Scarpetta's Spaghetti: Part Deux

Last night I decided to make the Scarpetta spaghetti recipe again, but to take a couple shortcuts. Now that I'm once again a member of the workforce it's a little tough to make homemade pasta after a full day on the job. So obviously making pasta from scratch was the first part of the equation to get cut, but I also used canned tomatoes instead of boiling fresh tomatoes and removing the skins. I bought one 28-oz. can of peeled Italian tomatoes.

Using a can of tomatoes still required a bit of manual labor. I had to cut the stems off the tomatoes, and remove the seeds/guts. But an added bonus was the tomato puree that was also in the can, which was a nice base for the sauce. I did the olive oil infusion step exactly the same:

And added it to the tomatoes after letting them cook for about 20 minutes and mashing them up:

And then the most important part: combining the sauce, pasta, butter, cheese, basil, and a little crushed red pepper in a skillet. Voila.

An admission: not as good as the first time. Obviously, even if you buy fresh pasta from the store it will never be as good as homemade. But that's just not realistic for an everyday meal. And the sauce wasn't exactly the same - the consistency wasn't as thick. Maybe it was the canned tomatoes instead of fresh, or maybe it was the inclusion of the puree from the can, which I thought would help hold the sauce together. I'm making it sound like it was bad, which wasn't the case...just not as good as when I have a couple hours to put into it. But pretty easy and delicious for a fairly quick weeknight meal.