Aunt Ruthie's summer pasta with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil

This week's entry is a bit different from last week's Ribfest meat extravaganza. Three weeks ago when the summer was in its final and most pleasant stages, I (Pat) took advantage of a pot-luck picnic and the cheap bulk tomatoes bursting off the vines to make a big batch of another one of our favourite foods in the world: summer pasta with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and basil.

This was the dish that turned me from a tomato-hater into a tomato-fiend a few years ago, thanks to my Aunt Ruthie's recipe and her fresh homegrown tomatoes. It has one of the highest deliciousness:preparation-time ratios I know of, and is the kind of vegetarian dish that has just as intense flavours and textures as any meat dish.

I've provided a sort of recipe as best I can remember, but it's more like rules of thumb to apply to your proportions. The photo shows all the ingredients I used to make a giant batch that supplied the pot-luck as well as several lunches/dinners for a couple of days (although, unfortunately, it's not quite the same as left-overs and doesn't keep more than a couple of days). 

Yakisoba

Columbus Day Weekend, 2008.  The place: Candlewood Lake, Connecticut.  The cast of characters: ten thesis-crazed Amherst students looking for a little R&R.  We spent four days at a friend's house on the lake, surrounded by sparkling water and fiery New England autumn hills, doing our best to forget about the work awaiting us back at school.  We slept until noon and spent the afternoons drinking beer and lounging on the dock.

And, taking advantage of the huge and elegantly equipped kitchen, we cooked.  We cooked like the hungry young fiends we were, overwhelmed with delight at our temporary freedom from dining-hall blandness.  We bought everything we could get our hands on at the local Costco, and put together elaborate communal dinners full of fresh vegetables and bright flavors.  And by far the most successful meal we had that weekend was our friend Shaylon's yakisoba.

Pesto by hand

My boyfriend loves gadgets. He is by far one of the most gadgety people I've ever met. Going to Target with him is a dangerous proposition: he will happily spend an entire afternoon wandering the aisles of the electronics department in a gleeful daze, coming to life only occasionally to pull something off the shelf and announce, "I'm getting this." Grocery shopping is just as hazardous, because every grocery store I've been to with him has a cookware section. If it slices, dices, pulverizes, or serves food in a visually arresting manner, he is drawn inexorably to it like a moth to a ceiling lamp.

And yet, he doesn't own a food processor.

This became an issue one recent Saturday as we prepared to go shopping for dinner ingredients. I wanted pesto. I craved pesto. I was horrified by the thought of buying premade pesto for dinner, when it's so easy and satisfying to make at home. But I'd never made pesto without a food processor before. So I turned to the Internets to see if you could, in fact, make pesto entirely by hand.