Fresh Tomato Pasta Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight I’m so excited because I’m making one of my favorite meals ever.

Tomato basil sauce on some whole grain pasta, so so simple but for some reason I love it.

So I’ve got a sauce pot on the burner here, just heating up. Looks about good so I’m going to add the olive oil and first thing I’ll pop in there is the onion. I’ve diced up some onion and we’ll just get that cooked until its translucence.

So the onions are translucent, I’ve got some garlic in there now while they’re just cooking a little bit and while I did that I’ve been chopping up my tomatoes.

And I wouldn’t normally use fresh tomatoes in the winter because they don’t often grow around where I live unless I get some green house tomatoes anyway the reason I am today is because I wanted to show you how easy it is to make tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes.

And in the winter of course environmentally and flavourfully if that’s a word, tomatoes aren’t quite as nice as in the summer so I do often use canned tomatoes for this as well but fresh is awesome.

Tomatoes of course are full of antioxidants which help to neutralize any free radical that might be in your system, so super important, free radicals are thought to cause-impart cancer. So definitely important!

Alright, this is looking awesome, the onions are nice and soft, garlic is just softening up and it’s time to put the tomatoes in here.

So I managed to fit all these tomatoes in my one pot, its good thing, I wasn’t thinking of using this bigger pot but apparently I needed it so I got things stirred around, onions, garlic, tomatoes all nice together.

And because I’m using fresh I don’t want these around on the stove for too long and loose all their goodness so I’m just gonna put the herbs right now, I got some oregano that is not fresh unfortunately but I dried it from my own garden so I know how old it is and its only a couple of months old.

I got some of that, I’ll get some sea salts in here; I did manage to find some lovely fresh basil so I’ll throw that in here, I like a lot! Put in as much as you like.

I find when I but the little packages of herbs, I have trouble going through them before they go bad so I figure might as well just chunk in as much as I want.

Stir that in and then the last ingredient I think, yup! I know I forgot the pepper! A little bit of pepper, I like to grind it as really nice fresh peppery taste and just a touch of unrefined sugar just to bring out the flavor of the tomatoes.

So stir this around and I’ll get the pasta cooking. I don’t want to cook this sauce for too long, I probably should have started the pasta already but what I can do is just cover this, keep it on the burner but turn the heat off so its stay nice and hot but doesn’t lose as many nutrients.

Alright! To cook this pasta because it’s a whole grain it has a little bit different technique from a white pasta. I’ve got it in cold water and I’ve got it on the heat, I’m gonna add a little bit of sea salt just to help with the cooking process.

And what I’m gonna do is if you can see I‘ve only covered this with water because what’s gonna happen is I’m gonna keep adding water as soon as it reaches a boil in order to cook it.

The whole grains cook when they’re coming up to a boil so if you keep them at a boil, they’re not gonna be quite as nice in texture.

So if I start with cool water, bring them in a boil, break the boil with water again, bring it up, they’ll cook a lot nicer so the key here is that you need to start with a pot not quite full because otherwise its gonna overflow.

Alright! This pot has just made it to a boil and what I’m gonna do is get some water and add just enough so that it’ll stop boiling. The steam still coming up it’s just on the verge of boiling but it’s not actually boiling and then I’ll wait for it to start boiling again, add more water, keep doing this until the pasta is cooked and I judge cook by fishing one out, trying it and see if I like the texture.

Some people like it more al dente so little bit firmer, some people like it really really soft and that would need to get cooked a few more minutes. So wait until this is cook, keep adding water as it boils then we’ll drain it and served it topped with our lovely tomato sauce.

So the pasta is finished cooking here, if you’re using a brown rice pasta its often helpful to run it under some water because it gets a little bit of stickiness to it that isn’t so nice to eat.

I’ve got a little bit here in my bowl and just spoon some of this lovely tomato sauce on top and I’ve got one of my favourite meal tomato basil pasta.