When I got home from class on Wednesday night, I wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. I stood there for a moment, staring blankly at the contents, half hoping that there wouldn't be anything inside so that I could just pour a bowl of cereal and plop down on the couch. Instead, there was a bowl of aging tomatoes that demanded to be cooked.
I had bought them over the weekend at my local produce market on clearance, six big tomatoes for $.99. So they were already starting to show signs of wilt when I brought them into the apartment, and 4+ days in the fridge hadn't helped measures much. I brought them out onto the counter, along with a large pan, half an onion and a few cloves of garlic. I got the onion and garlic chopped and simmering in a little olive oil over low heat and turned my attention to the tomatoes. I peeled the tomatoes with my serrated edge peeler (one of my top five favorite kitchen utensils of all time) seeded them and gave them a rough chop, making sure to cut out any overly soft spots. When they were all chopped, they went into the pan with the onions and garlic. I turned the heat up a bit to get things bubbling and thought about seasonings. A small palmful of chili flakes went in, along with a few pinches of dried oregano and a couple grinds of black pepper. I found some nearly gone fresh basil in my crisper drawer and tore it roughly to toss in at the end.
By this point, I had a pot of water bubbling away for pasta and was feeling excited about this simple but delicious meal that was shaping up in front of me. When the sauce had cooked down a bit, I tossed in a pat of butter to give it a little bit of smoothness and creaminess and stirred in the torn basil. Tossed with the whole wheat bowties I happened to have around, I took a bite straight from the pan and immediately I thanked the food gods that I hadn't succumbed to the lure of cereal and couch.
Sadly, I totally forgot to take a picture of my creation, so I'm borrowing one from ginandtonic1978. My sauce looked a lot like that.
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