Making Newman's Vodka Sauce Awesome

My wife and I just finished a simple pasta dinner where I got a little creative with a jar of Newman's Own Vodka Sauce. It was awesome. She doesn't really like Newman's sauces, but even she thought it was excellent.

Here's what I did:

Ingredients:
1 lb Dry penne pasta
1/8 of a white onion, sliced extraordinarily thin and then diced small
2 cloves of garlic paste
2 plum tomatoes, diced after removing the seeds
kosher salt
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 shots of vodka
1 jar Newman's Own Vodka Sauce

Procedure:
Put ~1 gallon of salted water on to boil. If you don't cover it, the timing will probably work out perfectly, as long as your stove is about the same temperature as mine (~15 minutes to boil). Once it boils, add the penne and cook until done. Drain, but do not rinse. While the pasta is heating/the pasta is cooking...

Heat about 1tbsp of EVOO over medium-low and add the onion and a pinch of salt while you prepare the garlic paste (about 5 minutes).

Add the garlic paste and stir it in. Allow it to continue heating while dicing the tomatoes (about 5 more minutes).

Add the diced tomatoes and another pinch of salt, and allow cook for ~3 minutes. Add a shot (1.5 oz) of vodka, turn the heat up to medium, and cook until soft, stirring regularly (~5-6 minutes).

Add the jar of sauce, and then rinse out the jar with another shot of vodka (split in half and rinse twice), shaking it around and dumping it into the sauce pot. Turn the heat up to high and stir constantly until boiling, then reduce the heat to low until the pasta is ready to serve. The idea is to get the sauce hot enough that the alcohol is boiling off while you wait for the pasta.

The only thing that might have made this better is a bit of fresh basil in with the tomato just before adding the sauce.

Estimated prep time: 30-35 minutes.

2017-02-25 Edit: Slight changes to how to do the tomatoes and heating after adding the sauce.

Garlic Paste

This is not the recipe I wanted to post (see Making Newman's Vodka Sauce Awesome), but because this is required by that recipe, I decided to post the two back-to-back.

Anyway, garlic paste is surprisingly useful. I only learned about it a couple weeks ago, but it has made for some excellent garlic bread and pasta multiple times since. And it's seriously easy to make.

Ingredients:
Garlic cloves
Kosher salt

Procedure:
Peel, clean, smash, and mince the garlic. Pile the garlic up and sprinkle a pinch of kosher salt over it.

Mush the garlic with the blade of your knife at a sharp angle, pressing down as you slide the knife across it, grinding the salt into the garlic. Pile it up if it spreads too far. Stop when it is so pasty that you can barely see it against your cutting board.

Use the blade of your knife to scrape it up.

Estimated prep time: 3 minutes. Maybe a bit longer if you're doing more than four or five cloves.