Vegetarian spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce is a simple and delicious recipe. This dish is easy to make, requires only a handful of ingredients and takes just 20 minutes to cook. A perfect meal for a quick weekday dinner.
The way Italians eat is simply magnificent. They enjoy every single moment, they celebrate the ingredients, they take time off to stop and be in the present. It’s more than just food, it’s the lifestyle. Living in busy and always running London (yes, even during a global pandemic nobody is slowing down in this city), I started appreciating those brief and slow dinner moments more and more.
When I was a kid, dinner and Sunday lunch were small celebrations in our family. My Mum took this part of the day very seriously and prepared the food with all her love. This time was our get together time, no phones, just chatting and sharing moments from our day. I carried this tradition with me for a long time and even here, in London, dinners became a 20 minute daily celebration with my fussy eater. However, the last 12 months changed everything. Sometime during the past year I lost this tradition. I became too busy to sit down and eat my food, too important to turn off my phone for at least 15 minutes, too strict on myself to even rethink my daily achievements.
One day I noticed that eating dinner in front of the TV or with phones in our hands had become a new normal. Our daily chats battled with the news reporter’s voice and our 15 minutes of enjoying homemade meals became a competition of who’d finish eating first to start their evening working shift.
It’s crazy to realize how easily you can change a good habit for a more convenient one. However, after realizing that this had become our new routine, I wanted to get back to the way we used to be. I wanted to have a relaxed dinner without any distractions and to experience that dolce vita Italian lifestyle for 20 minutes every evening. In order to create this, I needed comfort food and what could be better than pasta with a rich and creamy sauce. It’s like heaven on a plate.
Spaghetti with tomato sauce sounded like a recipe that could bring us back to the present moment. With just a handful of good quality ingredients, I created a real Monday evening feast. Cherry tomatoes gave sweetness to the sauce, Gochujang paste brought an extra heat kick to the dish and double cream created the creamy texture.
This amazing pasta dish fast became one of our favourites and let me tell you, no matter what, the day we eat pasta is the day when we live our dolce vita.
Recipe
Ingredients:
250g dried spaghetti
¼ leek
3 cloves of garlic
200g cherry tomatoes
3 tablespoons of tomato paste
1 tablespoon of sun-dried tomato paste
1 teaspoon of Gochujang paste
50ml double cream
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
To serve:
1 tablespoon of parsley
Grated cheese
- Cook the spaghetti in the salted water, following pack instructions.
- Add a splash of olive oil in a pan and cook the finely chopped garlic and leek for 2-3 minutes.
- After the leek and garlic soften, add the chopped cherry tomatoes and gently cook everything together for 2-3 minutes.
- Add the tomato, sun-dried tomato and Gochujang paste together with 100ml of spaghetti water into the cooked tomatoes. Mix everything together and gently simmer for 5 minutes. Season the sauce for your liking.
- Add the double cream and cooked spaghetti into the sauce. Mix everything together and finish the dish with the chopped parsley and grated cheese.
If you need more easy pasta recipes, check these out:
Spaghetti with Harissa and Roasted Peppers
Veggie Lasagne with Cabbage and Peas
