Name: Pasta with Baked Tomato Sauce
Yield: Serves 4
Ingredients: 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil; 1 pound very ripe cherry tomatoes, halved; 1/3 cup plain dry bread crumbs; 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese; 2 tablespoons freshly grated pecorino cheese; 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped; Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste; 1 pound dried fusilli (corkscrew) or farfalline (butterfly) pasta; 1/4 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves, torn

Cook: Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Source: Cucinaamore.com

It's difficult to imagine a more mundane-sounding dish than Pasta with Baked Tomato Sauce — and yet this extremely simple pasta is a breakthrough, not like any other you've ever eaten. And so good you'll make it again and again.

The sauce is made from roasted cherry tomatoes, very ripe ones. These diminutive tomatoes with the big taste are then covered with a cheesey-garlicky-bread crumb mixture and set in the oven. Just before serving, you tear some basil leaves into the roasted tomato mixture and that's your sauce, right in the oven dish: add some corkscrew or butterfly pasta and you have dinner.

Italian cookbook author Nancy Harmon Jenkins points out that the ony trick to this dish is using really ripe cherry tomatoes'which are easy to find all year long. If they're not available, use any red, ripe tomatoes and quarter them.

Recipe notes

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