April 9: Pasta with Three Tomato Sauce

The night before the Shamrock Shuffle, we decided to carbo load a little. We made a beet salad (not pictured) and spaghetti with tomato sauce. I found this recipe in Food & Wine a while ago (I think this is it), and basically work off that to create something similar but slightly different each time.

In the food processor are:

• about 3 plum tomatoes, chopped roughly
• 1 teaspoon/2 cloves minced garlic
• a tablespoon or so of basil herb blend (which is awesome to have around because you don't have to worry about basil going bad quickly, which happens to me a lot)
• 2 tablespoons of sun-dried tomato paste (which was a mistake -- see below)

I love how bright and fresh everything looks.

So the "three tomato" items are: fresh tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes and tomato paste. I accidentally bought sun-dried tomato paste, so rather than inlcude both the sun-dried tomato paste and the actual sun-dried tomatoes, I just did the paste. We thought it tasted similar to using both 2 tablesppons of regular tomato paste and 4 sun-dried tomatoes, which is what we typically do.

You blend those ingredients together for about 30 seconds, then add in extra virgin olive oil to smooth it out into a thinner tomato sauce. I usually add some oil, blend, add a little more, blend again, and taste to make sure it doesn't need more of any ingredient.

We cooked up our pasta, adding the pasta and sauce back into the large pot to mix everything up. We top it with some freshly grated parmesan cheese, and we're ready to go.

Yum. I kind of want to cook this again right now!

It's pretty simple to make, and is very fresh-tasting. It is our go-to pasta recipe, mainly because we have these ingredients lying around more often than not -- especially with the basil herb blend discovery.