While the humble tomato can be used to make some truly delicious things, we've gone through just about every kind of pasta sauce you can think of using that base ingredient, which means it's time to try something new. Keeping it red, recently we made a pasta sauce that's half cream, half vegetable based, using roasted red bell peppers instead of tomatoes.
While of course we love roasting our own peppers in the oven for things like hummus or the double-pork rollup, this particular week jarred roasted peppers were actually on a better deal than fresh red bell peppers, so we went that route. Our other ingredients are flour, garlic, half and half (you could use heavy cream instead), a tub of solid chicken stock (get the kind that usually is called "flavor boost" instead of a "stock base" and isn't powdered or liquid), crushed red pepper, and parmesan.
To get started, we roughly chop the roasted red peppers and then toss all the ingredients in the blender and blend until its a smooth sauce.
For this particular meal we wanted some meatballs with our pasta, which we're making with ground pork. These are also good with ground turkey or chicken. You can see how we put together our meatballs at this location (although this time we aren't stuffing them with cheese as usual).
We usually cook our meatballs on the skillet, which requires browning them on all sides first before pouring in the sauce to cook through.
Here's our blended sauce, which turned out a truly beautiful reddish-orange: a much different color than the traditional tomato pasta sauce.
The meatballs cook through in the sauce, occasionally stirring or re-positioning as necessary, while the pasta boils.
Here's my finished plate, topped with some parmesan and pepper.
We used multi-colored rotini, but anything from penne to linguine goes great with this meatball and sauce combo.
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