Firehouse Cookery

People always say that firefighters are good cooks. Being part of a fire department, I can tell you that this is actually pretty true. We have meeting twice a month, and following those meetings is always a very good dinner cooked by some member of the fire department. We have one guy, George, who used to, and still kind of does run a catering business. He cooks a lot of times, or at least helps out who is cooking, and always does a great job. I know this because of my own experience with him when me and some other younger guys decided to cook one night. We were just going to make some simple pasta with meat sauce and meatballs, but George helped us make it much better. First, he helped us transform our store bought tomato meat sauce into something a little more. He put it all in a large pot, and threw the meat balls in with it, adding some chicken and sausage to add to the flavor. He also added garlic which I have heard of doing before, but I have not heard of adding the meat. This all made the sauce taste much better and you could really tell when eating it. You could taste the strips of chicken that had spread throughout the sauce, as well as the garlic and other meats. This just shows how you can take a somewhat simple recipe and make it a lot better and flavorful. The meatballs were also a lot better after soaking in the sauce for a couple hours. We slowly cooked the sauce, heating up everything and letting it simmer. For the pasta, we threw some olive oil in the water just to give the pasta a little more flavor. You could defiantly taste a difference in the end and our meal was a big success.