[BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC] Here I have some rapidly boiling water. You can see all the bubbles coming up, and this is the first step to making pasta. The next thing is we're going to add some salt, and you can be pretty generous, because you're going to drain the water off of the pasta, and then you're going to add some olive oil. And this is where you want to use your less expensive olive oil. We're just adding it so that the pasta doesn't stick together. And then, [SOUND] we're just going to add some pasta. And I'm using quinoa pasta. Give it a little stir. And then we're going to go and make our pasta sauce [SOUND]. So this is where everything starts. This is the heart of action when we're making anything savory. Clearly, you don't want to eat the skin so cut the skin off. If you do this quickly You won't even cry. Then we're just going to use half of an onion because it adds nice flavor, so I'm going to keep the other half in the fridge for later. So I'll just pop it in a ziplock bag. And then the other thing I'm going to do is cut up a clove of garlic. To get this skin off the garlic, I use the flat part of the blade and go like this [NOISE]. Whack. And there, the skin got cracked and it comes off really easily now. Basically you just have to be careful of your fingers. I remember when I was a medical student and we would do our Emergency room shifts in the evening and at eight o'clock on the dot. There would be a line up of mums coming in to have fingers stitched up. Because they had been chopping onions for their dinner. So keep your fingers out of the way of your knife. You can start by kind of roughly chopping it up. You just want to expose as much as you can to the olive oil. Then you can hold the tip of the knife and just kind of go like this. I don't even know what this is called but it makes it into smaller pieces. See you don't need a lot of equipment to cook. You just need one knife and one board and a pot. Okay, so let's get some tomatoes now. They can be ideally, they're tomatoes that you grew in your backyard, which is amazing. But, not everybody has the luxury of a backyard with a garden. So, any kind of tomato you can get from the market is fine. Just cut it in half. And cut out this hard bit that the stem was attached to and get rid of that. And then there are a couple of different alternatives. You could either put it in a blender and just blend it up like a smoothie and put it in or you can just chop it. And I'm lazy to get my blender out so I'm just going to chop it up like this. It doesn't have to be small pieces because the tomato's going to cook down and it's become a sauce, so you're going to kind of mush it up anyway at the end. So, we're cutting up our tomato fearlessly. Except that we're keeping our fingers away from the blade of the knife. And there we have the basis for a homemade tomato sauce. And once you've had a homemade tomato sauce, you will never go back to the bottled kind. Okay. So, we're going to head over to the stove and start making our tomato sauce. You want to take a tomato? Okay. I have children who like eating fresh tomatoes. I am so lucky. I'm so happy about that. It's time to drain our pasta. It's not overcooked. I'm just going to pour it into the colander, to let all of the water off. If you want, you can rinse it with hot water. Just to get some of the starch off. So now we're going to make our tomato sauce. We've got our pot on medium high heat. We added a couple of glugs of olive oil. And we're just letting that heat up for a few minutes. And the first thing we're going to add, and this is the best smell that can fill your kitchen is our chopped up onions and garlic, and we're just going to add that in. You can hear it and smell it at the same time. This is the first step to every savory vegetable based dish. Saute your onions and garlic. You can add mushrooms to that. You can add zucchinis. You can add any fresh vegetable and it will taste good. Even if you just want to flavor it with salt and pepper, it'll taste great. Okay so now you can see that our onions are getting a little bit kind of glassy and translucent looking. and, but they're not yet burned, so you don't want to burn especially the garlic doesn't taste great, if it gets burned, so try not to let it burn, but get it to this stage and then the next thing we're going to do is add our tomatoes. We're going to add a little bit of salt. because remember we said we're going to try and hit all those receptors so we've got the sourness from the tomatoes so we don't need to add lemon juice to this. And then, we're going to add a little bit of sugar to this sauce just to balance it off. And if you want, you can add spices like paprika for example. Are you coming to join me, my friend? Are you going to stir for me? >> No, I just want to smell it. >> You just want to smell it? >> I just want to. >> This is the tomato sauce lover in our family. Don't get too close. Okay, so those tomatoes are just going to stew in here, and then you have to make a decision If you don't mind your runny sauce, you can just leave it like this. It will be delicious. You can put it on your,on your pasta after it's cooked for awhile, but if you want it to be a little bit thicker, you can add a little bit of cornstarch and this is going to make our sauce thicken. And we're just going to mix it up, probably about a teaspoon, but if it's a bit more or a bit less, it's not going to kill your sauce. You can see now that our sauce has gotten a little but thicker. What we are going to do now is just pound it, you can just use a fork, you can put your tomatoes in a blender, so those are all options. Now we can cut up our fresh mozzarella cheese that we're going to put into our casserole. It's basically just a really nice, mild kind of cheese with a lot of calcium and protein in it. And what I do, is just slice some thick slices of this, and you're going to basically just layer this with your pasta and your sauce. Okay, so we've got our pasta that we cooked and we're just going to basically, put it down into a dish. You can add a bit of your cheese and the heat of the pasta and then the heat of the sauce that you're going to pour on top will actually melt your cheese for you. And then, I'm just going to take our nice homemade tomato sauce and I'm going to pour it over here. And then I'm going to top it off with a little bit of grated cheese because the kids love cheese. I can hear them coming for dinner already. And that is our pasta casserole. [MUSIC] [SOUND] [BLANK_AUDIO]
