Pink Sauce

Unlike some other food bloggers, I am not a great cook.  My mom and sister are both amazing cooks.  I can follow a recipe.  

But lately I've been in this experimenting mood.  It's been kind of weird.  And most of my experiments end up... let's just say it's classified.  

Friday, however, I had a couple of tomatoes that wanted to use.  But, I wasn't sure exactly how.  So, out of the blue I decided to make spaghetti sauce out of it.  And to my surprise it actually went (mostly) right!

What I did was I blended up the tomatoes with some rice milk and water in a blender.  Now I didn't blend it up too well because I wanted tomato chunks in the sauce.  I put the mixture into a pot and put it on simmer.  

Then I added spices: garlic, salt, and basil.  I just added it until it tasted right.  (Sorry I was just experimenting so I didn't get any measurements.)  

It tasted great, but I was faced with a problem.  The sauce was more like a soup, I needed some way to thicken  it.  Being the 21st century girl I am, I googled "how to thicken sauces"  and found a very helpful website: 

http://www.wikihow.com/Thicken-Sauce

It had seven different ways to thicken a sauce, but in the end I used a mixture of two different ways.  

At first, I started with the "Reducing Method" where you basically simmer the water away until it's thicker and the flavor is more concentrated.  (When you do this, make sure you stir occasionally so that the bottom doesn't burn.) 

It worked, but it was really slow.  And I was hungry, so I decided to hurry it up by using a different solution to help it along.

The second solution was called "The Flour Method".  I added tapioca flour, but I'm sure regular flour, or rice flour would work too.  What you do, is you add flour (it gives you an estimate of how much on the website, but I eyeballed it).  Now, I didn't do exactly as the instructions called for.  I just added the flour and turned up the heat.  

It did have a flour-like taste, so I added more spices.  And it seemed to work out just fine.  If I use this method again, I'd turn the heat up higher so the flour would dissolve better and give less of the flour taste.  

It was a great sauce, considering it was my first time ever doing something like that.  Funny thing though, it was bright pink.  From the flour and rice milk I guess.  I wonder if all tomato sauces are really pink and they add food coloring to make it the traditional red?  

Another method I didn't try (simply because I didn't have it on hand) but would in the future was the "Pureed Veggie Method".  Apparently it thickens without adding a taste.

Anyways, that was one of my successful adventures in the kitchen.  What's cool about being able to make sauces, it that once you become an expert you won't need to buy sauces from the store anymore.  And you can control the ingredients making it more PKU friendly, like I did with the rice milk and tapioca flour.  

Thanks for reading!  Sorry, I didn't think to take pictures as I was experimenting.  Maybe next time!