Its nice to celebrate the country you live by hanging out with friends, eating good food and of course celebrating the colours of the flag. My friends decided to celebrate by making red and white food. It was hard to come up with a decent meal that didn’t consist of ketchup and vanilla ice cream. I racked my brain and since I was in charge of the main course, I decided to do pasta! Red sauce and white sauce!

I made a basic red sauce using carrots, onions, celery, garlic and canned tomatoes. Start with 2-3 cloves of minced garlic and half a medium sized onion diced. Sauté the onions and garlic  with some olive oil until it has become fragrant.

Take one carrot and a stalk of celery and add it to the onion and garlic mix. I had a friend who does not like vegetables so my secret is to grate the carrots and dice the celery as fine as possible. This prevents someone from picking them out during dinner.

Once the veggies are softened, add the can of tomatoes and let it simmer. I use diced can tomatoes and not the whole ones. Simmer the sauce to help break the vegetables. Simmering also reduces the liquid to make a thicker sauce. At this point I also had some seasoning like salt and pepper and of course some herbs. My favourite for tomato sauce would be oregano and bay leaves.

While the red sauce is simmering, start the white sauce. Start the sauce with a mixture of butter and onions. I used about a 1/4 cup butter and a 1/4 of a white onion. Let the butter brown to add a bit of a nutty flavour to your white sauce. Once the butter has melted and is slightly browned, add 2-3 tablespoons of flour slowly. Let the butter and flour mixture cook for a couple of minutes until it is nice and bubbly. Add about 2 cups of milk. When the sauce is nice and hot add 1 cup of freshly grated parmesan cheese.

The nice thing about the white sauce is that you can add more cheese or milk depending on what flavours you want to add. Remember to season with salt and pepper to taste.

To assemble the pasta, mix some pasta with the red sauce and then some pasta with the white sauce. Assemble into a rectangular pan so that it looks like the Canadian flag. To add the final touch, cut a tomato into the shape of a Maple leaf.

The other things we had that day included miso gravy poutine and a tomato and mozzarella salad. All of course red and white!

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