Pasta de Sarde

It's Friday night and I'm not really famished but I remembered that I boiled 5 huge red tomatoes the day before with the intention of coming up with a new tomato-based recipe but ended up storing them in the refrigerator after accidentally cutting a small wound on my hand while peeling a papaya with a recently sharpened knife. Ouch.

It was a good thing that I was done cooking the tomatoes by then and was just waiting for them to cool when this incident happened.

So anyway, I decided to make a very simple pasta recipe tonight so I can use the tomatoes: Pasta de Sarde. As it implies, it's pasta with sardines.

When I was a child I saw a cooking show where this one particular celebrity cooked pasta with spanish sardines and I was pretty convinced that the host was just being polite to the celebrity in saying that what the latter cooked was yummy when in fact she really wanted to switch to a commercial break so she can spit it out. My, what an imagination I had!

I now wonder what my old friend Sigmund Freud has to say about me trying out a Pasta de Sarde recipe of my own.

Ingredients:
5 big tomatoes, boiled until their skins peel off. (Remove skin!)
1 tbsp lauric oil or olive oil
1 medium-sized white onion, sliced into rings
Spaghetti pasta
155g Spanish sardines, drained
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
apple cider vinegar
1 tsp dried thyme

Steps:

1.) Boil the pasta until al dente. Drain and transfer in a serving dish. Set aside.
2.) Transfer Spanish sardines in a small bowl. Mix with lemon juice and vinegar.
3.) In a non-stick pan, sautee onions in oil until slightly limp.
4.) Add the tomatoes, crushing them with a wooden spoon as you stir them in. Mix well.
5.) Add the Spanish sardines. Do not stir. Let simmer for about 3 minutes.
6.) Sprinkle thyme on the pasta.
7.) Pour sauce over pasta evenly, with the sardines on top of the onions and tomatoes as much as possible. Serve.

The problem with these Cooking for One Experiments is that I'd have to eat them too!

I ended up wolfing down a plateful of this tonight, with much guilt and gusto.