I make the simplest spaghetti in town. I don’t have the luxury of making my own red sauce so I cheat a little by using pasta sauce in a bottle. It tastes good, saves me time, serves my purpose, so what the heck !

What I use is:

• spaghetti, enough for 4 persons
• 350 grams or about 2 cups of Prego pasta sauce of your preferred flavor
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, chopped into small chunks
• 6-8 cherry tomatoes, halved
• olive oil
• parsley

I start off by boiling the spaghetti in lightly salted water till al dente. This shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

While that’s happening, I happily cut the onions, carrot and tomatoes. I cut the carrot into small chunks and blanch it first for a reason.

Carrots are hard and take longer to cook. By blanching it, it’ll be half cooked by the time it joins the rest of the ingredients in the pan.

I drizzle some olive oil into a non-stick pan on medium heat and saute the onion till transparent. Then in go the tomatoes and blanched carrot chunks, followed by a good shake of the pasta sauce from the bottle and a sprinkle of dried parsley.

No, I don’t use the pasta sauce straight from the bottle, uncooked. Even though the pasta sauce is supposed to come with onions, garlic and mushrooms, I like to add more of my own.

Sometimes I add more herbs and some sugar to tone down the tartness of the fresh tomatoes. On a good day, I’d throw in broccoli flowrets and French beans as well. Notice I don’t add any salt at all because that’s already in the bottled sauce.

So yeah, that’s it and it took me less than 30 minutes from start to finish. Lunch is served.

This is definitely a great recipe to have at short notice. We observe two vegetarian days a month and sometimes it’s hard finding vegetarian dishes the kids like. At the same time, since the kids love this, it’s a good way for me to reduce our meat consumption.

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