Photo via 101 Cookbooks
I tried making a tomato sauce on my own once. It tasted sour and chunky and horrible. It stayed in the fridge so long that it became a base for some embryonic form of life. That was a fail. My problem is that I take basic knowledge and fuck it up with my ‘innovativeness’, also known as putting tea and arrack in random dishes and fucking them up. This time I decide to follow a recipe. What I found was this 5 minute pasta sauce from 101 Cookbooks. It’s simple, fast and excellent.
The Recipe
The recipe is basically tomato, garlic, red pepper, salt and oil. I mashed up the tomato by hand first and then by using a metal cup. That cut and pasted it up quite nicely. They call for 128 grams and I don’t know what that is. I put basically 5 kade tomatoes, which is probably 3 American ones.
The secret seems to be the oil. This is also the secret to fucking it up, as you will see later. It calls for a 1/4 cup of oil, which to me is a lot, but it works. It calls for olive oil but all I had was sunflower. Put that, half spoon of salt, one and half of red pepper and three diced garlic cloves in a cold pan. Then you heat it quite lightly, for about a minute, before it browns. My problem is that I do everything too much. This recipe forces you to stop.
Then you toss the tomatoes in, cook for a few minutes and done. It calls for zest of lemon, but all I had is archival lime and I’m not grating that skin in there. It’s simple, fast and great. I snuck a pinch of MSG in there but don’t tell anybody.
How I Fucked It Up
Got a bit too fancy with the pasta. The instructions for pasta are to heat water, add pasta, remove. Too simple. Instead I heated the water with Maggi soup cube and salt. When you remove pasta it’s good to coat it a bit with oil to keep it from sticking. This is where I fucked up. We save the used oil from frying. I was dumb and used that. Now the pasta tastes like fucking curry, ruining an otherwise perfect meal. So close, yet so far away. Good recipe though.
Hope no one was poisoned !
actually, a dollop of salted butter instead of your oil would have made wonders.
Keep at it, Indi. In cooking at least, it’s safe to say that failures are the pillars of success.
Why not stick to eating kiribath, kavun and kurakang while washing it all down with a glass of kola kenda?
ps. Don’t forget to bang your chest, kiss the airport tarmac and scream “Maaa throoo boooo me yaaa” after you finish, to show that you enjoyed your meal!