Sausage sauce

Often, home cooking involves compromises between timing, quantities, tastes and ingredients. I had two sausages from Rocco's deli that I wanted to use in a pasta sauce. The girls were eating before us. One daughter likes tomato sauce, and had not been given it for a while. Normally, I would use a 400 g tin of tomatoes in a sauce for two (that's a lot by Italian standards -- but this was an inauthentic, British pasta supper), so I needed some extra for her.

I bought two large, fresh tomatoes -- Dutch ones, which I usually avoid, but which were going to have their thin flavour concentrated through cooking and combination with other ingredients. I softened an onion and a clove of garlic in olive oil, added the tinned tomatoes and their juice, and the fresh tomatoes, chopped. I simmered the contents of the pan until they were thick, and pushed them through a vegetable mill. I dressed my daughter's pasta with some of this sauce.

I skinned and broke up the sausages, and added them to the tomato mixture with 100 ml double cream. (Browning the sausages would have given extra flavour, but is a messy job -- bits of sausage tend to stick to the pan and burn.) I simmered this sauce for about 30 minutes, to thicken it again and to cook the sausage.

We ate it with conchiglie -- pasta shells, inside which bits of sausage satisfyingly nestled.