Summer Pasta Puttanesca
My one absolute go-to pasta dish for easy weeknight meals is pasta puttanesca. I could eat this sauce with a spoon, any day of the week, with nothing but a loaf of crusty bread to mop up the deliciously salty, briny puddles.
Pasta puttanesca is an easy recipe with deep and pungent flavors. Try it – you’ll be suprised how much you love it.
Since one cannot eat bread for every single meal of the day (or so I’ve been told), I buy really good pasta to toss it with. It’s a fair agreement I made with myself, even though these seemingly simple shapes cost a fortune.
In case you were wondering: Yes, they’re worth it. Unless you make your own pasta on a busy weeknight, which makes you a (slightly insane) champion.
I think a good pasta puttanesca is easily a year-round dish, but with plenty of fresh tomatoes on the market during summer I sometimes feel a little… Uninspired? By making dishes with jarred ones.
I picked up a jar of anchovies the other day and since both capers and black olives are considered their own food group in our home, I had everything for our favorite meal on hand.
I pulled out the jar of pelati sitting in the bottom drawer of my European-style openly accessible pantry (this is the fancy way to tell someone you don’t have a pantry, but store your staples in a couple of kitchen drawers) – and stared at it.
No. I couldn’t. So many fresh tomatoes on hand – and I’m reaching for the jar?
You could say it doesn’t really matter these days, since we can buy both jarred and fresh tomatoes all year long now – but I’d argue that one should really stick to summer produce when it is at its peak. And make the most of it while it lasts!
This recipe isn’t a compromise. It’s not settling on using fresh tomatoes because you’d otherwise feel guilty about forgoing them while they’re in season.
It is a completely new and interesting dish, but with the same incredible flavors of the traditional Italian recipe.
In fact, I believe this pasta dinner is so good it should become your new summer tradition. Though its real secret doesn’t just lie in the fresh tomatoes, it lies in the way each ingredient is added to the dish to create not only flavor, but also texture.
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