You need a little bit of tomato sauce, or a little bit of lemon juice, or both, to make it sour.

If you do, they turn sour on you.

For one thing, it's like French cheese. They say there is one for each day of the year. Well, there are 30 or 40 recipes on borscht.

In my 'Big Dinners' cookbook, I recreated my mother's recipe for crab dip. The creamy dressing for this dip, made with mayonnaise, tomato paste, a touch of honey, sliced chives, lemon juice and zest, horseradish and Tabasco, is reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing.

At home, I make a large batch of tomato sauce and freeze it in meal-size portions in freezer bags.

Tomato sauce works best with dried pasta, because the tomato sauces tend to be too heavy for the fresh pasta. Fresh pastas tend to absorb sauce right away. Fresh pastas always work better with broths or lighter sauces.