What do you do when you have a ton of leftover tomatoes that will ripen before you can eat them all? Make sauce! I had a bunch of leftover tomatoes from Costco the other day and decided to spare them all from Overripe Land by cooking them into a sauce.
Ingredients
3 cloves of garlic (finely minced)
1 T tomato paste (To see my post about freezing leftover tomato paste from a can, click here).
all your leftover tomatoes (I had about 10 campari tomatoes from Costco)
1 hot Italian sausage cut up into small pieces (4 oz meat)
1-2 T heavy cream
chopped basil as garnish
Saute the garlic with a table spoon of tomato paste. Cut the tomatoes in half and add them all to the pan. Stir the mixture, reduce the heat to medium-low, and let it cook for about 15 minutes.
At this point, I actually stored the sauce in the refrigerator for several days. The beauty of setting the cooked sauce aside is that you save the tomatoes from going bad, and you also allow the flavors of the sauce to intensify a bit.
Of course, this is completely optional, and you can proceed directly to mix the tomato sauce with any vegetables or meat of your choice.
I decided to add sausage & cream.
Begin boiling water to cook pappardelle. I personally like to use an electric kettle because it boils the water so much more quickly. I then add the boiling water to a pot in order to cook the pasta. I have an Oster electric kettle, which I really like.
Saute about a tablespoon of olive oil with 3 cloves of finely minced garlic. Add 1 hot Italian sausage (cut up into small pieces) and cook until the meat is done. Add the red sauce and stir. Add about 2 T heavy cream and stir.
Undercook the pasta by about a minute since you need to add it to the sauce. I cooked the pappardelle for about 6 minutes (recommended time is 7 minutes) before quickly dumping out the water and mixing the hot pasta with the sauce.
I like to use de Cecco's pappardelle (from Italy), since it's make with eggs. Out of all the dried pastas I've tried, I still think de Cecco's papardelle comes closest to tasting like fresh pasta.
Typically, the egg-based pappardelle sells for close to $4 a box. However, since pasta doesn't really go bad quickly, I recently purchased 10 boxes at once from Amazon. By doing this, I only paid about $2 a box. I save money, and I'll be all set in case there's a natural disaster!
I just looked, and it looks like there are no bulk pappardelle de cecco deals currently available on amazon. However, you can get some pretty good deals on angel hair, perciatelli, or farfalle. It looks like the angel hair is egg-based, so that might be your best bet. Having never tried those, I can't say for sure.
Anyway, back to our cooking! Put some chopped basil on top for garnish, some shaved parmesan cheese, and you're all set!
Enjoy!
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