I took another whack at the Pasta with Red Sauce recipe featured on the ‘Techniques’ episode of No Reservations tonight. It came out a lot better than it did last time, though I’ve yet to perfect it. On my first try, the tomatoes cooked so far down that they were almost dry, leaving me with barely enough sauce for 9 oz. of pasta. This time, I wound up with a big ol’ pot of sauce that was just a little thinner than I would have liked. Maybe next time it’ll be “just right.”

John and I picked up twice the amount of tomatoes we used last time at the farmers’ market — 8 lbs. in all. John cut x-shapes in the bottoms of each one and I blanched them in boiling water for a full 20 seconds, which made the skins slide right off. We also skipped squeezing the tomatoes this time around in hopes of getting a wetter sauce.

This time the tomatoes did boil down to something resembling a sauce, rather than the tomato sludge I wound up with last time. The problem was that there was a bit too much liquid in the sauce, even after I let it reduce for 40 minutes, with the result being that the basil-and-garlic flavors of the infused olive oil were a lot more muted than they were last time. The dominant note of the sauce was of ripe, bright, fresh tomatoes, with the garlic and basil playing in a more minor key in the background. I would have liked those flavors to have been more pronounced, but the sauce was still very tasty. You can’t go too far wrong with ripe, NC-grown tomatoes!

This batch made more than enough for the 9 oz. of pasta we cooked (a good amount for the two of us), and it looks like we can get 4-6 more servings out of it! Maybe the key is to only squeeze half the tomatoes, or to squeeze them all and add water back in as needed. The squeezing step definitely makes a huge difference.

I could pretty much live on carbs and tomatoes, but John needs his protein, so he made another favorite of ours, Mussels Italiano, to accompany the pasta. I usually use crushed tomatoes instead of the diced ones the recipe recommends because otherwise not enough tomatoes get into the mussel shells for my taste. (Also, that way there’s more delicious sauce left over to mop up with some crusty bread.) I’m wondering if the mussels would also work cooked in the No Rez sauce–might be worth a shot, if I can get those proportions right.