Here’s a zippy tomato sauce made from scratch (well, made from a good can of whole tomatoes) in under an hour.
Don’t care for shrimp? No worries! Use clams, or replace seafood entirely with cooked and crumbled Italian sausage, or, heck, go for nicely crisped cooked tofu; it really is all good, and comes together in one pot.
Well, two pots, if you included cooking the pasta.
INGREDIENTS
Sauce:
•Olive oil
•Shrimp, peeled and deveined*
•5 cloves garlic, sliced
•3/4 cup diced sweet onion
•1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
•1 (28 oz) can tomatoes
•1/2 cup white wine
•1 tsp dried oregano
•2 tsp Italian seasoning
•1 tbsp sugar
•1 tsp black pepper
•1 tsp Aleppo pepper
•Sea salt
•Fresh basil
Pasta:
•12 oz cooked spaghetti or linguini
•1/2 cup liquid from the pasta cooking water
•Shredded cheese
*I had some frozen, cooked shrimp in the freezer that needed using up. If you’re starting with fresh, you can either sauté them a bit before adding to the sauce, or increase the cooking time once you’ve added raw shrimp to the sauce along with the basil.
Add 3 tablespoons olive oil to the skillet, then add the diced onion and cook until translucent, about five minutes.
Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and continue to cook, stirring, until the garlic is soft, about 1 minute.
Add the tomatoes with their juices, the wine, oregano, sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, and the black and Aleppo pepper.
Break up the tomatoes with a spoon, then bring to a boil.
Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 15 minutes.
Stir in the shrimp and basil and heat through.
While you’re working on the sauce, set another large pot of well salted water to boil over high heat – it should taste like the ocean.
Once the water is boiling, add your pasta of choice and cook as per package instructions.
Note: did you know that if you lay a wooden spoon over the top of a pot of boiling water, it will reduce the chances of the pot boiling over?
Neither did I; but I tried it with this pot o’ pasta, and have to say that it mostly worked.
Once your pasta is cooked, reserve about 1/2 cup of starchy water from the pot, then drain the pasta well. Do not rinse.
Toss the pasta with the starchy water to coat, then add to the sauce.
Note: depending on how much sauce and/or pasta you’ve made, you may just want to add the sauce to the pasta; this pot o’ sauce was just about perfect for the 12 ounces or so of cooked, high-fiber spaghetti, so I added it right to the sauce pot.
Toss the pasta with the sauce until it is well mixed, then serve as you like.
We had ours with a bit of freshly grated cheese on the top and some nice, fresh from the oven, crispity, cheesy garlic bread along side.
Simple. Nicely zippy. Ready in less than one hour. And nothing funky or overly processed added. I like that in a dinner.