So last week I was looking at one of my favorite cooking blogs
Smitten Kitchen and there was a featured recipe for tomato sauce with three ingredients.
1. Canned whole tomatos
2. Butter
3. 1 yellow onion
To the average cook this is quite confusing (no garlic, no olive oil, no red wine?!) but
her article was extremely convincing and it seemed so easy (too easy actually, you just throw the ingredients into a pot, chopping the onion in half
once- no dicing) So I did it. I made the sauce. I served it (to myself) on
rigatoni with some red wine and a little parmesan. I am telling you this sauce was beautiful. Seriously, so creamy and unlike anything I expected. You must try this recipe. I'm insisting upon it. It is as follows (straight from Smitten Kitchen):
Adapted from Marcela Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking
Another thing that blew my mind about this sauce: I, for one, am a grated parmesan junkie. I not only sprinkle it over my bowl of pasta, I like to have additional nearby, to apply a fresh coat to the layers of pasta that follow. So you can imagine my shock to find that I liked this dish even more without the parmesan. The flavor of the sauce is so delicate, fresh and sweet that it needed nothing at all.
Serves 4 as a main course; makes enough sauce to lightly coat most of a pound of spaghetti
28 ounces (800 grams) whole peeled tomatoes from a can (San Marzano, if you can find them)***
5 tablespoons (70 grams) unsalted butter
1 medium-sized yellow onion, peeled and halved
Salt to taste
Put the tomatoes, onion and butter in a heavy saucepan (it fit just right in a 3-quart) over medium heat. Bring the sauce to a simmer then lower the heat to keep the sauce at a slow, steady simmer for about 45 minutes, or until droplets of fat float free of the tomatoes. Stir occasionally, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon. Remove from heat, discard the onion, add salt to taste (you might find, as I did, that your tomatoes came salted and that you didn’t need to add more) and keep warm while you prepare your pasta.
Serve with spaghetti, with or without grated parmesan cheese to pass.
***Just a side note, I used Sunflower brand whole tomatoes because that is where I recently did my shopping and they didn't have San Marzano tomatoes and it still worked beautifully!
Hello my darlings! Welcome to the last weekend in January! Have any plans? Tonight I am planning on going to Boulder to see a friend of mine dj at this place. Then tomorrow I plan on taking it easy and doing a lot of nothing. It's supposed to be really nice so perhaps I'll go to the park! I also have to do a lot of reading because there is a book club meeting next week and I am a little bit behind. Oops. Right now we are reading this book and I am having a little trouble getting into it. Well hope you have a fabulous next few days! x.
