It’s the height of summer, tomatoes are everywhere… well, maybe that was true 2–3 weeks ago. If you still have tomatoes, though, and don’t know what to do with them…
Here is a great recipe from the Splendid Table for Uncooked Tomato Sauce:
- 1 clove garlic, split
- 2½ to 3 pounds richly flavored tomatoes (if possible, one-third cherry type, one-third mellow-tasting, and one-third low-acid), unpeeled, unseeded, cut into 1/4-inch dice
- 1½ tightly packed tablespoons fresh basil leaves or other favorite herb, torn
- 3 to 4 tablespoons fruity extra-virgin olive oil
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1 pound fusilli, penne, linguine or spaghetti
- 6 quarts boiling salted water
- ½ to 1 cup freshly grated aged Pecorino Romano cheese or domestic Fontinella (optional)
Method:
1. Vigorously rub a pasta serving bowl with the garlic. Add the tomatoes, basil, oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Let stand at room temperature while you cook the pasta, or up to several hours.
2. Cook the pasta in fiercely boiling water, stirring often, until tender yet firm to the bite. Drain in a colander and turn it into the pasta bowl, tossing all the ingredients together. Taste for seasoning and serve. If you like, pass cheese at the table.
She recommends:
I discovered a trick for making pasta with raw tomato sauces taste lustier. Slightly undercook the pasta. Drain it. Spoon the juices that raw sauces always throw off into the empty pasta pot. Set it over medium-low heat, add the pasta and toss until the juices are absorbed, then add the pasta to the sauce. Pasta and raw tomato sauce is served at room temperature, never chilled.
We added chopped Kalamata olives to ours. I would recommend giving the sauce at least an hour to develop some real juice, and I would recommend following Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s suggestion of cooking the pasta in the juices.
mmmhhh… today we had this with grilled eggplant
on topby Jeremy—Aug 7, 04:57 PM
We had two eggplants given to us that we left uncooked too long in the refrigerator.
by greg—Aug 7, 08:59 PM
baba ganoush is what you do with eggplants that you don’t think you’ll end up cooking.
it’s great… you can slather it on a sandwich, in lieu of mayo; you can dip your cut up carrots, cukes, and celery sticks into it, if you don’t do chips and salsa but want to crunch and munch; or, if you have stale pita bread, cut ‘em into triangles, toast ‘em up and let that be your meal.
that, though, is the worst about fridges… they can become a food graveyard, rather than a food saver.
Never let your gifted eggplants go to waste again!
by Jeremy—Aug 7, 09:25 PM
i know, i know you hafta cook those puppies to make baba ganoush.
oh, and if you don’t have a grill (which we wouldn’t had my in-loves not purchased one for us as a house warming), broil those bad boys.
anther thing that i like to do with eggplant is make roasted eggplant, roasted red pepper, tomato, basil, mozzarella stacks.
but, you guys are the veggienators, i’m probably telling you a whole buncha stuff you already know and do.
by Jeremy—Aug 7, 09:28 PM
The problem is that we’re just not big eggplant people, with baba ganoush and benghan bartha being the big exceptions. If we had a grill, there’d probably be more eggplant action, but alas…Plus, G may or may not have a personal issue with baba ganoush, which we haven’t fully explored. (Either b.g. or hummus is the big villain, but he almost always eats them together in the falafel pita sandwiches at the local falafel joint…)
If I weren’t such a lazy technological moron, I’d link to the appropriate Hermits discussion here. Maybe G will do it for me.
by kl—Aug 8, 07:48 AM
I do as I’m told.
by greg—Aug 8, 07:50 AM
well, broiled works just as well.
then again, i don’t fault people with limited palates. instead, i work with them, like a personal life-coach, over the years to expand their range.
t would’ve never touched the stuff 10 years ago… and it wasn’t until this summer that she’s actually taken a liking to raw tomatoes (then again, this summer we joined a csa and the tomatoes are fantabulous).
over the past 10 years, t’s gone from a 3 vegetable person to exploring the whole garden—though, her initial reaction is still to turn her nose up at things she has not tried before. she would have absolutely nothing to do with the toasted giant leaf-cutter ants.
if flatulence is the case, the boy really needs to isolate the problem… which could very well be the hummus, especially if it’s homemade… though there are ways of cutting down on that, as well—such as not cooking the beans in the water they were soaked in and changing out the water and fully rinsing the beans after the first 30 minutes of cooking. as beans cook they release some very complex carbohydrates (raffinose sugars) that our stomachs do not digest and which then ferment in the large intestine only to be at inappropriate times causing shame and dismay, which is often overcome by boyish bravado and false pride regarding their ability to distill essences
by Jeremy—Aug 8, 08:37 AM
Thing is, farts have nothing to do with it.
by greg—Aug 8, 08:41 AM
ohh…. you mean you exude from your pores… i didn’t go back to read… and had forgotten that it was more of an evil chakric aura
it probably isn’t the ghanouj, then as cumin isn’t normally part of the recipe (though of course there are variants, etc.)… instead, it’s probably the hummus or the falafel
by Jeremy—Aug 8, 08:54 AM
I think that image captures it nicely!
(God, let it not be the falafel!)
by greg—Aug 8, 09:02 AM
No tomatoes here yet. You have to have a greenhouse to grow them—we get frosts too late and too early. Also no eggplants. How I do love eggplants. . . and peppers. . . and tomatoes. . . and all the things one grows in more temperate climates. I would happily live in a more temperate climate, I think, if only I could find a place as small and out of the way as this one to move to (and, of course, could find some way to support myself—full time library jobs in the boonies are hard to come by).
by Laura—Aug 10, 09:17 PM
Confirmed: it’s the hummus.
Also: We made the uncooked tomato sauce tonight; it’s really good!
by greg—Aug 19, 07:32 PM