Moving, cheats and getting food on the table

Homemade Marina Sauce

Unlike many things, moving doesn’t get easier the more you do it. If anything, it gets harder. As much as we love waking up every day in our new old house, life is still makeshift on a daily basis. Besides living among not always well-labeled boxes here, we’re still vacating our apartment of nine years. We’re working around the contractor finishing up things. We’re dealing with disappearing cats when the contractor leaves doors open (the cat was found—in a closed vanity drawer, of course). And we’re getting up and going to work every day. So instead of a fresh recipe this week, you’ll be getting a confessional post of sorts.

The recipes you typically find here focus on fresh, simple (or frozen or canned, but still simple) ingredients. That is how we mostly try to cook and eat. But we’ve been doing more takeout these days. Never mind that we now live dangerously close to Chicago’s Chinatown, with some of the best regional Chinese cuisines you’ll find in the United States—we’ve already discovered a decent takeout-only place three blocks away. With a wealth of wonderful Mexican food options all over our new neighborhood, we’re basing decisions on proximity and speed.

We are indeed cooking too. Often, though, we’re doing cheats and cutting corners. For the first time in more than a decade, there is store-bought salad dressing in our fridge. Yeah, making a salad dressing only takes a couple of minutes, but right now, those couple of minutes are better spent painting baseboard, installing shelving, hanging art on walls, leveling and loading bookcases, arguing/negotiating with the contractor.

The basic, made-from-scratch marinara sauce in the photo above? It’s delicious and pretty easy and quick to make. I posted it here about a year and a half ago. I offered to make it the other night, even though our to-do list for the night was impressively long. What we opted for instead was a cheat I used to do years ago. I start with a jar of store-bought red sauce—the Classico brand is our favorite—then keep adding stuff until its own mother wouldn’t know it. Red wine, canned diced tomatoes, Italian sausage that I sauté quickly, tomato paste, frozen spinach… Not sure how much time this approach actually saves me. Maybe ten minutes or so. But it seems easy to throw together. And when I’m done, we’re sitting down together, eating dinner we enjoy. And especially right now, that’s what really counts.

2 thoughts on “Moving, cheats and getting food on the table

  1. We sometimes cheat on salad dressings. Well, on two. We almost always have a bottle of a pretty good commercial Caesar dressing on hand (nothing beats homemade, but homemade Caesar dressing does take a few minutes to make). And we sometimes buy a nice blue cheese dressing (one of those refrigerated ones you find in the produce department). When it comes to Italian, we often cheat with froze ravioli and a jarred red sauce. There it’s less of a cheat — both the ravioli and red sauce are from local places. Anyway, when we move it always seems to be takeout for at least a week or two, so you’re doing pretty well IMO.

  2. Did you ever try Rao’s marinara sauce? Totally basic and delicious and hard to improve upon!

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