Microwave pasta sauce

[kaz]

This is an adaptation of a pasta sauce recipe for the hob which was one of the first things I learned how to cook. The recipe is sort of comfort food for me, but the hob version requires watching and stirring the sauce as it boils, plus needing to wash up the saucepan afterwards, which is generally too spoon-consumptive for me. So I developed this version which you can essentially just stick in the microwave and forget about! It's still not a recipe for low-spoon days for me, but then again there aren't really any recipes I can manage on low-spoon days. It *is* a recipe I can manage on lowish-medium-spoon days when cooking most things is still out of the question. It's also quite customisable.

The main accessibility issues for this, at least for me, are that you still need to chop veggies/meat unless you can get something prechopped, and that it's not a one-pot dish - this is just the sauce, you need to make pasta separately. Or alternatively, what I keep meaning to try is making it with rice noodles and just soaking the noodles in the sauce, but I haven't actually got around to testing this out yet to make sure it works and you'd have to adjust sauce thickness accordingly I think. The main accessibility bonus is that it's quick with little fuss (I can generally get this done in... twenty minutes? maybe less? including chopping time), you don't have to stand around stirring something on the hob, and it doesn't require a lot in the way of utensils you'll need to wash up later.

So. This makes enough for about a pint of sauce, i.e. two portions for me, maybe less if I'm hungry:

( a few large images under cut, including some with meat )