Simple Summer Spaghetti with Tomatoes 🍅

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Hi there!

When I was a kid, I ate everything. My mom never had to beg me to eat broccoli, never had to encourage me to try pot roast, I would even gobble down boiled brussels sprouts. Except for tomatoes. I loathed tomatoes. If there was one tomato seed on a lettuce leaf in my salad (because I even loved salads), I wouldn’t eat the entire portion. It’s really hard for me now to fathom 1) having a kid who would eat everything without issue, and 2) not liking tomatoes. I guess that’s not to say that I like all tomatoes. Put a mealy, pale red tomato slice on my deli turkey sandwich and I will pull it right off of there. But fresh, juicy, ripe August tomatoes, H E A V E N.

I wait all year long for tomatoes to come in season on Long Island (usually the tail end of July, but they really shine in August). I think our tomatoes are special, kind of like tomatoes in Southern Italy, they’re just different. They’re perfect. (On Thursday’s episode of All on the Table, I interview one of our local farmers, Katie Baldwin of Amber Waves Farm, who explains why our tomatoes are so good.)

I love all of our tomatoes, but I am partial to the small ones. I like the red cherry tomatoes and the sungold tomatoes are truly the stuff dreams are made of. I make tomato jams, salads, and just pop them in my mouth like candy, but the dish I make over and over again is a simple spaghetti with tomatoes. When I tell you this dish is simple, I mean it. I like to make a sauce that is done in the amount of time that it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, and this fits the bill. I cut the tomatoes in half, saute them in a good amount of olive oil with one crushed garlic clove and a big sprig of basil that I remove at the end. I add pasta water, and finish the spaghetti in the sauce with a hunk of butter, grated Parmesan, and more fresh basil. It couldn’t be simpler, but it is perfection -- my absolute favorite summer meal. I knew that I had to make it for It’s Not Complicated, because it is as uncomplicated as it gets.

Let me know what you think!

xoKatie