Washed tomatoes and pasta

  1. Get half-kilo of fresh tomatoes, three onions, and three carrots. You can use the cheapest tomatoes for this, the heat treatment will average the taste. Wash everything. Chop onions and carrots, dump into the frying pan. Add salt.

Onions and carrots

  1. Fry diced onions and carrots in a pan, using a generous finger-thick layer of oil, preferrably olive, until the onions don’t sting anymore and carrots start to soften.

Simmered tomatoes and hot pepper

  1. Cut tomatoes in 2 pieces each, you’ll mash them anyway so thin slices do not matter. Dump tomatoes into the pan. Cover with a lid, cook on a slow fire for about 10 minutes until they become sauce. Mash and stir each 3 minutes so they won’t burn. Cooking less will preserve taste of fresh tomatoes, cooking longer will make it taste closer to canned pasta sauce. But they won’t have that taste of the can that you will get with canned tomatoes.

The secret ingredient and spices

  1. Add the secret ingredient - half-kilo of canned pork. This is an optional step - if you prefer taste over calories, it’s better to prepare a separate meat dish instead. If you want to add hot pepper, add it now so it will spread uniformly.

The secret ingredient

  1. Boil pasta while tomatoes are cooking - the standard 500 gram package will do, preferably something with a lot of surface like penne so it can soak up more sauce.

  2. Dump Italian or French spice mix into the pan. Turn off the heat, let it simmer for 1 minute so the herbs will soften.

Finished pasta

  1. Dump pasta into the pan. Done! Plating is optional, you can eat it straight from the pan. And the next day you can prepare another wonderful dish - yesterday’s pasta re-heated until it’s crusty.
  • howrar
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    1 month ago

    Do you have canned tomatoes or tomato paste? If so, then maybe consider using that. Canned tomatoes can be used the same way OP does. Tomato paste can be added if your tomato tastes insufficiently tomato, regardless of whether it’s fresh or canned.