sauce support

A friend (who would prefer to be called “Cakekins”) emailed me a question this afternoon:

i am cooking grilled salmon and fresh penne pasta tonight. can you suggest a tasty but healthy sauce to accompany this?

Now, I realise this totally sounds like I made it up. But I didn’t, I promise… Cakekins is real and not a figment of my imagination.

Anyway.

Pasta sauces are tricky. There are generally two genres, in my opinion: tomato-based and creamy. Obviously, tomato-based is the “good” choice and creamy is the “bad” choice. But as we all know, what’s “good” can end up being “boring”. So we need to jazz it up. Chopped tomatoes will only keep us occupied for so long. Eventually, we’ll throw it out of the pram and stuff our faces with carbonara sauce (bacon…egg…cream….parmesan….heaven…).

Red pepper sauce
This is a good way, especially in summer, to spice up a tomato sauce. Add you need is tomatoes, red peppers, tomato puree, garlic, basil, and a hand blender. Roasting/Grilling the peppers before blitzing the mixture gives a great depth of flavour.

Basil oil
Obviously, this route fits neither in the tomato-based category nor the creamy category. I reckon it falls somewhere in between. Plenty of chopped basil and a teaspoon or two of olive oil would coat the pasta quite nicely.

Less-sinfully creamy
If you must use a cream sauce, either use single cream (sparingly) or make your own white sauce (with skim milk and olive oil). But I honestly think you’ll get more flavour from a jazzed-up tomato sauce than you will from a pared-down creamy one.

What do you think?

Update: Cakekins went for the basil oil option in the end:

mmm, sounds good. thank you. i have a newish basil plant that is (for the moment) full of leaves so that sounds good...