Tomato Cream Sauce with Grilled Chicken over Linguini

I've been perusing AllRecipes.com a lot lately in search of inspiration for new cooking ideas.  I stumbled across this sauce recipe and it sounded pretty tasty, so I decided to go for it.  I'm at a point now where I don't really follow recipes as much as I used to, but I use them as a basis and work forward from them to make what I think sounds good.  It has taken some time to get to this point, but now it comes easily to me to modify recipes without royally screwing them up!  If you're interested in cooking, stick with it, and you will eventually get to the point where you don't feel the need to follow every recipe to the tee.  With that being said, onto the food!

This ingredient list came from the website, but I modified a few things in the list.  The original is here if you want to see it.  The measurements are per the website, I actually just tossed what I thought was a good amount of most things in.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped or diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 (14.5 ounce) can Italian-style diced tomatoes, undrained

a handful of fresh chopped basil

3/4 teaspoon white sugar

1/4 teaspoon dried oregano

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/2 cup Philadelphia cooking cream

1 tablespoon butter

Method:

In a saucepan, saute onion and garlic in olive oil over medium heat. Make sure it doesn't burn. Add tomatoes, sugar, oregano, salt and pepper. Bring to boil and continue to boil 5 minutes or until most of the liquid evaporates. Remove from heat; stir in cream and butter. Reduce heat and simmer a few more minutes.  Remove from heat and cool a tiny bit.  If you like the sauce chunkier, leave it as is.  Otherwise, move sauce to food processor, and add fresh basil.  Blend until it's at a consistency that you like.

My Recommendations and Changes:

The original recipe called for heavy cream.  I didn't want to use that or half and half, so I ended up grabbing the Philadelphia brand cooking cream.  It actually worked out pretty well.  It came out a bit rich though, so next time I'm going to try using part cream and part plain greek yogurt.  The original also didn't call for the sauce to be pureed, but after suggestions in the comments section on the website, and the sauce itself not looking very appetizing while chunky, I decided to put it through the food processor.  It was definitely the way to go for us.  Also, the fresh basil was a change that I made.  I have a basil plant that needed a harvesting.  If you're using dried basil, you can add it in with the other spices when the sauce is cooking.  If you are using fresh, add at the end, or before you run the sauce through the food processor.

Verdict:

This sauce came out exactly as I'd hoped it would, which is a big confidence booster for me since it was one of my first times kind of winging it based off a recipe.  I'll definitely be making it again.  I'll probably make some and freeze to have on hand since I have some left over cream.  I also decided to have the hubby grill up some chicken breast to top it with to fill the meal out a bit.  Otherwise, the sauce is vegetarian.  I served some garlic bread on the side.  If I was making a full on meal I probably would have also had a salad as well.