pasta and sauce.

at least once a week we do some variation on pasta and sauce, its quick, easy and relatively affordable. at this point in my "cooking experience" i'm trying to experiment a little more and go off book to create a recipe. last night's results proved to be quite tasty!

lets start at the beginning, i was wandering our delray 'hood (props to mom for the lingo!) and wandered into cheestique to check out their latest and greatest cheese selections. btw, it really has a spectacular assortment of delectable cheeses, their brie selections hands down win an A+ in my book. anyway, i was browsing around (read: drooling at cheese) when i came across a selection of 1/4lb bags of fresh linguini. I picked up one of each kind; a black pepper something and the other was maybe basil, i honestly can't remember but i always jump at fresh pasta when i can get it.


at this point, it was friday, i wasn't making pasta people. i was having a bbq! so pasta went in the freezer and was an after thought till monday morning when i pulled it out with some trepidation. after all, this was fresh pasta, it was already most likely lovely on its own, you could add some butter and parmesan and be in a perfect carb coma. however i decided to not let this fresh pasta intimidate me! the mission: to come up with a sauce that has strong flavor but doesn't overpower the delicate pillows of pasta.

the ingredients:
pasta, black olives, minced garlic, shallot, fire-roasted diced red tomatoes, tomato sauce, red pepper flake.

first warm up pan to medium heat, add 1.5 teaspoons olive oil ( i did a combo because i'm cool. 1/2 tsp each of basil oil, shallot oil and garlic oil). add a few sprays of cooking spray. let the pan warm up. add half a minced shallot and about 1/2 tsp of minced garlic. let it warm for 3 minutes. then add about half a can of chopped black olives with a few tablespoons of olive juice, stir it around, let olives break down.
next, add half a can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes and about 4 tbsp of tomato sauce.add 1 tsp of salt, 1/2 tsp of pepper, smidge of red pepper flake. stir all together. raise heat to medium high and let "sauce" start to bubble.


at this point i boiled my water and cooked my fresh linguini for about 5-7 minutes.

back to saucing! the sauce was a bit on the spicey side, wow! so i added about half a cup of water to thin it out , 1 tbsp of brown sugar and a nice handful of fresh basil from my new basil plant.



hi cute basil plant!

ok sorry, back to cooking. once the pasta was done i added about 2 laddles of pasta water (gotta love that starchy pasta water!) to the sauce and stirred while the pasta drained. i then added both linguinis right into the frying pan and attempted to mix them together. this proved to quite annoying at first as the pastas refused to combine. it reminded me of the seinfeld episode when jerry tries to eat the black and white cookie and the races are fighting each other!
anway, after a few minutes of stiring the sauce and pasta became one and this step really helped the flavors to fully marinate together.

here is my end result:


oh yeah, and i added a little freshly-grated parm right on top before husband and i gobbled it up.
sorry forgot the plated picture, we were hungry, hungry hippos folks!