Rigatoni and Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

I seem to lack the ability to grow tomatoes. I blame it on our yard. The front yard only gets the hottest, harshest sun of the day, and the back yard is too shaded. I have a few cherry tomato plants, but they’re only doing ok. They're certainly not producing record numbers of cherry tomatoes. I’ve accepted that I need to leave serious tomato growing to the pros. One of our local pros is Johnson’s Backyard Garden, and they’ve had an incredible tomato harvest this year. In fact, they have a bulk tomato sale that’s still in effect, and that’s how I came to have ten pounds of San Marzano’s. I set aside a few of them for oven roasting, and the rest were plunged into boiling water, skinned, and then seeded. By the end of the ten pounds, and really ten pounds isn’t even that much, it seemed like a lot of work, but when I tasted the tomatoes it was completely worth it. My first thought of how to use some of these tomatoes was that classic sauce I’ve heard so much about from Marcella Hazan. In Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, she included what she calls “the simplest of all sauces to make.” She also mentions “none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste.” She’s right about that. I tasted the sauce so many times as it cooked I risked not having any left to serve with pasta. This is her famous tomato sauce with onion and butter. There are exactly three ingredients plus salt and pepper, and it is a perfect sauce.

Obviously, the better the tomatoes, the better the sauce, and I was starting with those fabulous, fresh San Marzanos. As I said, I had peeled and seeded the tomatoes, and then I roughly chopped them. Two pounds were needed for one recipe of this sauce. The tomatoes went into a sauce pan with one onion that had been peeled and cut in half. Five tablespoons of butter was added, and then the sauce cooked. Occasional stirring helped break down the tomatoes, the liquid reduced, the sauce thickened, the butter melted, the onion added its flavor, and the simplest, most delicious sauce came to be. The onion was removed and seasoning was adjusted before the sauce was used. Marcella recommends this sauce for gnocchi or penne or rigatoni. I chose rigatoni which was boiled and then tossed with the sauce. On the plate, I added shards of parmigiano reggiano and ribbons of basil.

This sauce could be made with canned tomatoes, but the flavor of fresh tomatoes is so much better. The butter makes them even sweeter, and the onion rounds out the savoriness. I found it impossible to not taste the sauce each time I stopped by the pan to stir it, and once tossed with pasta, the bright, freshness of it was unbelievable. And, the very good news is that I have more of those peeled and seeded tomatoes sitting in my freezer just waiting to be turned into sauce.

Warm Tomato Dressing with Roasted Fennel

I’ve been eating a lot of delicious, fresh, raw tomatoes this summer. I joked that I could eat caprese salad every day, and then have pretty much done just that. I keep bringing home fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes and plucking leaves off my basil plants. It’s a perfect combination, but I finally decided to change it up and do something else with tomatoes. I had this recipe for warm tomato dressing from Living magazine from last year, and it’s a versatile sauce. It can be made in advance and then re-warmed for serving. In the magazine, it was shown as a topping for roasted fennel, and that’s how I served it. It would also be great with chicken or over polenta or with other roasted or grilled vegetables. I used some pretty, little pear tomatoes but any kind of cherry-type tomatoes will work great. They’re cooked with wine and balsamic vinegar and take on a sweet and tangy flavor.

I have to confess that I didn’t read the recipe very carefully when I was writing up a shopping list. I skipped right over the word ‘red’ next to wine in the ingredient list. When I started cooking, I realized we had no red wine in the house, and I had to use white wine instead. As you can see in the photos, the dressing still became a deep, red color from the balsamic vinegar. So, to make the dressing, the tomatoes were cooked in a skillet with a little olive oil for a few minutes, and then garlic, wine, and balsamic vinegar were added and cooked until the liquid was reduced by half. A little splash of red wine vinegar and salt were added at the end, and sugar was to have been added as well but I skipped it since I thought the sauce was sweet enough. To serve, I spooned the warm dressing over wedges of roasted fennel.

The mellow, roasted fennel was a well-matched vehicle for the tomato dressing, and the reduced and intensified balsamic and wine gave the dressing a nice, agrodolce kind of flavor. Of course, I’m always looking for ways to add spiciness, and I think some crushed red pepper would be an interesting addition here. I’m glad I tried something new because those heirloom tomatoes won’t be around much longer, and I needed to start kicking my caprese habit. And, this kind of cooked dressing could even be made with canned tomatoes later in the year.

Baked Manicotti

There was a great article in the March issue of Saveur about Italian-American food in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In the article, Tony’s Baltimore Grill and Angelo’s Fairmont Tavern were mentioned. These long-standing, local restaurants were described as now being overshadowed by new hotels and casinos, but "are among the few remaining vessels of the city’s soul." The article included the recipe for Angelo’s marinara sauce, veal parmesan, and baked manicotti. I’ve made all sorts of other baked pastas including stuffed shells but never manicotti, so I decided it was time to try it. I don’t know much about Atlantic City, and I’ve never even visited the state of New Jersey, so I checked in with Stacey at Stacey Snacks, and she told me this:

"Atlantic City has two really great Italian-American restaurants, but I haven't tried them. My Italian sister in law makes the BEST homemade manicotti... too bad my brother divorced her! Here in New Jersey, we say MAN-EE-GAUT. It's slang native to NJ."

I know I can't pull off a New Jersey accent, I still haven’t even acquired a Texas accent, but I had high hopes for making manicotti. I took a look at Angelo’s menu on their web site, and the cheese manicotti is served with your choice of meatball or sausage. In the magazine, it was shown as is with no meat which was fine with me. First off, I made the sauce which was lighter than I expected. Minced garlic, a bay leaf, and finely chopped onions were sauteed in a large saucepan. Whole, canned tomatoes were coarsely chopped in a food processor and then added to the saucepan. Dried oregano joined the mix, and I used fresh thyme because I didn’t have any dried. This was cooked over medium heat for 20 minutes until slightly thickened, and then fresh parsley was added.

To prepare the manicotti, you could boil them for about half the recommended cooking time, but I chose to follow a Barefoot Contessa tip. For making lasagna or stuffed shells, I do as Ina taught me and soak the pasta in a bowl filled with hot tap water for 15 to 20 minutes. The pasta becomes pliable enough to fill and is prevented from being overcooked in the end. The manicotti filling was started by cooking eight cloves of minced garlic, yes eight, in butter. That’s a good start. The garlic was added to ricotta, grated parmesan, chopped parsley, freshly grated nutmeg, and eggs. This was combined and spooned into the manicotti tubes. Next time I make this, I may actually put the filling in a piping bag and squeeze it into the manicotti because the spooning method was messy to say the least. I always think transferring something into a bag is going to take forever so I avoid it, but this time it was probably the way to go. Eventually, all the filling was messily spooned into the pasta, and it was ready to be baked. A little sauce went into a baking dish, the filled manicotti were set on that, the remaining sauce was poured on top, it was sprinkled with more parmesan, and it baked for 20 minutes.

Bubbly goodness emerged from the oven. Since the sauce was just chopped tomatoes with no tomato paste to thicken it, it was light and fresh-tasting. The cheese filling was as good as any cheese filling could be. I will be cooking garlic in butter and adding it to all future cheese fillings for pasta. Delicious. Just for fun, I drizzled a little chile oil leftover from the pizza I made on some of the manicotti. I couldn’t resist using the chile oil and of course appreciated the elevated spice level. Food fads come and go but classic Italian-American food is always well-loved, and now I have one more filled pasta recipe in my collection.