Farfalle al Sugo: a meal in 15min

Just came home after a 2 day company retreat (aka meetings) and there was nothing in my fridge... So I made a quick meal using the tomato sauce recipe I posted before :)

Ready by the time the pasta was done cooking!

The (Almost) Completely Homemade Tomato Sauce

Growing up in an Italian family, I was spoiled with fresh pastas and delicious, homemade sauce. I am a picky eater of Italian food and yet I do so love it, and love to make it at home. Pasta for me is often a spur of the moment comfort food, and I need to be able to have it when I want it! And I simply cannot STAND anything from a jar or can coming anywhere near my pasta... or almost nothing!

Making tomato sauce from scratch, while not rocket science, is somewhat time-consuming and really only worth doing in large batches. Growing up we would usually make about 5 litres at a time and freeze it, but I am currently somewhat limited by my small Chinese refrigerator. While I do definitely plan to make use of these delicious summer tomatos to make a batch soon, I also thought I would share a trick my Italian family often used when we were out of our homemade kind: Pomodori Pelati

The secret to having homemade tomato sauce in a snap!

Pomodori Pelati translates literally to "naked tomatoes" and it's just what Italians call whole, peeled, canned tomatoes. Except it sounds so much cooler in Italian. With a can of these, you can have the deliciousness of homemade tomato sauce in just 15 minutes, I promise!

But first things first. Even if you can't buy an Italian brand, which is perfectly fine, make sure you are getting the right thing. They should be whole, peeled tomatoes. Not crushed. Not diced. Not anything else! They should be canned in their own juice. There should be NO OTHER INGREDIENTS except for citric acid, which they need to put in to can them. Check the ingredients list! Mine says

"INGREDIENTS: peeled tomatoes, tomato juice, acidity regulator: citric acid"

Ok, so if you have the right stuff, your tomato sauce will be delicious!

Here is what you need to do:
Open the can and pour the contents into a saucepan. You can rinse the can out with some water to get the extra juice out, and add that to the saucepan too!
Turn the burner on medium and, as the sauce begins to warm up, use a wooden spoon to crush the whole tomatoes against the sides of the pot. You can have the sauce be as chunky or homogenous as you like it, depending on how long you do this for!
Add a pinch of salt.
Add a spoonful of sugar or honey (this helps to break the bitterness/acidity of the tomatoes and is the secret ingredient in many Italian family recipes!
Add a couple of dried bay leaves, whole.
Add a couple whole, peeled cloves of garlic.
OPTIONAL:
Add a dash of pepper (black, white, red, whichever you prefer!)
Add a couple of fresh basil leaves.

Let the sauce simmer until you have the desired consistency. If you are making pasta, 10-15 minutes should be plenty. If you want to use the sauce for lasagna or pizza and need it to be thicker, let it simmer longer.

I sometimes make extra and freeze or refrigerate this kind of sauce for later too.

Notice no oils or fat of any kind are added! This is important since the heating process changes fats, altering their flavor and making them less healthy. In my family, we only add the fats/oils once the pasta is ready to be served, i.e. AFTER the sauce has been poured over the hot pasta! Once this happens, you can add a spoonful of butter and/or a drizzle of olive oil to the pasta and sauce together. The pasta will be hot enough for the butter to melt and it makes the sauce SO rich and creamy! And olive oil is just delicious and healthy and Italians add it to pretty much everything.

Enjoy!

The Avocado Lady

The Avocado Lady is a creature of legend among Shanghai expats, and a not so secret secret that everyone should know. If you live in Shanghai and you don't know the Avocado Lady it can be said that you do not really live in Shanghai, you merely exist here.

From the outside, the Avocado Lady's little produce shop looks like the myriads of other little local businesses!

The Avocado Lady is your one-stop shop for all sorts of produce that is hard to come by here in Shanghai, and China in general. While an increasing number of fancy foreign supermarkets have started supplying a lot of what this magical being has provided for years from her humble little shop, no-one can beat her prices!

It is a mystery to me to this day how and where she manages to source her imported products for so cheap (small, family-owned businesses usually find it hard to compete with the likes of Carrefour and Walmart when it comes to price!), or where this entrepreneurial woman got this wonderful idea in the first place.

She stocks hard to come by produce such as beets, radishes, arugula, nuts, fresh spices and cheeses and, of course, avocados, which she sells at the cheapest price I have ever seen in China.

On top of the produce, she also stocks an ever increasing array of imported goods such as wine, olive oil, jams and marmelades, breakfast cereals, canned goods... and on and on!

Inside the store, the shelves are laden with foreign goodies and fresh produce!

I came home on my bike the other day, my little basket heavy with the delicious things I picked up. I generally buy my regular veggies closer to my house, but for special things I simply cannot find at my regular produce stand, the wonderful Avocado Lady saves my day!

Beets, avocados, almonds, walnuts, arugula, radishes, olive oil, fresh mozzarella, coconut milk, cream and canned tomatos were some of the spoils from my latest visit to the Avocado Lady!

The Avocado Lady's shop is in Shanghai's French Concession at 274 Wulumuqi Rd, near Wuyuan Rd. The closest metro is the Changshu Rd. stop on lines 1 and 7.

In Chinese: 乌鲁木齐中路274号，靠近五原路。