Hot sweet pasta

Several weeks ago I wrote about making tomato sauce the old fashioned way with my in-laws. I thought I'd tell you about one of my favourite things to do with that sauce. Cooking! It's cooking, OK? Get your mind out of the gutter.

Hot sweet pasta

First, you need one or two small hot red peppers, and one or two cloves of garlic. We have hot peppers and garlic fresh from our garden. Fresh ingredients make any dish they are in just that much better. Put the peppers and garlic into a blender with several cups of water, and blend until there are no large pieces left. Strain the water into a pot. This will be the water used to cook the pasta. Usually, one blender full of water is not enough to fill the pot, so I add more water to the blender, put the pulp from the strainer back in, blend, and strain that water into the pot as well. Discard the seeds and skins left behind.

At this point I would like to add a note of caution. You are now working with water that is, basically, essence of hot pepper. Do not touch your face, or any other part of your body for that matter. An itch in an embarrasing place now can rapidly turn into serious discomfort. Another caution: we are going to boil this water, which will inject essence of hot pepper into the air via steam coming off the pot. I sometimes experience a slight respiratory distress during preparation of this recipe. If you are already sensitive to breathing problems you should be careful. I like to open a window, and run the fan on my range hood while I cook this dish.

OK, ass covering now out of the way, let's get back to the cooking. Take a jar of your fresh tomato sauce and pour it into a sauce pan. If you don't have any fresh tomato sauce like I described in that earlier entry, I'd recommend going out and making friends with some old world Italians right away. You can't buy anything like this in any store I've ever found. No spices, no additives, no preservatives, this is just pure tomato sauce. Cook on low for several hours. Sorry, did I just screw you up? I should have mentioned right off the bat that you must start early. The cooking time of the sauce will depend on how watery the tomatos were. This year's batch will probably need longer cooking times that previous years, at least in my neck of the woods. The sauce is done when it reaches the consistancy you like your pasta sauce to have. Too thin, and it won't stick to the noodles;too thick, and it won't mix evenly into the noodles. Practice, practice, practice; this is way better than piano, though.

I don't add anything to the sauce, except maybe a little bit of salt. I want the sweetness of the tomatoes to be the dominant flavour. Now boil the water, and add your pasta of choice. Spaghetti, penne, fetucine, whatever you like. We also have home made pasta noodles to choose from at home. Eating home made pasta is one of the great pleasures in the world, and I hope you all have the opportunity to experience it at least once.  When the pasta is done (sure, you can use the ceiling, but I find the wall easier to clean) strain it, and serve. Traditional spaghetti presentation is pouring the sauce over the plain noodles, but I like to put the pasta back into the pot first, and mix in the sauce until the noodles are evenly covered, than serve. The thing I like about this recipe is the fact that the spiciness of the peppers and garlic are in the pasta, not in the sauce, and the sweetness of the sauce serves to temper the heat of the peppers. I like hot and spicy, but I like flavour more, and sometimes hot peppers can burn so much, they mask the taste. Don't forget the fresh grated parmesan cheese.