Simple pasta with tomato sauce recipe

Pasta with spicy herb and tomato sauce.

Although I want to be posting only one recipe per week for now, this week I will make an exception as I want to test out how 'Rich Snippets' work with my recipes. It seems to be a lot of work, but it should make my recipes more accessible from Google's new recipe search, which is good.


I decided to go with an easy classic this time, pasta with a spicy herb and tomato sauce. Though the name of the sauce is the same as the one from my last post, the sauce is actually different, mainly because the intended use of the sauce differs between the two recipes. That being said, there is actually quite a lot of similarities between the two recipes.

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Simple pasta with tomato sauce recipe

by Matt Conlan.

Pasta with a basic spicy herb and tomato sauce.

Prep time: 5m
Cook time: 20m
Total time: 25m
Yield: 2

Ingredients

• 400g Tomatoes, peeled and chopped (I used tinned peeled plum tomatoes, you can use fresh, and you can add some cherry tomatoes if you want your sauce a little sweeter without using sugar)
• 1 Onion, diced
• 2 Garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 small handful of basil leaves, torn
• 1 sprig of thyme, leaves only
• 1 pinch of chilli powder, to taste
• 1 Tbsp Tomato purée
• 1 Salt and pepper, for seasoning
• 1 Tbsp Olive oil (or any oil you prefer to fry with, cooking sprays should also work)
• 2 Bowls of freshly cooked pasta

Cooking Directions

1. 1. Heat the oil in a pan.
2. 2. Gently fry the onion, garlic and thyme until onion is soft and translucent.
3. 3. Add the tomatoes and basil, then simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. 4. Add the tomato puree, chilli powder, salt and pepper to taste.
5. 5. If the sauce is a bit bitter, add a pinch of sugar.
6. 6. Continue to simmer for another 5 to 10 minutes, until the sauce is thick and the tomatoes have broken down.
7. 7. Arrange the pasta on a plate, spoon some sauce on to the pasta and serve.
   

Enough for two, I jarred the surplus sauce.

In this post I was trying out rich snippets and microdata, I used The Recipe Wiz to generate an empty recipe template, and then I adapted it to fit my recipe afterwards. I did it this way around because when I tried using it on the site the ingredients list didn't seem to work properly. However I could not get the microdata to work properly.

I tried also using RecipeSEO after the recipe wiz failed to do what I wanted. It seems to have worked, the code was laid out nicely so when I went to change it manually to how I wanted it to be it was fairly easy to understand what did what, and so on.

This will have the advantage of being a lot easier than learning all the new HTML tags for it from scratch. For now, this is how I will be doing my posts, I will just copy some skeleton code from this post and put it into the post template.

Author:

Matt Conlan