this recipe is nothing particularly revolutionary. it is pasta and sauce made with time, love, and a couple of pantry staples. but!!!!!!!!

“you don’t even have to look to high cuisine or molecular gastronomy to find magic in cooking” says ruby tandoh (of great british bake-off fame) in her wonderful wonderful book eat up about the joys and magic of food and cooking and eating. the tomato sauce recipe featured in this post is very lightly adapted from one you may have seen circulating around the internet. “this four ingredient tomato sauce is exploding the internet!!!” or whatever it is they might clickbaitily say. but here’s what tandoh has to say about it:

“there’s one dish i make weekly, sometimes more: a tomato sauce for pasta, from a recipe by italian-born food writer marcella hazan. so many people will tell you that a good pasta sauce needs richness from olive oil, garlic and herbs. they insist that in order for a meal to taste good, it needs to be made from the best stuff, the ‘best’ unfailingly being – no surprises here – the most expensive. that means trudging to the market for heavy, bursting, scarlet red tomatoes: the kind that come still on the vine, the herbal, nostalgic smell of sun on their skins. hazan has an alternative. in her recipe, you simply combine two tins of chopped tomatoes, an onion – peeled and halved – and a sizeable chunk of butter. cook over a medium-low heat for 45 minutes, then remove the onion, season with salt, and serve. i don’t know how, from such store-cupboard basics, comes such a luxuriantly thick, rich, buttery, savory sauce. the sharpness of those watery tinned tomatoes softens into sweet, crimson velvet, making a sauce that’s infinitely more than the sum of its parts. all it takes is a long, slow cook.”

i couldn’t have said it better, which is why i felt the need to type up that entire quote. the more food writing i read, the more annoyed i get with prestigious chefs and their “you absolutely must use the highest quality ingredients in existence!!!!!!!!!!! the best kind of cooking is when you spend $20 on a container of raspberries, toss them artfully on a plate and casually add another michelin star to your collection in the process. gosh i love being a privileged white man!”

personally, i like to take more of a “law of equivalent exchange” approach to cooking, like giving a little bit of my heart and a little bit of my time and getting something delicious and nutritious and filling and thrilling in return, rather than tracking down ingredients that cost an arm and a leg (…haha) and calling it talent.

no, disembodied fullmetal alchemist brotherhood narrator guy, you can’t create something out of nothing but, as david lynch reminds us in his book, catching the big fish:

“the unity of all the particles and all the forces of creation. this is a field of nothing, but the scientists say that out of this nothing emerges everything that is a thing.”

and as winnie the pooh reminds us in last year’s christopher robin movie,

“[doing] nothing often leads to the very best something”.

i’ve been making somethings out of nothings for years now. if you ever feel discouraged about what you have to work with, remember the awards that have been won for food blogs created and continuously updated by the chronically ill almost entirely from the (dis)comfort of their own beds. of the artists who learned to paint and changed the world while lying flat in bed after terrible accidents. remember this and live by the idea that “we’ve done so much with so little for so long, we can do anything with nothing now”. sorry cocky white dude chefs but you CAN create pasta-granny-worthy feasts armed with nothing more than some flour and canned tomatoes.

beethoven apparently said that, “only the pure in heart can make a good soup”, and while i prefer that statement over vitaly paley’s “find the best ingredients possible and listen to what they tell you about how they want to be prepared. mess with them as little as you can blah blah blah”, i also deeply love samin nosrat’s response to beethoven, several hundred years later, “get into the habit of making soup with the fewest possible ingredients, and you’ll find it’s so delicious it might even purify your heart.”

childrens’ cartoon have taught us that a life without pain is meaningless. and sometimes that pain is accidentally trading two of your limbs and your little brother’s entire body in a failed attempt at bringing your mother back from the dead, but sometimes it’s not having the money or energy to give to cook food that would live up to the standards of ferran adria. do it anyway. gather up a few hungry people who love you to help you roll out cute little chewy pasta shapes. serve the pasta to them drenched in a big fat slow-cooked tomato sauce. and you just might gain a heart made fullmetal.

(if you don’t understand the references then what you should be asking yourself isn’t “what is it with the Kids These Days and their excessive quoting of all those new-fangled 19th century composers? in my day we…” but “why have i yet to watch the greatest work of fiction that ever has or ever will be created in the entire history of humankind?”. maybe make yourself a big bowl of pasta, forgo all responsibilities in lieu of watching cartoons on netflix, and not get up again until you’re crying on the floor and wondering how life can possibly go on now that you’re done with it (this obviously refers to being done eating your pasta not um…watching 64 episodes of cartoons…))

oops i digress???? happy pasta making.

-kara

magic pasta
serves 3-4

ingredients

for the sauce (adapted from marcella hazan):

  • 1 28-ounce can peeled whole tomatoes
  • 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1 small onion, peeled and cut in half
  • kosher salt

for the pasta (adapted from lady and pups):

  • 1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 2 large egg yolks
  • 5 tablespoons water

intructions:

to make the sauce:

heat a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. add the tomatoes, butter, onions, and a pinch of salt. bring to a simmer, then lower the heat to medium low and simmer 45 minutes, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a spoon as they cook and stirring occasionally. remove and discard the onion. if the sauce is too chunky for your liking, puree with an immersion blender or food processor.

to make the pasta:

mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. add the egg yolks and water. stir the ingredients together until a shaggy dough forms. transfer to a cutting board or other work surface and knead vigorously for 5 minutes until the dough is smooth but not sticky. wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let rest for 30 minutes. tear off little pieces of dough, about 1/4 tsp each until you have about 20 pieces to work with. wrap the rest of the dough back up in plastic wrap while you work. roll each piece between your palms for a few seconds
until it’s short and stubby with pointy ends. drop the pasta into a small pile of flour, then repeat with the rest of the pieces. every once in a while, toss the pasta with the flour to prevent sticking. once you have rolled out the first 20 pieces, repeat with the rest of the dough. to cook the pasta, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, then drop in the pasta and cook just until they float to the surface of the water. drain immediately. serve topped with the sauce and enjoy!