Bread and Pasta?

This is what you get when your creative juices are emptied after a tired day of work (the backache has been bugging me for a few days). I can't think of a better title.

First, on a backlog (yes, again). I made this Chocolate bread (recipe from the HongKong book) last Fri.


It was indeed my first Chocolate bread (other than the swirl version some time back). The dough was good to work with, not too wet. I used my VM to knead it in the beginning and further hand knead it to get a smooth dough. Don't you think it looks pretty? (ok ok, I know I'm obsessed with smooth bread dough...)


The chocolate flavour is quite prominent, so the kids naturally love it. Texture wise, quite good, I would say.



The Royal Prince was complaining why I'm cooking rice everyday (sigh...very difficult to be a royal maid). So I decided to cook pasta today, partly because I've got loads of tomatoes in the fridge. I had wanted to do the Chunky Tomato sauce I did last time as it was so good, but decided to create another version. My experiment paid off, this turned out equally good. Royal Prince usually don't like tomato base for his pasta (he prefers creamy kind), but he didn't complain today.



Homemade Pasta Sauce

Ingredients
8 ripe tomatoes (mine weighs about 865g)
1 tsp dried basil
3 tsp garlic, chopped
3 tbsp sugar (adjust according to the sweetness of your tomatoes)
1.5 tsp salt

Method
1. Cut 3 tomatoes into chunks. Blend the remaining 5 tomatoes till juice/puree form.
2. Heat up 2 tbsp of oil in a wok. Fry the garlic till fragrant.
3. Add the tomatoes (both chunks and juice), salt, sugar and basil and simmer till juice has mostly dried up (takes about 30-40 mins). The consistency should be that of store bought pasta sauce.
4. Add other ingredients (e.g. hotdogs, minced meat) and simmer another 5 mins till the additional ingredients are cooked. This goes well with minced meat.
5. Serve over cooked pasta/spaghetti.

Note: I had wanted to add in one yellow onion, but didn't have that on hand.

I don't think there can be any easier way to make our own pasta sauce. Try it and let me know your verdict.


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