Adventures in Roommates, and Ketchup

I've lived with a lot of roommates over the years. I counted it up once and the number was over two dozen different people I have shared an address with. Generally speaking I love living with other people and I've had some awesome friends share my homes over the years. Yes, you have to deal with their dirty dishes, and their human foibles and drama but usually it's worth it.

Some of my favorite roommate memories revolve around food (big suprise there, right?). I actually met my first good friends in college because of our love of food - I smelled baking tofu in the dorm kitchen and went to investigate. I remember pigging out on one roommate's meat pie when I was still a vegetarian and pulling a red wagon full of vegetables back from the store with another. Did you know that sweet potatoes go great with black beans, or that black pepper and seasoning salt are just as good on popcorn as butter? If it weren't for my roommates I wouldn't either. One set of roommates and I enjoyed White Trash Dinner nights and perfected our Tater Tot Hot Dish recipe and our tuna noodle casserole (the tuna noodle may show up on this blog someday, but the Tater Tot Hot Dish most likely never will.)

I lived for a couple months once with the most wonderful man in the whole wide world. Eric is one of those people that everyone loves. He is generous, kind and will keep you laughing from morning till night. And if you want an adventure, just make sure Eric is around and adventure will find you. Often Eric and our other roommates would come home in the early hours of the morning after a night of adventuring and meet me as I was waking up for my work day. It was always a fun, bright start to a morning and almost always involved breakfast sammies. Bacon, egg, cheese, english muffin and ketchup... the breakfast of champions.

Eric has moved up to NW Washington to follow his bliss and I am still making breakfast sammies at least once a week. I still like my eggs overhard (yolk broken and not gooey at all, please!) but these days I'm just as likely to use sour dough as english muffins.

I also recently made my first batch of homemade ketchup. It really bumps a sammy up to gourmet status, and is much easier than I expected. OK.. it's easier to MAKE the ketchup, getting the flavors just right is going to take some time. I started with googling "homemade ketchup" and reading every recipe I could find. They're mostly the same - some tomato product, spices of some variety, vinegar and sugar. Which spices and how much sugar are often the big variables and I finally decided to go with a recipe and just try it.

I chose this recipe from Brooklyn Farmhouse, a blog I intend to spend a whole lot more time at in the future. It calls for some pretty basic spices all simmered together with the tomato product. I used tomato puree instead of whole tomatoes partly because thats what I had avaliable and partly to cut down on simmering time. In the end I tweaked the spices a litle bit and am still not 100% happy with the end result. I'm eating it, and making some seriously good sammies, but next time it will be better.

One More Homemade Ketchup Recipe

makes about 1 pint

4 whole cloves

1/2 teaspoon celery seed

1/2 teaspoon chile flakes

1 cinnamon stick (1-inch long)

2 14-ounce cans of tomato puree

1/2 a large onion, chopped,

2 garlic clove, peeled and smashed

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1/2 cup cider vinegar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 of an onion and 1 garlic clove

*Wrap the cloves, celery seed, chile flakes and cinnamon stick in a cheesecloth bundle. Combine everything except the second piece of onion and garlic in a heavy bottomed, 2 quart sauce pan and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for at least an hour.

*Remove the spice bundle and puree the mixture in a blender along with the second addition of garlic and onion. Return the mixture to the pot and simmer again until it looses it's "raw" flavor. Feel free to adjust seasonings and simmer longer to reach your desired consistency.

Like I said, this recipe isn't perfect. It's a little cinnamonny for my liking (the original recipe called for a 3 inch piece, I used a 2 inch, I'm saying you should use 1 inch) and there's still something not quite right. It's also a little chunky but pushing it through a sieve would have helped that as would cooking it longer to reduce the water content.

Eric would like it though, especially combined with some Secret Aardvark Sauce. He was always up for an adventure, and making homemade ketchup is truly an adventure.