Monday, August 3, 2009

Sunday: raw pasta sauce



Pasta with raw heirloom tomato-basil sauce.

This may not be a great year for tomatoes, because late blight (the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine way back when) got a foothold in the U.S. during the cold and rainy beginning to the summer. The big box stores, which rely on very few plant suppliers, actually contributed to the spread of the fungus by selling blighted plants from those suppliers all over the country.

In any case, heirloom tomatoes have finally arrived, so we took advantage of their wonderful flavor in this raw pasta sauce. It has to be one of the easiest meals we ever cook: you just chop up a couple cups of tomatoes, throw them in a bowl with a couple tablespoons olive oil and a few peeled cloves of garlic, and add about a quarter to a half cup of chopped basil. Let it sit a couple of minutes for maximum flavor.

The basil pictured here is "bush basil," a varietal with attractive tiny leaves, but any basil works well.

1 comment:

  1. (1) That looks delicious. And I too have been bummed about the lack of good tomatoes. I have too much mozarella and basil to go without!

    (2) An idea: I would love (as I increase my produce shopping at farmer's markets) to hear your techniques and tips for storing all this produce for the week without it going bad. Do you have a certain order in which you use certain ingredients before they go bad, or do you have nifty ways of storing things?

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