So apparently I tried to poison my family with dinner last night

No, no one died. Or was even sick. They just didn't like dinner and made lots of faces.

I liked dinner, a roasted red pepper sauce served over bowtie pasta. My youngest child liked the sauce and pasta just fine until he heard both his father and his older brother announce that they didn't like it, then he changed his mind.

I saw this on an episode of Chef at Home that I came accross while channel surfing last week. I liked the look of the vibrant red sauce, tossed with hot pasta and baby spinach and decided I needed a bit of a change from the usual tomato based sauce. Plus according to Michael Smith, his own son didn't know it wasn't tomato sauce until he was told it was peppers. Sounded good to me.

I had to omit the baby spinach as no one is selling spinach in any form but frozen right now. So to add some greens into dinner, I served my pasta along side a caesar salad, as well as adding a warmed baguette. Turns out it was a good thing I did.

You'll note from my picture that my sauce did not come out a vibrant red color but orange instead. I don't know why, I roasted 4 very large red peppers along with garlic and onions, a bit of fennel seeds, all tossed in olive oil, then pureed them with a bit of water, but I still ended up with orange. What did he do to make his red?

This sauce did not taste anything like a tomato sauce, so again I don't know how his son didn't know, but was mild, sweetish, and creamy. I couldn't taste the fennel, nor any of the garlic. Actually I couldn't really taste red pepper either. The mild brightness of the sauce, however, was what I needed, a break from the usual tomato based sauces my family likes so much.

So if anyone else makes this (and I wanted to try it with yellow until my family squashed my hopes of a new standby recipe,) let me know if you were able to get the proper color, or if you found it comparable to a tomato sauce.