The bruschetta didn’t use up all of the tomatoes, and I have a forest of basil, so I figured that I would make some pasta (though of course, this meant buying a few more tomatoes - too many, too few never-ending cycle). My first instinct was a cappellini pomodoro, but that was too obvious. I recalled a recipe from the Cooking Channel for roasted tomato penne alla vodka. I hadn’t made this before, and I was a little suspicious of marscapone cheese, but I had a few hours to kill so what the heck.
The most time consuming part of the recipe is roasting the tomatoes - over an hour of them sizzling away in the oven. The next part went pretty quick - sautee onions and garlic, add vodka and chicken stock, reduce, and then add the roasted tomatoes/marscapone, puree with immersion blender, and stir in some shredded basil.
Once it is all nice and saucy, add in cooked pasta (called for penne, but i had bow ties - farfalle), stir, dump in a casserole dish, and top with mozzarella and parmesan. THEN it goes back in the oven for another 45 minutes.
Crazy time consuming but oh so good. To quote my husband, “This is like restaurant good - and I don’t mean Olive Garden!”
Tags: food
