Italian tomato sauce is the most versatile  basis of so many dishes I figured I would throw it in here early doors because I will most likely refer back to it again and again in later recipes.  This is probably the first thing I ever learnt to cook at my mum’s side and my mum is part Italian, so we’re already onto a winner.

Unadulterated, you can stir this sauce into pasta and have a great, easy, quick  meal. However the last thing you should do is stop there – I use it for the base on pizza, spaghetti bolognaise, italian meatballs, spaghetti marinara and a host of variations on the theme.  Stick in some meat or veggies or both, pour over some fish and roast, throw some olives in and you have puttanesca, stick some herbs in, stick some spices in, stick some chilli in, whatever you want to do this recipe will make everything right with the world.

And you know it’s pretty easy when this is the ingredients list:

• 1 onion
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• garlic (optional)

Chop up the onion and fry reasonably gently until they soften.  Add the garlic if you’re using it (yes, of course you should use it!), fry for another minute or two, then add the tin of tomatoes and cook through.

So that’s all pretty straight forward then, innit?  Well, it is, but there are some techniques that make all the difference here…

If you add some salt to the onions when you’re frying them, you’ll find the salt just draws out the moisture a bit – in general this is not a good idea when frying meat or veg because it stops them from browning, but when trying to get the sweetness into gently fried onions we don’t want them to brown, but we do want them to fry, so this works well.

There’s technique to the tomatoes too – tinned tomatoes are generally uncooked, so they need cooking out but when you add the tomatoes try allowing the juice to reduce right down until you get a good sizzle and the tomatoes are actually frying – this means you not only get cooked tomatoes, but slightly caramelised too.  If you need a wetter sauce than that, just add a bit of water again.

But it’s the variations where this recipe really excels, and these are but a few – the list is endless and you need to go nuts on this recipe, but to get you started…

Instead of using a tin of tomatoes, get real tomatoes and roast them – cut in half, place on a try cut side down, add a couple of cloves of garlic with the skin on and a drizzle of olive oil – put in a hot oven for 10 minutes to brown and then turn right down.  The longer you can leave them in the oven the better, so you can turn down to 100 degrees C and leave for a few hours, or you can turn down to 150-180 and leave for half an hour – the longer the better to develop that flavour, but even leaving them on high for 20 minutes will be good.  Squeeze out the garlic (it comes out like toothpaste) and chop the tomato, then use for the sauce as above.

Passata is another good and quick alternative.  Passata is sieved tomatoes and it doesn’t need cooking through, so you can have a dish ready as soon as your onions are fried.  I often use passata in recipes that you want less sauce, like a pasta recipe where the sauce should just minimally cling to the pasta rather than smother it.  Maybe just some pancetta and a thin tomato sauce with spaghetti, that type of thing.

But it doesn’t just have to be pasta – fry up a steak and baked potato and dollop some tomato sauce on top of the steak when you serve it.  Or add some olives and smokey paprika, get a roasting dish with some boiled potatoes in it, place a nice thick piece of white fish on the tats, pour over your smoky tomato sauce and roast for 15-20 minutes…nom nom chuffing nom!

The point of this is not to give you a nice easy recipe – the point of this is for you to take it and tweak it and change it and experiment with it and see if it will take you to new unchartered places.  Let me know how you get on!