The Yum Yum Factor

One of my absolute favourite ways to eat really ripe tomatoes is in a raw sauce with pasta. I spent some time in Milan and this was the first meal that my friend, who had been living there for almost a year by that time, made for me the day of my arrival. He mixed up a bowl of diced tomatoes with lots of good olive oil, salt, fresh basil and some onion and let it sit out on the counter all day. When it was time to eat, he cooked up some pasta, ripped up some fresh mozzarella and threw the drained, hot pasta into the bowl of juicy tomatoes, covered that with the cheese and tossed it for a couple of minutes. The hot pasta warms up the room temperature tomatoes a bit and causes the fresh cheese to start to soften and just start to melt. The two of us finished off the entire bowl and from that day on, when I eat this and close my eyes, I am back on my friend's terrace in Milan, sweating my face off with a crisp little glass of rose in hand and all is right in the world. I found th...

If you read this blog, or know us personally, you will know that there are only a handful of ways to eat pasta in this house. Shack, who loves pasta above all other things, really just means spaghetti/rotini with tomato sauce and meatballs OR with meat sauce, which is just really tomato sauce with meatballs smashed up in it. The only two exceptions are, of course, lasagna which is just a shape shifting pan of spaghetti and meat sauce and carbonara but that has lots of bacon in it and, well, BACON. I, on the other hand, love all forms of pasta with all kinds of sauces - olive oil sauces, cream sauces, fettuccine, farfalle, orecchiette - you put a bowl of some sort of carby goodness in front of me and I will be happy but if I say I'm cooking "pasta" for dinner, I mean meatballs/meat sauce/marinara with spaghetti or rotini, maybe penne if he is feeling adventurous. For that reason, I  was absolutely certain that I must have written down my recipe for plain old spaghett...

It's throw back thursday and so I am sharing this recipe that I made back in March of 2011 for NoReEats and decided to make again tonight. I have made a few changes since I started making this dish in an effort to lighten it up without sacrificing any flavour because if that can't happen, I will always go with the original, full fatty creamy dish but, in this case, I am happy to report that it's every bit as delicious as the original version that sported a full cup of 35% cream. It's bad enough that we are putting bread crumbs on our pasta - we might as well just throw in a bowl of rice and some mashed potatoes, really. Think of it as an ode to carbs and just don't eat it every day. In the end, this pasta is everything I think pasta should be: quick, easy, flavourful and filling. Since we are leaving for our two week Jordanian adventure in a day and half-ACK- I am just trying to use up the food in the fridge and my fridge almost always contains arugula and b...