I ate last night the first of my cheap meals, Penne pasta with Sainsbury’s Basics Pasta Sauce. I added mushrooms and cheese for a little more flavour and protein. Unfortunately the attempt proved futile: that was possibly the worst meal I have had in my life. Worse than flavourlessly bland, it had a lingering cloying flavour that only faintly evoked either tomato or basil, the two primary ingredients of many such sauces. I began to wonder if the sauce had ever seen a tomato, much less been graced with the inclusion of one.

As it turned out, the sauce barely had: while it is composed of 50% tomato puree, of actual tomatoes it is only 6%, and then I suspect they were hardly the pick of the crop. And then there was the texture of the source: gelatinous like Chinese takeaway sweet-and-sour after its gone cold, only without the MSG that makes that so guiltily delicious.

Combined, the flavour at the texture overwhelmed even the fresh mushrooms and the copious amounts of cheese. I had to add nearly half a tube of Sainsbury’s Basics Herb Mix just to make the meal bearable, and by that I do mean bearable, not palatable. And despite forcing down the whole lot, I still feel an emptiness in my stomach, almost a hollowness as of broken promises.

Consequently, I would not recommend Basic Pasta sauce to anyone, and who would buy it more than once remains a mystery to me. Then again, perhaps the whole sale of it is built around customers purchasing a single jar out of curiosity. I will however, at some point post a recipe for a cheap and good pasta sauce, which I may or may not have developed myself (this will be a part of my new types of features where I pass on the few things I have learned in life to anyone willing to read).

As a side note, the Basics ‘Biscuit Selection’ seems a far better proposition. I’ve only partaken of the Nice biscuits so far. Not only is there an appreciable quantity of them in the packet, they’re actually not bad. My housemate’s comment on that was that “they’re biscuits, how could you mess biscuits up?” Well, it can be done, it’s entirely possible, but these are not such a biscuit.

Tags: Basics, cheap, food, one week ten pounds, pasta, pasta sauce, Sainsbury's, save money

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.