- Get half-kilo of fresh tomatoes, three onions, and three carrots. You can use the cheapest tomatoes for this, the heat treatment will average the taste. Wash everything. Chop onions and carrots, dump into the frying pan. Add salt.
- Fry diced onions and carrots in a pan, using a generous finger-thick layer of oil, preferrably olive, until the onions don’t sting anymore and carrots start to soften.
- Cut tomatoes in 2 pieces each, you’ll mash them anyway so thin slices do not matter. Dump tomatoes into the pan. Cover with a lid, cook on a slow fire for about 10 minutes until they become sauce. Mash and stir each 3 minutes so they won’t burn. Cooking less will preserve taste of fresh tomatoes, cooking longer will make it taste closer to canned pasta sauce. But they won’t have that taste of the can that you will get with canned tomatoes.
- Add the secret ingredient - half-kilo of canned pork. This is an optional step - if you prefer taste over calories, it’s better to prepare a separate meat dish instead. If you want to add hot pepper, add it now so it will spread uniformly.
-
Boil pasta while tomatoes are cooking - the standard 500 gram package will do, preferably something with a lot of surface like penne so it can soak up more sauce.
-
Dump Italian or French spice mix into the pan. Turn off the heat, let it simmer for 1 minute so the herbs will soften.
- Dump pasta into the pan. Done! Plating is optional, you can eat it straight from the pan. And the next day you can prepare another wonderful dish - yesterday’s pasta re-heated until it’s crusty.
Is there any reason for choosing canned pork over fresh ground pork?
Something like this I would ordinarily start by browning the meat, then remove and use its rendered fat to cook the onions, then deglaze the pan with the tomatoes. Your method obviously works, but is backwards from what I’d expect.
The main reason is that I’ve got this can of pork for free, and it wasn’t super high quality, with skin and sinew. Eating it as-is was meh, so my choice was either to dump it into a soup, or army-style macaroni, which is a downgrade of navy-style macaroni, the recipe is literally - dump the can of meat into a pasta, and you can replace the pasta with instant noodles for an extra decrease of cooking time and dish quality.
Gotcha. Sauce is a good use for lesser quality meat.
If you don’t add the meat, this becomes a classic vegetarian pasta recipe. Eat with a slice of Brie, or grind some hard cheese on top. Or simply put sliced cheese on top, it is going to melt anyway.