Tomato and gammon sauce for pasta

I ventured into my classic Italian cookery book by Marcella Hazan for this one.  I'm used to using onion, carrot and celery for risotto where it's sautéed in olive oil, but not had it cooked slowly in tomato pulp then added the olive oil added afterwards.  Worked really well however, but take the cooking times with a large pinch of salt!  30 mins plus 15 mins to reduce the sauce down?  Make that 30 mins plue 90 mins reduction time and you'll not be far off!

I finished it off with some of the gammon we had at the weekend and a bit of fresh rosemary.  It takes a while to do, but it's better with fresh tomatoes in my opinion, and you don't need to use Italian tomatoes but you can make it with tinned too.

Ingredients
1.2 kg fresh tomatoes or 3x 400g tinned, chopped tomatoes
2 sticks celery
1 large carrot
2 small onions
2 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons Extra virgin olive oil
A small sprig of rosemary, leaves removed form stalk
120 g gammon chopped finely

Method
Prepare the tomatoes if using fresh.  You can either drop them in boiling water for 2 minutes, peel and remove the core and then chop them up but I find it easier to use a vegetable mill. It's pretty cheap to get a stainless steel one of these and they do a great job of getting the pulp out of the tomatoes while leaving the skins and cores behind.

To use the mill, wash and halve the tomatoes and put them in a large saucepan, cover them and heat over a medium flame for 15 minutes then ad to the mill using the largest disc.  Once you have extracted the juice and pulp, add this all back to your saucepan and heat it over a moderate flame.

While the tomatoes are heating, peel the carrot, celery, onion, rosemary leaves and garlic and chop them very finely - I use the food processor for this, it makes the job so much easier.  Once they're ready, add them to the tomato pulp, add a teaspoon of salt  and cook them uncovered at just a little over a simmer for 30 mins.

Add the extra virgin olive oil and adjust the seasoning and reduce to get a lovely rich sauce, another 60-90 mins.  Once the sauce is cooked, add the gammon and serve with whatever pasta you fancy and some freshly grated parmesan.

We loved it, hope you do too!