Skillet Marinara with Blue Cheese
Garlic, tomato, and mushrooms cooked down in oil, finished with crumbled blue cheese over pasta.
- calories
- 620
- weight
- 6 oz
- cal / oz
- 103
- protein
- 18 g
- serves
- 2, scales
- prep
- 10 min
- cook
- 20 min
- total time
- 30 min
- water
- 700 ml boiled
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Canister stove
- Campfire coals
- Liquid fuel
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Backpacking
- Vegetarian
- Nut free
- One pot
- Grab and go
- Needs a cooler
- Basic
Ingredients
| Olive oil | 2 tbsp | carried in a small bottle |
|---|---|---|
| Garlic | 5 cloves | chopped; a whole head keeps for a week unrefrigerated |
| Tomatoes | 2 small | chopped; sun-dried tomatoes plus 1/4 cup water work if you are carrying weight |
| Yellow onion | 1/4 | diced |
| Mushrooms | 8 | quartered; dried shiitake rehydrated in hot water is the light version |
| Salt and pepper | to taste | |
| Vinegar or lemon juice | 1 tsp | optional, cuts the fat at the end |
| Blue cheese | 2 oz | crumbled; it survives a day out of the cooler |
| Dried pasta | 6 oz | short shapes cook faster and stir better |
Method
- Boil about 700 ml of water, salt it, and cook the pasta. Drain into a spare pot or a wide-mouth bottle and keep a splash of the water.
- Wipe the pot, set it back on the stove, and heat the oil until it thins out and moves fast.
- Add the garlic. Thirty seconds to a minute, until it smells like garlic and not before it browns.
- Add the tomatoes. Cook until they collapse and the juice bubbles at the edges, three or four minutes.
- Stir in the onion for a minute, then the mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms give up their water and it cooks back off.
- Season with salt, pepper, and the vinegar. If it looks dry, add a spoonful of the pasta water.
- Return the pasta to the pot, stir, and crumble the blue cheese over the top off the heat.
The order matters more than the ingredients. Garlic first and briefly, tomatoes long enough to break down, mushrooms last so they brown instead of stewing. Do it in that sequence in one pot and you get a real sauce out of five things; do it all at once and you get warm vegetable soup.
Blue cheese is the reason this works without a long simmer. It is salty, sharp, and fatty enough to stand in for hours of reduction, and it melts into the sauce on residual heat. Cook the pasta first and reuse the pot — carrying two pots for one dinner is not worth it, and a spoonful of the starchy water loosens the sauce back up when you combine them.
Packing
Chop the garlic and onion at home and bag them together. Cheese goes in the cooler or, on a cool trip, double-bagged in the middle of the pack. Pasta and seasonings ride dry.
Variations
- Swap fresh tomatoes and mushrooms for sun-dried tomatoes and dried shiitake, rehydrated in the pasta water. That drops it to a shelf-stable backpacking meal.
- A packet of tomato paste thickens the sauce if your tomatoes are watery.
- Parmesan in place of blue cheese if you want something milder that keeps longer.
https://camprecipes.com/classic-recipes/quick-marinara-w-bleu-cheese