Two Sauce Trios

When you make a red sauce, there are three wet ingredients and three dry ingredients without which you just shouldn't forge ahead. They're pretty obvious to some but I was horsing around in the kitchen the night I made  godfather pasta for Kat and Juan, and the little spice trio picture is just so cute. Here we go:

The Base:

I just couldn't imagine a sauce without any of these players. The canned tomatoes are a lot easier and cheaper than fresh, and half the time you want a nice hearty pasta sauce when tomatoes aren't fresh anyways. The tomato paste adds a depth and richness, not to mention a wicked thickness to the sauce.

The wine, however adds complexity that a teetotaling sauce lacks, and the alcohol burns off so there's really no excuse. Even if you buy a jar of pasta sauce from the store, I urge you to add wine to really ramp up the flavor. Plus, you have to open the bottle to get the wine in the sauce and well lookie there, is that a wine glass on the counter? Let's just fill that puppy up, shall we?

Before I forget, a white sauce really isn't as good without a good white wine either. But I can post about that later.

The Spice

This trio is painfully obvious but the bottles all looked so cute together, that I just couldn't resist a little photo. Garlic is best in natural form but I will still add garlic powder towards the end. See, spices always come in the last 10-15 minutes of cooking, especially dry spice, because they do not require a lot of time or heat to release their essences, and so even if you add minced or chopped garlic at the beginning of a sauce, with your onions, the flavor will really mellow into the sauce. Sure it adds its two cents (scents?) to the dish but there's also nothing wrong with a last minute pop of more garlic. The basil and oregano are pretty freaking self-explanatory. I guess the real trio is The Tomato, Basil, and Oregano because that is a menage-a-trois that just never gets old, amirite?