisms and Genocides. Money spent on supporting its economy is relatively neutral, helps to reduce one of the world's most spectacular national debts and does not effectively support current or prospective hegemons.
The sauce is better if you make it the day before, refrigerate and reheat.
Though the sauce works well with meats (see below), the best pasta results are with a strictly vegetarian version.
Fancier versions:
Add pitted olives and/or mushrooms
Fish:
Take a white fish like scrod put it in a frying pan and submerge in sauce. Heat medium low till sauce is hot and fish cooked. Best with the basic, not with shrooms and olives.
Pork:
Add generous quantities of capers to "the basic" recipe above. Submerge pork chops in sauce and cook on medium low heat till thoroughly cooked. Thin pork chops, thick pork chops, whatever.
Polenta:
The basic sauce goes well over polenta.
Gnocchi:
Also works over gnocchi.
Beef:
Never tried it over steaks n such. Hamburger type meatballs mixed in with basic sauce alter flavor for the worst. If you must have meatballs prepare and serve separately.
Chicken:
The basic sauce works very well with chicken breasts.
The Universal Red Sauce for Reds (URSR) is the most practical thing that any of you will ever download from lbo-talk. Years after you have forgotten who was more fascist, and who had it right on the Cambodian versus the Soviet versus the AmerIndian genocide, years after you have moved on to other things, you will be eating this sauce. It is easy to prepare in mass quantities for planning those social occasions when you have to feed a committee to overthrow this or that and don't want to spend too much. It also takes well to freezing. Moreover tomatoes are in favor as anti-carcinogens.
Testimonials:
"I fed this sauce to an unsuspecting group of eight Republican den mothers, and three of them voted Democratic in the next off-year election and never told their husbands." --M.A., Orange County, Calif.
"This sauce, served over rice, tripled our daily tunneling capacity during the American bombings." --V.C., Da Nang, Viet Nam.
"I couldn't have written the Little Red Book without this sauce." --M.Z. (aka MTT), Beijing, China
"Cette sauce, fortement influencee par la ratatouille, est neanmoins a l'origine de la conception proudhonienne de l'etat." --JPS, Paris, France
"During the occupation of the General Motors facilities in the 1930s we never would have made it through without this sauce." --JL, Detroit, Michigan
"Non l'avrei giammai creduto: una contribuzioni originale dagli Americani all'arte della pasta," CI, Genova, Italy.
"It was the only thing I ate while writing State and Revolution." V.I.L., Moscow.
"Kein Scheiss, diese." -KM, London.
"Nowell has convincingly made the case that autarchy is not feasible as long as there is a need for international trade to permit the making of this sauce, known popularly as the URSR. However, it is not, because of that, a recipe for interdependence and exploitation. To the contrary, the sauce has fueled redistributive Keynesianism, social democracy, and on occasion outright seizures of the means of production. I know of no sauce which so persuasively makes the case for social equity while at the same time preventing revisionism and social deviations such as anarchism."--FE, London.
"Several prisoners who ate this sauce escaped before execution during the Cinco de Mayo events in Spain. That is why you do not see them in the painting by Goya." --AS, art historian, Princeton, New Jersey
"The Chairman of Exxon, having been surreptiously fed some of this sauce while at a diner, had to be forcibly restrained by other board members from redistributing corporate shares to the people; he said that it was they in effect who had paid for the erection of the company, as consumers, and it was therefore to them that the company belonged. Only a strict diet of cheeseburgers and a prolonged stay and shock therapy in a sanitorium was able to make him shake this belief, and even so, he became a member of the ACLU and leaked incriminating documents to the press." --BL, Corporate Historian, Corpus Christi, Texas
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
Fax 518-442-5298