This, that, and spaghetti sauce

Okay, so anyone who knows me knows I don't feel like I 'm a good cook. I can get a meal on a table, but it's not my favorite thing to do. My repertoire is sadly lacking. But since the people I feed don't really like a lot of things, that works to my advantage.

So the other night I thought we were going out to eat. Around 6ish I wandered into my husband's home office and asked if we were going out soon and it was decided that, eh, we really didn't want to go out. Unfortunately, the cupboard was lacking several essentials for making any of my fallback meals. I could have made tacos but I got the nose sneer from the 14-year old. I took a gander at what I had on hand and then hit Google. To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, "Me and Google, we be mates."

I had a can of tomato paste and some bowtie pasta and some ground beef. Surely, SURELY, there's a way to make spaghetti sauce out of tomato paste with no sauce, puree, or tomato chunks available. I ran across someone's recipe online (I'll have to dig into my history on the computer at home tonight cuz I want to give credit where credit is due). I did some tweaking of my own, not because I thought it needed it, but because I thought I needed to do SOMETHING. So here's, in a weird nutshell, what I did:

I added 1/2 cup olive oil to a 12 oz can of tomato paste and let it cook together (stirring occasionally) while I boiled the pasta and browned the meet. I added no telling how much garlic powder, Italian seasoning, oregano and basil (and, yes, I realize that the Italian season probably had all that stuff in it, but, like I said, I was doing it just to do something cuz I felt like I needed to add something) and seasoned salt. After the pasta was done, I added the pasta water to the paste/oil combo until it was the consistency I wanted and then added the meat. I drained off the rest of the pasta water and then added the sauce to the pasta. As One Fabulous Mama say, "Amazeballs!" I selfishly yanked out some from the pot to take to work the next day so when the hubster came back for 3rds, there was none.

And yes, I'm very proud of myself. And, I may never buy spaghetti sauce again!