August 10, 2009

Pasta for supper

Lately I've been learning to enjoy homemade pasta sauces. Several months ago I picked up a magazine called "Perfect Pasta" put out by Cuisine at Home. I don't know if you can still find a copy around somewhere, but if you stumble across one I'd encourage you to pick it up. It starts out by explaining how to make some of the most basic pasta sauces and moves on to cover most of the classics -including salads and risottos, and I love that it has at least one picture of every recipe and prep tips to make everything come out faster and tastier. So far I've tried making the oven roasted marinara and the bolognese sauces. Both of them were a big hit with Allen. The marinara recipe in particular is amazingly simple. It's posted below along with my modifications (since I rarely leave any recipe alone!).

Oven Roasted Marinara with Summer Squash

The basic recipe calls for for:

8c quartered, fresh tomatoes
1c chopped onion
1/2c olive oil
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1tsp sugar
1tsp salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4c fresh basil, sliced thin

To this basic recipe I added:

1med zucchini, rough chopped
1med yellow squash, rough chopped

I also added another cup chopped onion. (I had some large onions.)

Rough chop all the veggies and mix together with oil and seasonings in an oven safe dish. Roast them at 400 degree for 45 minutes until the tomatoes are very soft. After you've roasted everything, pulse the mixture in batches to your desired consistency, and add basil. Feel very proud of making your own spaghetti sauce - I know I did!



Tip: I ended up blending too much liquid in with my sauce and making it a bit watery. If a lot of liquid was released during roasting you might want to hold some of the liquid back -at least until you've blended part of it and judged the consistency.

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