Over the past several years when I had no money to buy food so I had to get almost all my food from food banks, I've occasionally invented a useful recipe for making use of that "junk" food. Today, on 2008.Jul.17, I decided it was time to post some of my new recipes here.
The food bank provides immense quanties of dry pasta, mostly spaghetti and similar-looking products such as linguine, occasionally other forms such as elbow macaroni or Gamesa stars, but almost never any spaghetti sauce to go with it. It's no fun cooking pasta and eating it with no sauce!! Below are recipes for using spaghetti without any spaghetti sauce.
Cook pasta like it says on the box. Pour it into a collender to get of the cooking water, then pour from collender back to regular container.
Spoon several teasspoons of tomato sauce into a bowl.
Stir in enough tomato paste to thicken it so that it's not watery. (Use a small fork to smash the tomato paste against the side of the bowl to break it up so that it will mix with the watery tomato sauce when you stir them together.)
Stir in half to full teaspoon of Pace Picante sauce. (Yeah, I got that from the food bank once, and almost threw it out because it burns my mouth. But then I discovered this trick "recipe" for making use of it.) I find that half a teaspoon of picante sauce is about right for five teaspoons of tomato sauce. Stir it really really well so that there won't be pockets of bland tomato sauce and pockets of burn-your-mouth picante sauce!
Drop some cooked pasta over the sauce and stir it in. If there's excess sauce pooling away from the pasta, drop in more pasta. Keep dropping pasta and stirring until there are no more pockets of sauce and the thickness of sauce on the pasta is "about right". Eat with fork, rotating while pressing against side of bowl to squeeze out excess sauce, which will cause some sauce to drip off and pool. When the pooling of sauce is excessive, drop more pasta and stir again to get a good balance of pasta and sauce for your final eating from this batch.