Marinara in a hurry: Experiment 1

Ever since I started making my own sauces for pasta, I've been morphing into such a sauce snob that I don't even like Ragu anymore. I mean, it's okay. But why settle for okay when, if you plan a few hours ahead, you can have your own sauce from fresh tomatoes and your own assortment of herbs?

Today I didn't have a few hours. I wanted to surprise my mother with a nice lunch and had about one hour. (And almost no ingredients.) So I thought: "Hey, butter chicken doesn't use fresh or some sort of whole tomatoes. That's just paste. Let's make a sauce using parts of my butter chicken recipe."

And it worked. (Until I ruined it, but we'll get to that.)

I finely chopped one sweet onion and sauteed in olive oil it until it was soft. Just because, I tossed in a cinnamon stick. They were nearby on the counter and I put one in for butter chicken. Then I added a teaspoon of lemon juice, three cloves of garlic (minced), half a tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of dried parsley, a tablespoon of dried basil, and a few pinches of dried oregano. I let all that cook for a minute, then added half a can of tomato paste. To thin it out I added about a cup of milk and a few tablespoons of water, stirring until it achieved a typical saucelike consistency.

At this point it was pretty good and I should have left it alone. But, I didn't.

I added half a cup of red wine that was open in the fridge. From here on out the sauce got super sweet and I couldn't save it. I added fish sauce and more lemon juice, more water, more milk, just trying to counter some of that syrupy red wine. The lemon juice and some more herbs were best at masking it, but next time I'm going to stick to what I know works, dry white wine, instead of just using whatever is open.

Still, Mom loved it. I served it over whole wheat penne pasta, which helped balance the sweetness a little bit. Even with the red wine mishap and lack of fresh herbs, it was still tastier than Ragu.