I’m writing this week’s Scraps after a long Easter weekend break, and a bit of time off work, too. We went to the North-east for my mum’s 60th, and I got to hang out with my niece, and walk on the beach, and have an Eton mess ice cream from a really great parlour in Bamburgh. I’ve picked something sniffly up, though – my nose is tingly and my eyes streaming. I’ve spent today thinking about food that is comforting, and rich, and easy and cheap.
A nice mellow song. In fact, cook to the whole Yebba album this week please. Your food will taste better.
1.The four-ingredient tomato sauce I use in everything
Is this the right amount of butter? I have no idea. That brick-red dollop at 10 o’clock however is Harissa pasta – it’s spicy and piquanty, and should give the sauce an arrabiata-like quality.
I’m spending the next few issues focusing on meat-free recipes, but I knew Marcela Hazan’s tomato sauce would wind up in Scraps at some point even before then. It’s so easy to make. Over the years, it’s become less of a recipe than a sort of concept – something I’ll tweak and play around with. Hazan first published the recipe in her book, Essentials of Italian Cooking, but it’s been reproduced in the New York Times and countless other places since then. Food52 has a video recipe featuring it, too. The basic recipe is two tins of tomatoes, a whole onion, butter, and salt. The onion cooks in the sauce for 45 minutes, and is removed at the end and discarded. That’s it. That’s the recipe.
But over the years I’ve tweaked it and changed it loads. It’s forgiving, so whether you use plum tomatoes or tinned cherry tomatoes, it will taste amazing (as a taste-as-you-go cook, I’d recommend adjusting the salt depending on the tomatoes). You can add a couple of finely sliced garlic gloves in here to mellow out while the sauce cooks, or you could try a red onion or two shallots instead of a white onion. Sometimes, I add a tablespoon of harissa or sambal and instead serve the sauce with instant noodles, rather than spaghetti.
The leftovers are so good used in baked eggs the next morning (I sprinkled feta on mine).
I’d also recommend doubling the quantities in the Food52 recipe and freezing a batch of this. It’s so useful to have around. The sauce is thick enough to bake chicken thighs or white fish in (maybe with some sliced olives and torn basil) but as we’re keeping it meat-free at the moment, I’d absolutely recommend spooning this sauce over some potato gnocchi (whether you make it yourself or buy it is up to you, but making it fresh is an A+ Sunday activity).
It’s also perfect as the base for this tomato and parmesan risotto or as the sauce base for a DIY pizza. The leftovers are great heated up in a skillet or frying pan and cracking a couple of eggs in for a riff on Nigella’s eggs in purgatory. On that occasion, I add a generous glug of hot sauce (preferably a slightly pungent, vinegar-laced one like Cholula) to give it a kick.
And finally, it would not be Scraps if I didn’t say: keep the sticky onion wedges once you fish them out the sauce. We don’t discard anything on this newsletter (well, we do, obviously, but stay with me here). Pat them dry and roast them in the oven on a high heat – the sugar from the tomatoes will help them caramelise and crisp up. These are great in grain bowls, or chucked in a vegetable soup. Blitz them with some yogurt and chives and you’d have a pretty good dip. Just don’t throw them in the bin.
2. Your Scraps: Meat-free edition
Last issue, I asked readers to send in their favourite meat-free recipes. This was largely an exercise in outsourcing – and I wanted to share some of the best ones.
A lot of people sent my emails about “THE STEW” – the infamous Allison Roman recipe. If you haven’t come across it before, do read up on the phenomena around it (Vox, my employer’s parent company, has a great explainer). The Stew, for all the brouhaha around it, is genuinely one of my favourite things to cook and I kicked myself for not remembering about it. It plays to my love of winging it – I’ve had slurpable versions of this in giant soup bowls, and thicker portions of it scooped up on flatbreads. It’s also great meat-ified, if you have any chicken stock you’re keen to use up.
My friend Holly told me to cook Ottolenghi’s mushroom ragu – this has definitely been on my radar for a little while now. She said, “The Ottolenghi mushroom ragu is absolutely incredible. Such depth of flavour, makes a huge batch, freezes really well. I've had it with pasta, rice, even on a jacket potato.”
Speaking of Roman, Rosie got in touch to tell me how much she loved her recipe for roasted squash with dates and hazelnuts. “You quarter the squash and roast them and then brown the butter, add chopped walnuts, then the dates and some herbs to finish. The squash becomes so soft you can eat the skin and everything!” – this sounds incredible, even if I’d rank walnuts fairly low down on my own personal nut-matrix.