Pasta & Fresh Tomatoes , Basil, Olive Oil, Romano

Here’s a real fresh summer dish, especially now that your garden is producing too many tomatoes all at once.

Take a few tomatoes, remove the skins if you want or leave them on, cut the tomatoes in half, cut out the tough core, then slice them into big bite-size pieces. As you slice them, drop the pieces in a bowl so the juice will collect around them. Next, tear some fresh basil leaves into very small pieces, discarding the central stem, and sprinkle the little pieces into the bowl where the tomatoes are resting.

For this dish, the ideal is to choose a pasta that comes in short pieces that are well shaped to hold sauce or juice, shapes such as shells (conchiglie), or broad spirals (rotini) — in other words, avoid the long smooth featureless shapes, such fettuccini. That’s the ideal here, but the goal is to enjoy this process, so use what’s on hand. Cook up the pasta and this time it’s important to remember to salt the water a bit.

While the pasta is cooking, drizzle olive oil into that bowl of tomatoes and toss everything around with a big spoon. That’s enough, you can set the table now. An ordinary red wine would be nice, too. When the pasta has cooked, run it briefly under warm water from the faucet — just so it’s not too hot to eat – then pour the pasta into the bowl with the tomatoes and toss everything together with that big spoon you used earlier.

Serve it up and be sure to grate Romano cheese over it;  Romano is salty and goes perfectly with the tomatoes. This is excellent on a hot day.