First Harvest Dinner

It was a Friday night in June and we had no dinner plans. To be fair, it had been an unusually busy week with both of us working extra hours. The following day my radio station was holding our largest annual event, a big concert with six bands in a beautiful park in the middle of Pittsburgh's university district. I hadn't really been thinking about our dinner plans for the evening before Summer Music Festival. Yet there we were, sitting in the living room debating our options of mediocre Chinese take-out, a trip to the grocery store for some frozen or prepared foods or making due with what I had on hand. My husband was ambivalent.

I stood in the kitchen at about 6:30 that evening, my stomach softly rumbling, and stared into the empty abyss of the refrigerator. We had eggs, a head of cabbage and and a couple of apples. The pantry held a little more promise with a can of Italian San Marzano tomatoes and a couple boxes of pasta. Combined with good olive oil, some of the grated Parmesan cheese I unearthed from the fridge and a whole bunch of herbs from my garden, I could make a nice, light and fresh tasting tomato sauce and serve it with angel hair pasta. Voila, dinner would be served.

For a decent tomato sauce, onion and garlic are necessary ingredients, but alas, my fridge was uncharacteristically devoid of onions and I had two pathetic dried out cloves of garlic on hand. That's when my brilliant, handsome and resourceful husband chimed in with "hey, we have a whole bunch of onions and garlic growing in the garden". I seriously need to marry that guy. This is the first year we've attempted to grow onions and its early in the season. The garlic had just put out their shoots a few weeks prior, so we figured they'd be underdeveloped. Gloves and trowel in hand, I ventured out to see if I could harvest enough goodies to make this sauce happen. I pulled up two small onions and a puny garlic bulb, but also decided to harvest the one fairly large Japanese eggplant we had in the garden. With veggies procured, combined with handfuls of fresh basil, oregano and parsley, I was ready to go to work.

TOMATO SAUCE WITH EGGPLANT

1 12 oz. can good quality whole peeled Italian tomatoes
1 cup chopped fresh eggplant
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup each chopped fresh basil, parsley and oregano
Salt, black pepper and red pepper flakes to taste

Honestly, this sauce is so easy I'm embarrassed to write a blog about it. But there are some fine points that will help you make the very best dinner you can out of these sparse but flavorful ingredients. Normally, when garlic has reached maturity and the bulbs are big and fat, they are harvested and left to dry for a few weeks until the skin become papery and garlic has mellowed. I didn't have that luxury and fresh garlic is extremely assertive. The bulb I dug up was only about the size of a hazelnut, but it stunk up the whole kitchen, so I used half of it. Before starting the sauce, I put a large pot filled with water over medium high heat and added several tablespoons of salt for my pasta. In a medium saucepan, I sauteed the chopped onion with some olive oil, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes just until it was translucent before adding the garlic. While that sauteed, I opened the can of tomatoes and lifted each tomato out of the can into a bowl, leaving the liquid in the can, and I crushed up the tomatoes by hand until all the big pieces were mostly broken down.

Once the garlic and onions began to brown, I added the sliced eggplant and another splash of olive oil and let that cook until the eggplant began to soften, then I added the tomatoes and just a splash of the tomato liquid, turned the heat down to medium low and let it gently simmer for about 15 minutes. I came back and tasted, added a pinch more salt and pepper, a little more tomato liquid and half of the fresh herbs. After 15 minutes, I dropped the pasta into the boiling water and cooked it until it was still a little chewy, about 8 minutes. Before I drained the pasta, I scooped out a cup of the pasta water to loosen the sauce. When you drain your pasta, for goodness sake, don't rinse it!!  Pasta has a thin layer of starch on the outside that allows the sauce to penetrate and stick to it. I drained the pasta into a colander, dumped it back into the pot and scooped the sauce on top. The pasta will taste better if you let it finish cooking in the sauce, so I added about half of the pasta water and put it over medium heat to finish cooking. It only took about 6 minutes for the pasta to absorb the liquid in the sauce and take on its beautiful flavors. Before serving it, I added the rest of the fresh herbs, stirred it all together and admired my work.

We enjoyed our dinner with a little of that grated Parmesan cheese on the top and a glass of chilled sauvignon blanc. It was delicious! The red pepper flakes brought just a little heat and the sauce was sweet, mellow and surprisingly complex. With just a few ingredients and a little imagination, I'd managed to pull a really lovely, light and flavorful dinner out of thin air, thanks to my garden. Even though its early in the season and the garden has just begun to produce, its such a satisfying feeling to cook with the stuff you grow yourself.