Bottle cooking

It so happens that there has been a jar of ready-mix sauce in the cupboard for some time now. Not exactly a ready-meal, but not that far off it. A confection of tomatoes, water and sugar. With a few percents left over for onion and flavourings of various sorts. Regulators and stabilisers. This afternoon, it was convenient to give it a go.

Fried up a couple of chopped onion in some extra virgin rape seed oil. Added half the jar of rather wet looking sauce. Gently boiled it down to a rather better consistency. To the point where it would stick if one did not keep an eye on it.

Prepared and cooked the outer leaves of a large chou pointu (or something of the sort) from Tesco. Probably less than five minutes.

Cooked some pasta. Probably more than ten minutes.

Stirred 200g of Bastides saucisson, also from Tesco, into the sauce and onion mix. Peeling off the casing, slicing and chopping the slices into quarters that is. Which was a bit more bother than it might have been in the absence of a kitchen knife with a clean, sharp blade of a proper weight.

Simmer the mixture for a bit, then serve and eat. And although I say it myself, not bad at all. At least, all the saucepans were empty by the time that we had finished.

By our standards, rather highly flavoured, but as I say, not bad at all. And using the ready-mix certainly speeded things up. No chopping and cooking of large numbers of tomatoes. And the use of all the flavourings made a change: I generally don't go further than (freshly bashed) black pepper and (freshly chopped) garlic. Nothing exotic like salt, herbs or E-numbers.

PS 1: my Laguiole clasp knife has a good blade, made of the finest French stainless, but a clasp knife is not a kitchen knife. I did use to carry it about and it would have been better than what I did have, but not as good as a proper kitchen knife.

PS 2: the following morning: the big Tesco's between Ryde and Brading might do alright with greens and with recycling sausages from Bastides. But they do not do alright with oranges. Two nets of their large oranges have been old and dry, this morning almost to the point of inedibility. A problem which we have fairly often with the big Sainsbury' at Kiln Lane. Disappointing that, on the basis of a sample of one, Tesco's do no better.

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=laguiole. A few previous mentions.