JD recently told me that he was going to be cooking dinner for his lady. Now I know JD, he can’t cook - his only specialty comes from the back of a Discovery Fajitas packet. I call that more reading than cooking myself so I decided to teach JD how to make a simple tomato base sauce to allow him to make a plethora of meals: spaghetti, lasagna and even enchilada.

Simple Tomato Base

Ingredients

• 4 cans of tomatoes (personally I use 2 chopped, 2 plum. Too many chopped and the sauce looks very thin and too many plum makes it seem very blocky)
• Garlic
• Basil (fresh is preferred but dried is satisfactory)
• Large White Onion
• Cherry Tomatoes (has to be cherry - they bring an added sweetness while taking no room)
• Sun-Blushed Tomatoes (this is very specific, sun-BLUSHED. If you can’t get blushed, dried will do however - if you can get both - GET BOTH - you need a good helping, like one cup)
• Red Wine (a glasses or two will be fine)
• Black Olives (I love olives with a passion, however a few people I know don’t so feel free to leave this out)
• Several Linked Beef Sausages (this a recent addition to the recipe, but we sometimes buy good quality beef sausages to cook alongside within the pot. The beef adds an additional flavour to the sauce. To your own discretion)

Method

1. Get a large saucepan. Make sure you it can hold at least the volume of ingredients or are going to put into it. Put in some olive oil and head it up.
2. Prepare the ingredients: dice the onion & garlic, slice the black olives into small slices, cut the cherry tomatoes in half and cut the garlic. We like garlic a lot here so for this we usually use around 3-4 cloves but feel free to change that. The sun-blushed tomatoes are usually in halves already so leave those alone however sun-dried need to be cut into strips. They are just that bit chewy when eating large so strips of them are prefect.
3. Throw the garlic into the pan and stir it around, making sure it doesn’t burn. Give it a few seconds and toss in the onion and the basil. About two heaped tea-spoons is enough of basil.
4. Cover the pan and make it low heat. You don’t want anything to burn, but you want the onion to be soft.
5. Open up the four cans of tomatoes and pour those into the pan. Stir to make sure everything is coated and drop in: the sun-blushed/dried tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes and the olives.
6. We drop in about a dessert spoon of extra olive oil, some salt and some pepper.
7. At this point, we drop in a glass of red wine and place in the sausages. These will ‘boil’ in the sauce cooking them and releasing flavour into the sauce.
8. That’s it. Let that settle for about 2-3 hours now, using the back of a wooden spoon to squish the cherry tomatoes when they are soft. Top up the red wine now and then as well while checking on the sausages. When it is finished, take the sausages out of the pot (this point I usually just eat the sausages as an afternoon snack!) and your sauce is finished!