Pasta Sauces

Pasta: As comforting as the Tasmanian woods.

We grace our dining table with pasta dishes on a weekly basis, as it's comfort food for my hubby and they tend to follow very simple recipes. So besides loving these dishes, it gives me opportunity to veg out in my kitchen on a lazy Sunday.

So I'm quite happy to use commercially bottled pasta sauces. Be it a tomato base with a lovely mushroom flavour, or one with garlic and basil. But I move these flavours from the acceptable to the extraordinary by enhancing their flavours. That means a dash of shiraz and stirring in tons of grated mature cheddar. Other times I spice up the tomato sauce with minced olives and crispy bacon bits. Still others I melt the finely chopped anchovies into the sauce.

But I always stop short of buying bottled cream-based pasta sauces, regardless of its added flavours. I believe the canning process destroys the fulfilling taste of fresh cream. And that is the essence of creamy pasta sauces - the cream, be it single or double, must be added to the pasta the moment the milk has been processed into its final consistency. Fresh is yum.

And so I stick to the rule of building my creamy pastas from scratch. And that is as simple as tossing fresh cream into the pot of Italian noodles. And letting the stir fried mushrooms and bacon bits to flavour the dish. Or use capers and dill to offer contrast to generous chunks of baked salmon.

Since both types of pasta sauces are thus simply simple to dish out, this comfort food is a staple when we go rent a self-contained cottage for a holiday. There's certainly nothing move comforting than chowing down on a generous serve of well-sauced fettucini by a log fire, its aromatic scent perfuming the air.