Recipe/TomatoSauce

This is a very basic tomato sauce for use with pasta or similar. It's great because it's (a) quick - takes less time to cook than dried pasta - and (b) very easy to base endless variations on.

Basic version:

Ingredients: Serves two
6-7 normal size tomatoes (salad tomatoes are fine)
Tomato purée (hard to say how much: quite a lot. Perhaps 40g? Between 15-50g, anyway.)
Half an onion
Salt, pepper
Herbs: typically basil and oregano, but many variations possible
Olive oil or sundried tomato oil
Two people's worth of pasta
Cheddar for grating

Steps

Start boiling a kettle for the pasta (1 litre of water)
Start heating some oil for frying
Chop the half onion
Put the onion in the frying pan and start frying it till it just starts turning golden/brown
The water should have boiled now: put it and the pasta in the pan at a heat to just still bubble
Chop the tomatoes roughly (each normal salad tomato into about 16 pieces)
By this point the onion should have fried: put the tomato and tomato purée into the onion pan and stir well. It should start mushing down and turning from chunks into a sauce
Add salt, pepper and herbs to taste (literally. Taste it and see if you want more. You can also add a little sugar - 1/4 to 1/2 tsp - if you think it needs it.)
Keep stirring the pasta and sauce; they should both be ready at about the same time.
Drain pasta and serve with optional grated cheddar

Variations
These are why this sauce is so useful. You can use the above as a base for all sorts of variations. You can try:

Add parmesan or cream to the sauce
Add pepper, either raw (chopped and at the same time as the tomatoes) or grilled/roasted
Add other vegetables from the freezer e.g. sweetcorn
Add sundried tomatoes
Add a splash of red wine vinegar while the tomatoes are reducing (maybe about 2 tsp)
Add a little bit of Marmite (about 1/4 tsp)
Add a splash of Worcester sauce

There's probably ways to add meat too, but AlexChurchill doesn't care about those :-P