Heard A Tale of Old Manhattan

I'm not certain if I love to cook, or simply love cookbooks and cooking magazines. My coffee table is piled high with two years' worth of Taste of Home and Food Network magazines. One kitchen cabinet is entirely filled with cook books containing recipes from days when fat and salt went into everything. Occasionally, I do get a good idea from them -- a fabulous recipe that, once I'm finished with it, scarcely resembles the original. Most of the time however, my kitchen resembles Professor Snape's potions classroom, producing noxious odors and strange vapors.

Recently, I came across a photo cutline in one of my magazines talking about hot dog sauce. It seems the new sauce du jour with hot dog vendors in New York City is a simple tomato paste, olive oil and onion concoction. Sounded delicious to me, but there wasn't a recipe. Not about to be deterred by something so trivial as written instructions, I took to the kitchen to see what I could create.

My first attempt was nothing short of -- stupendous! Even people whose culinary skills are the talk of Methodist covered dish dinners loved it. Of course it helped that we ate it on the best hot dogs in all of creation -- Tony Packo's Hungarian Hot Dogs from Toledo, Ohio. But my new sauce held its own with those fabulous dogs.

Then I started thinking, and that not always a good thing. What if this sauce was the base for other things? You could make it Italian or Mexican. Use it with pasta or baked steak. With something so basic, the possibilities were endless.

So today, I made Italian baked steak with my new sauce. I just added garlic, mushrooms, green peppers, basil and oregano, then topped the final product with mozzarella. Absolute heaven!

If you want to give it a try, here's my recipe.

Manhattan Sauce

1 large Vidalia onion
1 small can of tomato paste
Some olive oil
As much Mrs. Dash as you need
1 Tbls. brown sugar
1 tsp. prepared mustard

Halve the onion and slice it. Toss in olive oil until well coated, then saute until tender. Add tomato paste and Mrs. Dash. Stir together over low heat. Add water to thin paste to a sauce consistency. Add brown sugar and mustard. Use more if you think the tomato is still too acidic. Slather on your hot dogs and enjoy. It's an entirely new taste treat.

And if you think you need meat sauce on a hot dog, fry some ground beef and add to your sauce.