Sexy Pasta

Everyone loves a good plate of pasta. And it's one of the indulgences in which we poor, unemployed people can still partake. Pasta is cheap. You can put anything on it. It's really hard to mess it up.

Many years ago, a lifetime really, a former roommate of MatchGirl found a recipe for a post-coital pasta sauce in Cosmo and passed it along. To the best of my recollection (it was a lifetime ago to be fair), it involved a salsa-like mix of ingredients and a splash of vodka - a cream-less, cook-less vodka sauce.

Arriving home from what turned out to be an amazing weekend on Sunday night, I was starving - craving real sustenance. It was also about 80 degrees once the sun went down, so I wasn't really feeling like cooking. After a careful inspection of the cupboards and after thinking about this Cosmo pasta from long long ago, I decided to try my hand at it. I Googled, but found nothing but that thick and creamy Vodka sauce that is so very all-American and so very not what I wanted on a hot night in May.

So I made it up as I went along (which is half the fun of cooking, anyway!).

Here's what I came up with:
1 can of diced tomatoes (use fresh if you have them, halved grape tomatoes would be super tasty in this)
1 very small red onion, diced small
3 cloves garlic (use less if you do not <3 garlic as I do)
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
a little fresh basil
scant 1/4 cup vodka
1/2 box of ridged ziti (or other pasta that takes a hearty sauce well), cooked

Make the salsa-y sauce in a big bowl, make the pasta and toss it all together
So simple
So filling
SO CHEAP

And while I ate this particular batch by myself, it certainly would be simple and yummy as post-coital summertime meal on one of those long, lazy afternoons ...