Food Notes: 8/26
Garden tomatoes, Pumpkin Spice Cookies, Breastmilk Ice Cream, and more
I made a garden variety tomato sauce. Literally, it came from the garden.
We planted a whole lot of tomatoes back in May. They've been growing in the garden all summer, and the harvest finally started trickling in.
I planted a mix of tomatoes including grape tomatoes for salads, roma tomatoes for sauce, and beefsteak tomatoes like classic Rutgers Tomatoes for sandwiches. We've had a lot of luck with grape tomatoes in the past, with lots of clusters growing and producing enough fruit to actually build a dish around. My hope this year had been to grow a big bounty of saucy Romas, but it never came together with the overflowing cornucopia that I had hoped.
I suspect the main garden bed had a bit too much water. The garden is on Cape Cod, which means I'm not around to tend it full time. In past years, we've had both too much rain and not enough rain, and this has had mixed results. In some ways, our best results were in 2020 when the whole of the Cape was hot and dry, in a drought, and I hand watered the tomatoes daily.
For this past Christmas, my father got me an automated water timer, which I think was mostly his way of not having to water the garden when I was not around. We hooked up all the hoses with a soaker hose and sprinkler, but it was initially set to water the garden every day. The summer didn't start off especially dry, and I think this was too much water. I wasn't around in June to correct this, in part because we were eating and drinking our way around Tuscany with my in-laws.
By July, I had arrived at the Cape and suggested dialing back the water. It finally got hot and dry, but the plants were still under performing. In 2020, I was hand pollinating the plants and had plenty of time to care for them every day. Now of course, we have a four-year-old, who was enthusiastic about picking tomatoes, but demanded a lot more attention than the plants, and the poor stalks suffered.
We ate a few beefsteak tomatoes on sandwiches, and with some of the grape tomatoes we made tomato tarts. But once a year we have the chance to make a fresh, light tomato sauce, and it finally happened last week.
What I like about this sauce is how it really highlights the tomato as an ideal sauce vegetable. Its a fast, light sauce, not a heavy ragù, and you simply cannot make this sauce with canned tomatoes or paste. Roma tomatoes are an ideal sauce tomato because they have a high ratio of sauce to seeds. The seeds can add bitterness, and the pulp really forms a silky, creamy sauce, especially with a splash of starchy pasta water.
But I also l like adding in the fresh grape tomatoes at the end. They typically have a few more seeds, but adding them at the end means they don't cook all that much. There is a contrast in texture and in flavor.
Garden Tomato Pasta Sauce
Ingredients
9 Roma tomatoes
12-15 grape tomatoes
3-5 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
3/4 of a pound of high quality macaroni (for a 1-lb box of pasta, reserve 1/4 lb as plain pasta for your fickle four-year-old who only eats pasta with butter and cheese)
Instructions
Thinly slice the garlic cloves
Gently heat the garlic in oil on low heat
Finely chop the roma tomatoes
Begin cooking the pasta
When garlic is soft but not browned, add tomatoes
Simmer and stir
Halve grape tomatoes and reserve
Salt tomatoes and crush garlic while it simmers
Taste pasta. Before draining add a scoop or two of water to the sauce
Stir sauce
Add pasta.
Toss in reserved grape tomatoes
Stir for about 30 seconds
Remove from heat and serve
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