— Diane Kirschner

So, um, my first inclination is to go towards like a pesto or maybe a chimi cherry, right? So pesto is a very easy, um, super simple sauce to be able to make. Um, and I'll usually do mine with like half spinach and half basil. But the great thing is that you can put as much as or a little as you want into it. You don't have to make a ton of pesto. Um, you will see that the spinach, you know, and the, uh, the basil breakdown very quickly, just like if you were sauteing them. Um, so you'll need a little bit more than you might think, but it breaks down really nice and you can either use pine nuts or walnuts. I usually use lemon juice and actually add a little bit of orange juice just for the sweet, um, to be able to cancel out the bitterness in that. Um, if I'm not using oil, if you are using oil, you can just use that instead of the orange juice as well. And I'm talking just a very small amount for chimi cherries, kinda the same way, a little, uh, roasted red pepper and different herbs and kind of blend that up to be able to make as much or as little as you want. Now for some of these, like say the chimi cherry, you might not want to use the whole roasted red pepper. Now you can use that ingredient for something else, but not make just the sauce, right? So you can have, um, you know, just enough of that roasted red pepper for your sauce to be able to dice it up. But then you do can use the roasted red pepper for a different recipe, um, um, as an ingredient in something else. So I think the big part of that is just being able to downsize the amount of sauce that you're actually making on of those. And that should work for most recipes that you're doing. You might just need to find a use for the other ingredients. So you might wanna shy away from something like a, you know, like a pasta sauce that's like a, a red sauce because you're typically owning opening like a can of tomatoes or something like that. That's fine if you can figure out what you do with the rest of those tomatoes. But if you don't have a use purpose for those, you might wanna think of, um, outside the box a little bit or outside the can, um, and kind of think of ways to be able to repurpose the rest of the ingredients that you're putting into the sauces and then make a smaller amount of sauce just for you.