Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about the re-emergence of red sauce season, with two recipes and eating notes.
From Pale Soup to Red Sauce
After a few weeks of pale soup suddenly it was red season again –
I gradually stopped cooking with chorizo a couple of years ago after over-exposing myself (partly due to late 2000s ubiquity in UK supermarket products). Then several times over the winter my partner’s mother made a soup with tomato, butter beans, and chorizo that made me re-think my accidental boycott. The rich tomato stood up to the chorizo, which seasoned the soup without dominating it. I was reminded of what a delicious and useful ingredient chorizo can be. The soup also reminded me of a piquant pasta sauce that my mother makes with onions, chorizo, and black olives and tomatoes. So, a few weeks ago I made the following –
Chorizo, tomato, and onion pasta
½ large onion (or one medium one), sliced thinly
2 garlic cloves finely chopped
2 small, dried chillies
4 inches of firm chorizo, diced
1 tin plum tomatoes
1 tablespoon capers
I softened the onions first in 3 tablespoons of olive oil (but didn’t cook the onions down too much – I didn’t want them to caramelise and wanted them to add body to the dish), then added the diced chorizo and cooked for a few minutes so the oil went red, then added the garlic and chillies and stirred them in the oil for a couple of minutes, then added the plum tomatoes, squashing them in the pan with a wooden spoon and cooked for 20 minutes. I finished the dish with capers and seasoned with salt and pepper. If I’d have had olives, I would have used them instead of capers, but I still enjoyed the capers. I tossed the sauce with the pasta (100g dried weight each) and a little pasta cooking water in the frying pan, over the heat – and then served to Sam it on a tray with a bowl of grated parmesan and a salad of little gem lettuce. It was Valentine’s Day and he had covid and was isolating. The bowl of hot red sauce was as close as we could get.
I was happy with the method and flavours of the dish and soon wanted to make something like it again. A few days later we’d run out of chorizo, so I made another red sauce with the same method and a different source of salty richness –
In 2021 I made a pasta with tuna, cinnamon and mint that was inspired by two recipes in Mary Taylor Simeti’s book, Sicilian Food – recorded here on my blog when it was still a blog. I really liked the flavours then – the subtle sweet roundness added by cinnamon – and decided to bring these flavours into the picture of the new dish. But to keep the saltier qualities of the new sauce, I added anchovies to make up for the lack of intense umami of chorizo. And this time I did have some olives.
Tuna ragu with cinnamon and olives
I’ve made this twice now. It’s tonnes of sauce for 2 people and plenty for 4 people with 100g pasta (dried weight) per person.
1 X 200g tin tuna in oil (150g drained weight)
5 anchovies, roughly chopped
1 cinnamon stick
1 medium onion, finely sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 small, dried chillies
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tin plum tomatoes
70g pitted green olives
Soften onion with the cinnamon stick in 3 tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of salt. When they are soft and translucent, but not browned or cooked down add the anchovies and break up with your wooden spoon in the oil. Add the garlic and chilli and cook for a minute until fragrant but not brown. Add the tomato paste and stir into the mixture for a minute. Add the tinned tomatoes, break up with a wooden spoon. Then add the tuna and its oil and break up the pieces with the wooden spoon so it’s well distributed in the sauce. Simmer just bubbling for 15-20 minutes. Stir in the olives. Season with salt and pepper to taste. It can happily sit for a rest while you cook the pasta. When ready to serve, put a low-medium heat under the sauce, add cooked pasta to the pan with a ladle or so of its cooking water and toss well until it’s all coated. Then serve immediately.
We didn’t have parmesan with this – though each to their own!
Eating Notes
Sam had covid for eight days and isolated so it became my job to deliver trays of food to his door for the week (as mentioned above!) I take a lot of pleasure in composing meals in the yellow frame of the tray – a way to amuse and delight and feel like I am doing some good. Perhaps the most fun was the first one I made: a cup of miso soup, a bowl with rice cooked with onion and carrot, fish fingers and a hard boiled egg with Dutch brand satay sauce, a small dish of pickles, a small dish with Kewpie mayo and sriracha.
The next day for dinner – also delivered on a tray – I made a dish of chicken thighs with rosemary, garlic, vermouth and some tomatoes, finished with butter. First I lightly browned eight whole peeled garlic cloves in 2 tablespoons of olive oil, removed them from the oil, then cooked the chicken thighs (seasoned with salt and pepper) skin side down until the skin was really bronzed and the fat rendered. Then I added the garlic cloves back in with a sprig of fresh rosemary, then added a generous glug of dry vermouth and scraped the bottom of the pan and shook the pan, added and a handful of tomatoes and simmered gently until the chicken was cooked through. I finished the sauce with a bit of butter and a small squeeze of lemon juice and salt and pepper. We had it with potatoes that were cooked in a bit of liquid and olive oil in the oven so they were sort of squidgy. And then a salad of little gem lettuce dressed with lemon juice, wine vinegar, olive oil salt and pepper.
Potato and leek soup with cheese and tomato on toast, half an orange, peeled and sliced. Fizzy water.
An ideal salad of chicory, radicchio, sliced pear, peeled raw almonds with a lemony dressing at The Eagle pub in Farringdon shared with my friend Rebecca. Then a plate of gnocchi with some duck confit.
Two cinnamon buns from recently opened Potting Shed Bakery in East Bergholt. Very good! Soft and and moist and well seasoned.