Cooking Notes: Pasta Pomodoro

A lot of what I eat doesn’t come with a formal recipe.  When I first started cooking, I could not understand how people could cook without recipes yet as I’ve cooked more (and perhaps, become more used to my mother’s cooking notes), more and more of my cooking repertoire are these recipe-less dishes.  In some cases, I will get around to converting these notes into formal recipes but in many cases, I’d like to save and share the dish.

Pasta pomodoro is all about tomatoes.  It’s incredibly delicious IF you have good tomatoes.  If you can’t get tomatoes from your backyard or a farmer, it won’t taste the same.  It’s a simple, quintessential summer dish that I like making during the summer when my bag of produce from the farmer’s market inevitably has tomatoes.  \If I’m feeling nostalgic, I’ll have pasta pomodoro with a glass of milk.  If I’m feeling fancy, it’s with a glass of red wine.  Here are my notes:

Pasta Pomodoro

• 1.5 cups peeled and crushed fresh tomatoes (plum, early girl or another meaty variety)
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 1 Tbs extra virgin olive oil (approximately)
• 1/2 tsp salt (approximately)
• Capellini or another long skinny pasta, enough for one serving
• Hunk of parmesan cheese for grating

1. Set a pot of water, generously salted, to boil the pasta.
2. In a saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat.  Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds, stirring constantly and making sure that the garlic does not burn.
3. Add the tomatoes and salt and cook over medium-low heat until you reach a desired amount of cooked-ness.  Personally, I like my tomato sauce cooked at least for 15 minutes as I don’t like very raw sauce.
4. Cook the pasta according to the instructions on the packet.  If you are using capellini, it will probably take about 5-7 minutes or even less.
5. Remove the pasta and add to a plate.  Top with sauce.
6. Grate a generous amount of fresh parmesan cheese atop the pasta.