The Steaming Pot - Easy vegetarian recipes from India

This post is dedicated to all those who believe their culinary range is limited to cooking instant noodles and heating ready-made food, for whom pasta sauce means a pricey jar of red substance bought from the supermarket.

Please. Don’t let those packaged pasta sauce bottles burn a hole in your pocket and inject a million preservatives into your system. Making homemade tomato sauce for pasta is the easiest thing in the world. At least, if you go by this recipe I’m going to share with you.

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In the post on coriander parsley pesto, I had promised to share recipe ideas using pesto.

And so, here I am, delivering on that promise.

Three recipe ideas using pesto as key ingredient: mushroom and cherry tomato sauté with pesto, spaghetti with pesto, pesto on toast.

1. Mushroom and Cherry Tomato Saute with Pesto

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Other than Indian dishes using spinach (spinach toor dal, aloo palak, palak paneer), I love to cook pasta with spinach as its prime ingredient. Here’s a simple spinach cheese pasta recipe.

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They talk of "trial by fire" as a true test of character – instances of it abound in medieval Europe as much as Indian mythology.

While one may question the veracity of such a test with reference to people, it does throw up interesting results when applied to fruits and vegetables.

I’m referring to roasting.

Placing raw whole vegetables on an open flame and slow-cooking them brings out latent attributes that you wouldn’t even know existed. Roasted capsicum becomes juicy and sweet, shedding much of its pepperiness; tomatoes take on a delicious smoky note.

This tomato olive capsicum pasta – with its key ingredients roasted – has a lot of character. It has been through trial by fire, after all.

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