Feeding America … & My Family

I’ve become increasingly frustrated that the recipes aren’t online earlier than one hour before the show because my grocery store is a good five miles from my house. Even the über-proprietary Martha Stewart puts her recipes up on the same day, HOURS before it airs. I have to admit that since The Chew came on the air, I no longer feel the need to watch her hour-long infomercial for all things MSLO. All I want are some recipes, some healthy living tips and some lifestyle tips on a show where the commercials come BETWEEN segments and aren’t the impetus behind the segments themselves.

Today the short notice wasn’t the problem - it was the number of choices. Usually, I’m able to quickly narrow it down to one or two dishes to make based on what I have on hand and how likely I am able to get anything not in my pantry. Today, the only thing I knew I didn’t want to make was Carla Hall’s pot roast because I still had tri-tip from Saturday’s cookout in my fridge and didn’t want to add even more beef to my rapidly expanding inventory of leftovers.

After reading the recipes, I realized that while I had some ingredients for each of the dishes, I didn’t have 100% of ingredients for ANY of the dishes. I decided to watch the show first in the hopes that it would make my choice easier – which it in fact did, but not in the way I expected.

In the back of my mind throughout today’s episode was how unlikely it would be for someone needing a food bank to have all the ingredients for any one of today’s dishes on hand if a foodie like me didn’t. Then it hit me between the eyeballs that the point of today’s show wasn’t that everyone would have every ingredient on hand, but that with a little imagination, anyone could put together a nutritious, filling dish with whatever they did have on hand, even if it comes from the food bank. Voilà!  I had my idea – I would make Carla’s Penne Ragu using ingredients from most of the other dishes to make up for the fact that I didn’t have leftover veggies from pot roast, then donate the money I would’ve spent on those dishes to Feeding America.

Here’s what I came up with:

• Olive oil – just enough to coat the bottom of a deep frying pan 
• 1 small sweet potato, peeled and grated 
• ¼ of a red onion, roughly chopped 
• ½ carton sliced baby portabella mushrooms 
• ¼ bulb of fennel, roughly chunked 
• Leftover protein (I used tri-tip beef) 
• 1 tsp turmeric 
• one pizza delivery envelope of crushed red pepper (use fresh-ground black pepper if you don’t like spicy) 
• cinnamon to taste 
• 4 oz 11 minute Penne 
• 4 cups boiling water 
• whole wheat Panko crumbs

1. Put on the pasta water in a pan 
2. preheat a deep frying pan over medium-high heat  with just enough olive oil to thinly coat the bottom. 
3. Put the pasta in the water. Add the grated sweet potato then the onion into the fry pan and stir. 
4. When the sweet potatoes begin to stick and the onions start to soften, add the fennel and stir again. 
5. Add the mushrooms and stir again. If it is too dry, add a cup of the pasta water. Stir. 
6. By the time the mushrooms start to soften, the pasta should be about a minute or two away from being done. Dump the pasta, water & all, into the fry pan. 
7. Add the meat Continue to stir until a nice gravy is rendered. It will thicken up as it cools so be careful to not overcook. 
8. Let sit while you toast up some breadcrumbs. I used what I had on hand - whole wheat Panko. 
9. Spoon the penne mixture into bowls and top with the freshly toasted crumbs.

I used tumeric from Mario Batali’s chicken dish, sweet potatoes from Daphne Oz’s pancakes, red onions from Michael Symon’s tacos, crushed red pepper and penne from two of Carla Hall’s dishes which means I will be donating the $25 I saved NOT making the entire dish to Feeding America – if I can find the link on The Chew website…which as of yet I have not been able to do.