Roasted Red Bell Pepper Pasta with Basil & Tomato Cream Sauce

Since I already posted about the Roasted Red Bell Pepper pasta I made, I'm not going to go into that. I had half of the recipe in the freezer (1 pound, uncooked) and wanted to use it for a meal this week.

Since last time I dressed the pasta very simply, I wanted to see about doing a more bold sauce. I really like cream and tomato sauces so I decided to give this one a try.

Roasted Red Bell Pepper Pasta with Basil & Tomato Cream Sauce

(from here)

1 pound homemade pasta (or store bought fettuccine)

1 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons butter

1 large shallot

1 (28 oz) tomato sauce or marinara sauce
1/4 cup of white wine (optional)

salt and pepper, to taste

dash of sugar (to taste)

1 cup half & half

grated parmesan or Romano cheese (to taste)

fresh basil, chopped

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I rolled out and cut my pasta after thawing it out. You always hear that you can freeze fresh pasta dough then thaw it out, but I never believed that this would work. It worked out perfectly.

To make the sauce, toss the butter and olive oil into a large skillet over medium heat and wait for the butter to melt.

Add your shallots to the pan.

Cook for about 5 minutes or until they have softened but not started to brown around the edges.

Throw in your sauce. I used canned marinara sauce from Trader Joe's.

Give it a stir and add the wine.

Let it come up to a simmer and go for about 10 minutes.

When you have a nice simmer going add the basil.

I cut my basil pretty thinly.

Add the half & half and give everything a good stir to combine.

Put your pasta in the water at this point. We'll be adding it directly to the sauce when it's done.

Wen your pasta is maybe 75% done add it to the sauce. If you do it late it'll get too mush in the pan.

Stir well but gently to combine.

Add a shake of parmesan if you want. I did.

If it's too tight, add a bit of the hot pasta water to thin it out some.

Garnish with a bit more basil and more cheese.

Overall the sauce was fantastic. Creamy, and a bit sweet. The red pepper pasta was kind of lost in it, but it was fun to experiment with different sauce/pasta combinations. I'll go with just a simple sauce for flavored pastas in the future, but for regular pasta, this sauce was really nice.

Easy to make and good to eat.

Enjoy!