Simple tomato sauce pasta (pasta con pomodoro) (vegan)

This is the mother of all pasta sauces, the classical Italian pomodoro (Italian word for tomato) recipe. In more elaborate versions, people add all sorts of things to it - from other types of cooked or raw vegetables to cheeses and meat - but usually, if at least half the filling is pomodoro, its taste overpowers everything else. 

Nonetheless, whatever you intend to do with it - put it on pasta like we did here, or pizza or meat or mashed potatoes and so on, you need to know, once and for all, how to make some home-made pomodoro closer to the original than the awful (to your health and taste buds) stuff in supermarkets. 

Although basic for other elaborate sauces, this thing is surely good enough to eat simple, but for perfect results make sure you choose the best quality ingredients you can find (the pasta, tomato paste and olive oil.... and perhaps the sugar are the most important). Most people forget the sugar part, but that's the best traditional trick the Italians use to mellow away the tomato's acidic bite. The sauce won't taste sweet but flavorful. Enjoy! :)

Ingredients (serves 1):

• 70-80 g pasta ( we used baby pasta for quick boil)
• 100 g high quality tomato sauce (made of fresh tomatoes mashed into a paste)
• 50 g fresh parley (or basil, if you can find, case in which lose the bottom ingredient of dried basil)
• 1 garlic clove
• some olive oil
• 1-2 teaspoons of brown sugar
• 1-2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• some salt and pepper
• 2 teaspoons of fresh basil

Boil your pasta, drain it and set it nearby:

Prepare your other ingredients. Wash the parsley:

Mince the garlic clove:

Finely mince the parsley:

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan and add the tomato sauce:

Stir, season with salt, pepper and the brown sugar. Make sure you stir well so the sugar gets properly dissolved (in a minute or two):

Add the minced garlic ad parsley and also the dried basil. Stir to mix everything:

Only leave on the fire for 30 seconds or so while you're mixing (that preserves much of the good part of the raw flavor of garlic and herbs). Then remove from the fire, put the pasta in a serving bowl and add the whole contents of the pan on top:

Mix well and it's done. Dig in! :)