WASP Pasta Sauce: The Recipe

Are you curious how to make this:


into this?


Wait no longer. This is the recipe for John Payne's WASP-style pasta sauce. The story behind the sauce (a webisode!) can be retrieved here and the story behind the story of making the sauce can be found here. Recipe after the jump.

John Payne's WASP-Style Pasta Sauce

Serves 6

2 tablespoons canola oil or other oil with high smoke point
1/2 sweet onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups mushrooms, sliced
1 can of Campbell's tomato soup

15 oz can peeled cherry tomatoes in juice

35 oz can of San Marzano tomatoes

1/2 cup Mediterranean olives

2 Quorn chicken cutlets

2 Veggie Burgers (Morningstar farms spicy black bean burgers are preferred by John)

1/4 cup basil, ripped
1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1 lb pasta

1/2 cup grated parmesan
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat pan over medium high heat and add oil one tablespoon oil. Add onions. Reduce flame to medium and saute until soft. Add garlic and cook until fragrant about 2 minutes. Increase heat to high and add mushrooms.

In separate skillet, heat remaining oil. Fry quorn chicken patties and veggie burgers until crispy on the outside and cooked through, about 3-4 minutes per side. Remove from heat and cut into bite-sized chunks. Set aside.

Add tomatoes, olives, and veggie meats to pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer and cover. Let cook 30 minutes. Add herbs and cook for 2-3 minutes more, or until wilted. And you saw the cooking process. Pretty standard, with the understanding that the sauce should thicken after about 30 minutes of simmering so that it becomes stew-like. Salt and pepper to taste.

After sauce has been cooking for 15 minutes, cook pasta until al dente (about 8-10 minutes).

Once sauce is thickened, and pasta cooked, spoon pasta onto plate (about one cup cooked pasta), top with sauce (to taste), and shredded cheese. Serve immediately.

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WASP Pasta Sauce: The Webisode

Welcome to NYCookery's first webisode. John Payne generously offered to make me his WASP pasta sauce - a favorite of his growing up in New England - a famous dish of his grandmother's and one of the only he actually knows how to make. For the back story on how this video came to be, click here. Watch, learn, enjoy.




Next up: the recipe.

End of post.

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WASP Pasta Sauce: The Preview

Mark Annotto and John Payne met in Lewiston, Maine as undergraduates at the small liberal arts school, Bates College, where together they sang in an a capella group, played ska, and bonded while toasting hot dogs in John’s Hot Diggidy Dogger. The two—sardonic and self-deprecating—have been somewhat of a creative duo ever since. After four years in New England, they formed both the Armed and Ridiculous Brooklyn Comedy Collective and the “post-geek-synth-rock” band, Puppetbox (named as such while John sat, literally, on a trunk full of puppets during a brainstorming session).

Through Armed and Ridiculous, Mark and John created sketch comedy bits that morphed onto the screen. Their inaugural short, The Underground: NYC Ping Pong, which, Mark claims, “is one of the century’s most mystifyingly un-funny [films],” was accepted to several festivals despite his modesty about its quality. The two also created a series of semi-biographical silent shorts about the trials and travails of a 27 year-old virgin (I will not share here which of the two arrived at that age as such) told through puppets—a second place winner at the 2006 MTV Labs Desktop Film Festival.

For months, John (who shares my affinity for artistic theatrics and who has studied at the London School of Puppetry and has created his own short plays for New York’s puppet slam, PUNCH) had insisted that NYCookery would be a great show and that his friend, Mark, would be perfect for shooting webisode with his “fancy camera.”

I avoided the topic. After years as an actor and doing student films, the desire to be onscreen had been completely squelched. But then one evening not too long ago, I finally met Mark and John for some beers and, over a basket of popcorn, the two talked enthusiastically about the possibility of a creating a cooking video. Their excitement about the project began to tickle my interest.

However, there was only one problem: since Mark had to do the filming, that meant John had to do the cooking. As it turns out, John does not cook (he said something along the lines of, “I know how to make a mean omelet. Well, I used to. I mean I haven’t made one for a long time, but I’m good at it. That and sandwiches.”) But he had an idea—he could make his grandma’s famous pasta sauce. "Great!" I thought. "Everyone loves a good pasta sauce!" Then he told me the secret ingredient: Campbell’s Tomato Soup. As in the stuff in the can. That orangey goo that comes out in clumps.

My eyes widened. Mark averted his gaze and stuffed his face with some popcorn. Then, sheepishly and in defiance of his Italian heritage, he told me that he had eaten it, and that it was “actually really tasty.” I looked back at John, who smelling my fear like a shark does blood in water, said, “I’m not telling you what else I put in there.”

God knows what they slipped in my drink, but I said yes.

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