Wombat sauce
This started out as a random scratch tomato-based pasta sauce. Boring studenty food? Perhaps so, but I just whistled one together on a semi-random basis with stuff which came to hand, and it went down stormingly well ...
Serves 2-3 hungry people with pasta, though could stretch further.
- dash of olive oil
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 tsp chopped garlic (I used "Very Lazy" pre-chopped garlic; maybe 3 cloves worth, I'd say)
- 1 tsp chopped ginger (I used Very Lazy, and then chopped it down smaller)
- 1 chilli, chopped and deseeded (your choice of colour; mine was green)
Fry all the above in a saucepan for a few minutes, until the onions start to soften and go translucent. At one point I turned the heat up and stir-fried for a minute. Then add:
- 3 rashers (approx 75g total) bacon, chopped
- 1 tsp mild chili powder
- 0.5 tsp nutmeg
Fry until the bacon is cooked (by this point, the toasted spices make it hard to breathe if you smell the contents of the pan, which is a good sign), then add:
- 0.5 sweet pointed (Ramiro) pepper, roughly deseeded and chopped ringwise (I had half a pepper lying around, otherwise I'd have used a whole one)
Fry for just a minute or two, then add:
- 1 dsp tomato purée
- 1 can (400g or so) chopped tomatoes
- dash of balsamic vinegar
- 3 tsp vegetable bouillon (or you may care to improvise with a stock cube)
- salt and pepper
- 200ml (about half the tomato can) water
Bring to the boil for a minute, then get it simmering and reducing. Add 1 tsp oregano and 0.5 tsp basil and simmer fairly strongly until it achieves a slightly gungy consistency. (This took about ten minutes.)
Serve with your starch of choice and optional cheese. It's fairly warm - it gave us a wonderful staged warmness down the taste buds - and it went a long way.