Tomato Garlic Pasta in Twenty Minutes

A template demo recipe formatted the way a weeknight-cooking site runs it: the sauce has three moves, and each step below maps to one of them.

Move one: garlic, sliced thin

Thin slices toast evenly in olive oil over medium-low heat. Two minutes gets them pale gold - pull them a shade early, because they keep cooking. Crushed garlic would burn long before the tomatoes go in, and bitter garlic is the most common way this dish fails.

Move two: cook the tomatoes hard

Canned tomatoes carry a lot of water. Over medium-high heat, pressing them with the tongs, that water boils off in six to eight minutes and what remains turns jammy and darkens at the edges. This concentration is the difference between sauce that coats pasta and sauce that puddles.

Move three: pasta water, the emulsifier

1. Salt the pasta water heavily and cook the spaghetti one minute short of the packet time.
2. Toss the noodles into the tomato pan with a ladle of pasta water.
3. Stir hard for a minute - the starch and oil bind into a glossy sauce that clings instead of sliding off.
4. Finish off the heat with basil and a thread of raw olive oil.

Make it a full table

The same tomatoes double as the base for the roasted pumpkin soup - roast instead of simmer and blend. And if the weeknight energy runs out entirely, the fluffy pancakes batter is faster than this pasta, not slower. Sweet finish: the chocolate chip cookies dough rests in the fridge while the water boils.