Five Vegetable Pasta Sauce

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Cooking the veg.

Five Vegetable Pasta Sauce, the ingredients

This recipe was derived as a result of having so many spare vegetables sitting in the fridge. It makes a thick, rich sauce perfect with pasta. The recipe freezes well so the ingredients can be increased for later use or to increase servings.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 small red onion
• ½ leek
• 1 garlic clove
• ¼ red pepper
• 1 carrot
• 1 small courgette
• 1 tin chopped tomatoes
• 150ml vegetable stock
• 1 tablespoon Tomato puree
• ½ tablespoon Sun dried tomato puree (optional)
• ½ teaspoon sugar
• Basil

Method

1. Chop all of the vegetables fairly small, ½ inch cubes or smaller. It will save effort with the hand blender later and they will cook down quicker.
2. Heat the oil in a large pan
3. Fry the carrot first as ths will take longest
4. Add the remaining veg, onion, leek, garlic, red pepper and courgette and cook until soft. about 10 minutes.
5. Add the tin tomatoes, sugar, stock and purees and give another few minutes to bring back up to heat.
6. Dried or fresh basil can be used, add at the last minute before blending. No need to chop first if using fresh.
7. Using a hand blender straight in the pot is easiest although you can do this gradually in a worktop blender, blend until you reach a consistency you prefer.
8. Freezes well and can be gradually defrosted from frozen on a low heat on the hob or in the microwave.

Chef's notse

Thank you Kitchenminion, for a wonderful recipe idea. With the addition of a cheese topping, the ingredients shown served 2 people, for 2 days. The only changes I made were to microwave the carrots first and add a pinch of ancho chile powder.