Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce

Mike and I both love the Rosa sauce at Domenic's Italian Restaurant.  It's a tomato cream sauce that we have never been able to reproduce and we've never tasted any other sauce at any other restaurant that rivals that deliciousness.  This doesn't mean I've stopped trying to make this sauce at home.

I had bought a quart of heavy whipping cream to use in some recipe.  Unfortunately I don't remember which recipe I wanted to make this this.  As a result, I started looking at different websites to try to find a use for it.  I found this recipe for Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce, which looked amazing.

I only made a quarter of the recipe in case I didn't like it.  Plus, even if I did like it, what would I do with a pound and a half of pasta?  However, when I was calculating how much onion to put in, I actually put in the whole amount for the onions, not 1/4 of it.  I thought it seemed like a lot of onion for the amount of oil and butter that was present.  Luckily I realized my mistake before I had added anything else except the garlic.  I then put the onion/garlic mixture in a storage container and started again, this time only putting in 1/4 of the amount of onion identified in the recipe.

This recipe calls for sugar - to taste, salt and pepper - to taste, and Parmesan cheese - to taste.  How am I supposed to know how much of each to put in?

I also didn't have any fresh basil at the time, so I omitted that all together.  At first I didn't put any sugar, salt or pepper in at all.  It came out quite tart.  I then added some sugar, but then the sauce was too sweet (see what happens when a recipe doesn't tell you how much sugar to use?!)  I then added some garlic salt and some cheddar cheese since I had run out of Parmesan cheese.

I plan to make this recipe again, but to note how much of each ingredient I am actually using.