i’m adding delia’s fresh tomato sauce to my list of stonking good recipes. darren made it for tea at the weekend and i made some fresh pasta to go with it and it was gorgeous.

i’ve always ignored recipes when they demand you skin tomatoes but it turned out to be a lot easier than i thought and well worth the effort. you just pour boiling water over them, wait for the skins to crack open, drain the water off and pop the tomato innards painlessly out of their skins with your fingers.

and while i’m here let me leave a reminder to myself: when you make pasta dough, leave it for quarter of an hour before trying to knead it through the machine. i always chop the dough in half and have a right nightmare trying to get the first half to turn into pasta as it turns into a holey mesh on each run through the machine. when i’ve finally turned the first half into tagliatelle, i pick up the second half of the dough and have no problems turning it into a smooth strip of pasta in about 30 seconds. i’d be better leaving the whole lot for a bit and doing something else instead. and i’d make fresh pasta more often if i found it easier to do. i presume the flour is doing some kind of gluey starchy thing with the eggs while i’m wrestling with the first half of the dough.