Homemade pasta sauce

I decided to cook pasta for dinner yesterday after seeing Happy Homebaker's wonderful pasta picture. Usually when I cook pasta/spaghetti, I would just use off-the-shelf sauce. What else can be more simple than that? There is one problem though. We always ended up having to keep the remaining sauce in the fridge. And after a while, this cook would have forgotten about it. By the time it was out of the fridge again, more than half the chance it would end up in the rubbish bin as it had turned bad. A waste of food!

So yesterday I decided to try making my own sauce instead. In fact I did two, one tomato sauce and another cream sauce.

Animal pasta with chunky tomato sauce


Creamy wholemeal pasta with green mussels


In normal circumstances, I would have preferred the cream sauce. In fact, 99% of the time I would order the creamy kind of pasta when I dined out. I just don't like those sour tomato sauce (that's the image of tomato sauce in my mind)...until yesterday. My tomato sauce turned out so good (lol...self bragging here) that the cream sauce seemed to fall into disfavour.

Chunky Tomato Sauce

Ingredients
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
500g fresh ripe tomatoes, cut into chunks (about 2cm)
1 can (400+g) whole tomatoes (I use the brand "Hunt"), cut into chunks
A handful of fresh basil, cut into small pieces
2 tbsp sugar
1 & 1/2 tsp salt

Method
1. Heat up 2 tbsp of oil in a wok. Fry the garlic and onion till fragrant.
2. Add the fresh and canned tomatoes. Fry for a few minutes. Add the sugar and salt and simmer for 10-15 minutes until half of the juice has dried up.
3. Add the basil and simmer for another 5 minutes. Serve over cooked pasta/spaghetti or with chips.

Note:
This serves as your base sauce. You can add in other ingredients such as seafood or meat. I've added ham and crabsticks (added last) into the sauce for my kids.


Mood: blissful