a "bloody" good meal

Sometimes work drives me to drink. I'm exaggerating, but really, after a long hard day at the office, it does happen that I don’t feel like cooking. Luckily, a simple pasta supper will do the trick. I first found this recipe from Gary Rhodes’ Keeping it Simple cookbook. While I don’t like all of his recipes (I think he uses too much butter and cream as ‘easy’ routes to good-tasting food), I’ve been wanting to try his bloody mary pasta for a while. And the vodka can help settle my nerves.

I keep a bottle of vodka in the fridge, though I haven’t opened it since I bought it six months ago. A good excuse to open it, then, if ever I heard one.

The sauce is composed of:

Finely chopped onions, sautéed (Gary says in butter, I say olive oil)
Passata
Blanched, peeled, deseeded and chopped tomatoes
Your average bloody mary ingredients – celery salt, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and Vodka. (The brilliant thing here is you can make your sauce like you make your drink)

The result is really tasty – it looks simple when served (almost too simple). But my tastebuds were pleasantly surprised by a seemingly boring tomato sauce that has a zing and some earthiness (kindly provided by the celery salt). I could have eaten loads (but I didn’t)

Calories per serving: about 575 – a respectable meal in and of itself.
(A 100 g serving of wholewheat spaghetti (335 calories)+ ½ the sauce (1/2 jar passata, ½ tbsp olive oil, 1.5 tbsp vodka, ½ an onion and the other bloody mary accoutrements))

An easy way to cut down on calories here would be to either:
-have a smaller serving of pasta (say 75 g), which I often do
-cut down on the sauce (my version calls for quite a saucy dish)
-use olive oil spray instead of the olive oil (About 30 sprays I’d say would do – though keep the heat low and perhaps cover the onions so they can sweat more easily)

I would have done the third one, but my incessant use of olive oil spray has caused me to run out mid-week!

One last tip: put the vodka bottle back in the freezer right away or you might get carried away after dinner!