I’m trying to learn to buy groceries, cook for myself again.
Can’t afford to buy and keep produce. Limited cookware. So, any recipe telling me to crush garlic, dice onions, etc, can’t do.
Need budget, ghetto, for people on a fixed income, easy no frills way to make diy tomato paste pasta sauce.
Good suggestions so far. Tks. I have 1 bowl, 1 plate, 1 spoon, 1 fork, 1 butter knife ; 1 small sauce pan; Only stores nearby are corner stores. Hardly any produce. Having to make due with what you can find in a liquor store.
Honestly, I’d just buy a cheap can of Hunt’s spaghetti sauce (assuming you live in the US) if you ‘can’t afford to buy and keep produce.’
If you do buy prepared sauce this way & then have any sauce left over, and assuming you also have a freezer, then a tip is to freeze the left over sauce, so it’ll keep for months if needs be, to then use later.
There are also even cheaper store brand canned tomato sauces, that taste pretty good but might seem a little bland, but you can use cheap store brand dried spices to help it out, and I’d recommend the simplest ones: salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
Also, if you feel your sauce tastes a little bitter/tart (this is from the acid in the tomatoes), then add in a little sugar…add a little at a time, mix in completely and then taste it, then stop adding sugar once you’re satisfied with the results.
You can also up the flavor of plain canned tomato sauce even more by adding some store brand tomato paste to it, along with the salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and/or sugar.
Edit to add: You want to take it up another notch, add some store brand dried Italian seasoning.