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Spaghetti sauce – The Rookie Cook tries her first elaborate recipe

 

img_2100I love pasta. Actually, I could spend days only eating pasta. Sadly, my waistline doesn’t enjoy pasta as much.

When I was a child, my mother used to make delicious homemade spaghetti sauce. I have fond memories of helping her prepare the ingredients and watch over the pot while it cooked. Unfortunately, she never wrote her recipe on a piece of paper so I am unable to reproduce it.

Being the rookie cook that I am, I never ventured on replicating my mother’s recipe. However, I decided to take on the challenge of making primavera spaghetti sauce (aka vegetarian spaghetti sauce) a few months ago after I bought Kilo Cardio, a book that not only gives you tips about training, motivation when dieting, and eating well, but also offers weekly menus/recipes (for one person), etc.

Making this recipe ended up being an adventure, especially because I thought I had all the ingredients but really didn’t. Luckily, the sauce ended up tasting good nonetheless! It’s just a little bit too … liquidy!

Let’s continue our Rookie Cook lessons with 103 – Making primavera spaghetti sauce.

The recipe, which appears on page 45 of Kilo Cardio, requires the following ingredients:

  • ¼ cup of olive oil
  • 2 onions, minced
  • 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, minced
  • 2 green peppers, minced
  • 2 red peppers, minced
  • 3 cups of mushrooms, sliced
  • 5 cups of tomato juice
  • 2 table spoons of tomato paste
  • 28 oz of braised tomatoes
  • 2 bay leaves
  • salt, pepper and thyme to taste

I had everything but the 5 cups of tomato juice, the tomato paste and the braised tomatoes. Well, to be exact, I had 2 cups of tomato juice and 14 oz of braised tomatoes. Of course, being the rookie cook that I am, I started mincing the veggies before I noticed that I had a tomato emergency! And, at the time I decided to try the recipe out, the grocery store was closed. Solution: Improvise! I ended up putting in 2 cups of V8 juice, 1 cup of water, skip the tomato paste and add a few diced tomatoes in the lot.

The preparation is pretty simple:

  1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and brown the onions, garlic, peppers and mushrooms.
  2. Add the tomato juice, tomato paste, braised tomatoes and the seasonings. Let simmer for about one hour.

I had loads of fun making this recipe, especially since I had to improvise and didn’t know how the sauce would turn out. The preparation was easy enough for me to follow. The primavera sauce I ended up with was, as I mentioned, a bit too liquidy but it still tastes great. On the plus side, this spaghetti sauce can be frozen.

This adventure in spaghetti sauce making taught me to always ensure I have the needed ingredients before I start prepping the food for a recipe but that improvising can not only be fun but turn out good!

Note that Kilo Cardio is currently only offered in French. I have no idea if they will ever have it translated but considering the success it had when it came out, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do translate it into English down the road.

Photo Credit: CliqueClack Food/Isabelle Carreau

2 Responses to “Spaghetti sauce – The Rookie Cook tries her first elaborate recipe”

February 2, 2009 at 5:35 PM

Your liquidy sauce would have thickened up nicely with the tomato paste. Check your ingredients next time! ;-)

February 5, 2009 at 8:54 AM

I stocked up on tomato paste since then ;)

When I make my next batch of sauce, with the right ingredients this time, I’ll write up a post to let you know of the differences.

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