Pasta al Pomodoro

Mum and I were having a quiet night in tonight and decided to make something simple with whatever we had in the cupboards. She had kindly sent me a recipe for making my own gnocchi (a cooking dream I am yet to fulfil or even attempt actually!) earlier in the day and it reminded me of a beautiful pasta al pomodoro I had eaten in India last year so I decided to give it a go! I've eaten enough pomodoro to have an idea what should be in it but the beauty of this Italian sauce is that as long as you have the basic ingredients: tomatoes, olive oil, basil, onion and some fantastic cheese, you can play around with it and add in all sorts of different ingredients. I must confess that writing out the ingredient list may be a little difficult as there wasn't much measuring involved and there was a lot of tasting and seasoning and tasting and seasoning going on. This recipe is for a main course for two people but could obviously be a starter for four!

Ingredients (this recipe serves 2 people as a main course)

3 glugs of olive oil

7 shallots, finely diced

4 plump cloves of garlic, crushed

1 can of peeled plum tomatoes, throughly squashed with a fork

6 fresh vine plum tomatoes, finely chopped

4 sundried tomatoes, finely chopped

Half a ball of mozzarella, roughly chopped

A good handful of fresh basil, roughly chopped

A decent grating of Parmesan cheese

Sea salt and pepper

175g pappardelle pasta

Method

Heat a few lugs of olive oil in a pan over a medium-low heat. Add the finely chopped shallots and mix thoroughly with the oil then cook, stirring until soft, which should take about seven or eight minutes. Add the garlic to the shallots and cook for 2 to 4 minutes. 

Turn the heat up to medium, add the squashed peeled plum tomatoes and freshly chopped vine plum tomatoes and season lightly with sea salt. At this point I also filled the now empty can of peeled tomatoes a third full with water, gave it a rough shake to release the tomato sauce that remained in the can and added this to the sauce mixture in the pan. Add the chopped sun dried tomatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens slightly and the flavours infuse together. This should take between 15 and 20 minutes. 

While the sauce is cooking, bring a pan of water to the boil. Season with salt, add the pappardelle and cook, stirring occasionally, until cooked. Everyone has a preference for how they cook their pasta but at our house it's always al dente.

Once the sauce has thickened and thoroughly cooked through, remove from the heat, stir in the roughly chopped basil, a few twists of freshly ground black pepper and the chopped mozzarella. Stir thoroughly until the mozzarella has melted into the sauce. At this point I also added in a small handful of grated parmesan and stirred this in as well.

Drain the pasta and add to the sauce, stirring to coat the pasta with the sauce. I served the pasta in bowls with a fresh grating of parmesan and some fresh basil leaves on top. My mum decided to have hers on a bed of salad, I just went with the pasta!

Seriously yummy comfort food!

Please note all photographs used in this blog entry are actual pictures of my cooking, not file photos.