Day 14: Cheese-Gilded Linguine with Smoky Tomatoes

At first this recipe seems like a boring tomato/cheese pasta dish. But the trick is tossing the linguine with the cheese before adding the tomato sauce.

Cheese-Gilded Linguine with Smoky Tomatoes

I have been making some of the more complicated items from How to Eat Supper and I wanted to cook something a little simpler for dinner. Like I said above, at first glance this looks like a fairly straight forward pasta recipe.

Cook up some bacon. Drain bacon on paper towels and pour off all but a couple of tablespoons of bacon fat. Saute a chopped onion with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes until it starts to brown. I added a dried red chile at this point which is not called for but I think added significantly in the dish. Add 5 minced garlic cloves and cook a minute more before adding 2-3 pounds of chopped tomatoes and the bacon, chopped. You can use canned or fresh tomatoes here, I used canned. Their preferred trick with canned tomatoes is to use whole canned tomatoes and then smash them with your wooden spatula as you put them in the pan.

Cook the sauce until nice and bubbly, 8 minutes or so. I kept it on warm while cooking the linguine. The recipe calls for 1 lb of linguine, but we found the sauce to be on the short side with that much pasta. Next time I might just use 3/4 or even just 1/2 of a package. Mix the cooked pasta with one cup of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese before tossing with the pasta.

This was a nice simple meal. The whole dried chile I added gave a nice, subtle, and smoky spice and mixing the cheese in first guarantees that the cheese flavor is predominate in the dish. I am going to cook leftovers with meatballs tonight. (Grass fed-organic meat of course!)

One funny side note: The pictures are few and far between in this cookbook. Many of the recipes and more complicated techniques have no picture at all. And I have to admit that it is usually a photo that entices me to make something out of a cookbook. But for this recipe they took the time to show how to toss pasta with cheese! They are nice photos of course, but I just thought it was funny.

26 recipes down in How to Eat Supper.