Farfalle with Tomato Sauce

Tonight was supposed to be pasta and pesto but I went “off menu” for a number of reasons: I’ve got a cold so thought something with chilli in would be a good idea; on Saturday morning a bag of farfalle (among other things) fell out of the cupboard reminding us that we have a huge amount of pasta that needs using up; ready-made pesto (my own is rubbish) seemed a bit wrong for the first week of blogging about food.

I’m not sure where the farfalle came from, well…it came from Sainsbury’s because it said so on the packet but I’m not sure how it made it’s way into the kitchen cupboard because it’s not one of my favourite pasta shapes. I like spaghetti or rigatoni (the fat tubes) or papardelle (the wide, fat, long strands) but these bow-ties aren’t really for me. They’re a bit novelty I think and novelty is all well and good, but I like my pasta to be of the more traditional variety. I suspect Stephen bought them. And didn’t eat them. He does that a lot. That’s probably why the cupboard is so overcrowded.

Anyway, because of the desire for chilli and the need to use up the bow ties, I thought I would make tomato sauce. Easy, quick, filling and useful. I have a tomato sauce recipe that I always use but on Friday Stephen and I made pizza (we didn’t post about it because it was a disaster, don’t ask, I’m still not over it) and we used a Jamie Oliver recipe for the tomato sauce. It was really simple, just olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, basil, salt and pepper but it was really tasty and it struck me at the time it would be good with pasta. So, that’s what I did tonight, I just added a little (well, a lot actually) chilli and some sundried tomato paste to emulsify it. It wasn’t as good as it was on Friday (typically) but it checked the chilli and using-up-of-novelty-pasta boxes.

Of course, what I could have done is used the leftover sauce from Friday that I squirreled away in the freezer. That would have checked another box that needs checking: the using-up-things-that-Kerri-has-frozen box. I do that a lot. That’s probably why the freezer is so overcrowded.