For a lighter main course, do this one-dish supper of pasta with greens, chickpeas and shrimp. If you prefer a strictly vegetarian meal, double up on the onion and the chickpeas, eliminating the shrimp.
Instructions
With "squiggly" noodles and tomato, this is a gem of a kid's pasta. And it has a sneaky side - they will eat beans without even thinking about it.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper watched a cook on a horse farm in Umbria make a sauce right on her cutting board with wild chives she picked just outside the back door. Mincing everything may not follow traditional pesto technique which calls for crushing in a mortar, but I like the idea of this fast sauce made on a cutting board. Adjust the herbs with what you find at the market. Try this over rice and with couscous.
Ingredients
Tagliatelle con Arance e Mandorle
With this recipe, the only thing you have to cook is the pasta. My cousin Edda makes it all summer long. This is the freshest, purest-tasting recipe I have found for a sauce of raw tomatoes and uncooked seasonings. You rub a bowl with garlic, dice up ripe tomatoes, leaving their skin and seeds intact, tear a few leaves of fresh herbs over the tomatoes, twirl in a thread of olive oil and finish with salt and pepper. Nothing could be easier, or taste better. In some country houses, you might find capers and oregano in the bowl, or hot pepper and crushed garlic, or mint or even celery leaves. Everything in this dish is about what the country cook has on hand.
Another dish from our first evening together in Saint Louis. With this one, Fernando needed no coaxing. In fact, when he had finished he asked if he might have "un altra goccia di salsa, another drop of sauce." I set a little dish of it before him, and he proceeded to spread it on crusts of bread, eating the little tidbits between sips of red wine. I tried it that way, too, and ever since, we always make extra sauce, keeping it on hand for other uses. See suggestions below.
This requires the least work of all the cooked tomato sauces. With this technique, everything tomatoes, olive oil and seasonings goes into the pot more or less at once, usually with no presaute and simmers until thick. Instead of the distinctively layered tastes of saute-based sauces, the simmered sauce is softer, more tomatoey and mellow.
Copyright 2002, Lynne Rossetto Kasper