30 mins
Not Too Tricky
serves 4
About the recipe
This pasta sauce takes minutes to cook.What’s great about this recipe for beginner cooks is that once you’ve done it a few times you can add other simple ingredients to your basic tomato sauce to completely transform it. Check out the end of the recipe, where I’ve given you some ideas to get you started.
Ingredients
2 cloves of garlic
1 fresh red chilli
1 bunch of fresh basil (30g)
300g dried spaghetti
olive oil
1 x 400g tin of plum tomatoes
80g Parmesan cheese or Grana Padano
Top Tip
FLAVOUR BOOST:
These can be added to your tomato sauce when it’s finished. Just stir in and warm through:
– Add a handful of baby spinach to the sauce at the same time that you add the pasta – when the leaves have wilted, remove from the heat and serve with some crumbled goat’s cheese on top.
– A few handfuls of cooked prawns and a handful of chopped rocket, with the juice of ½ a lemon.
– A tin of tuna, drained and flaked into the sauce with ½ a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, some black olives and the juice of ½ a lemon.
– A handful of fresh or frozen peas and broad beans.
Method
- Peel the garlic and finely slice with the chilli (halve and deseed it first if you don’t want the sauce too hot).
- Pick the basil leaves off the stalks and put to one side. Finely chop the stalks.
- Cook the spaghetti in a large pan of boiling salted water according to packet instructions.
- Meanwhile, put a large saucepan on a medium heat and add 2 good lugs of oil. Add the garlic, chilli and basil stalks and give them a stir.
- When the garlic begins to brown slightly, add most of the basil leaves and scrunch in the tomatoes. Turn the heat up high and stir for 1 minute. Taste and season with sea salt and black pepper, if needed.
- Drain the spaghetti, reserving a mugful of cooking water, then transfer it to the pan of sauce and stir well. Add a splash of pasta cooking water to loosen, if needed, then taste and season to perfection.
- Divide the pasta between bowls, or put it on the table in a large serving dish and let everyone help themselves.
- Roughly tear over the remaining basil leaves and finely grate over the Parmesan.
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