woppy dinner 10/11/09

when it comes to school and business, i identify with my jewish side, but when the occasion calls for it, i'm happy to pull out other slivers of my family's ancestry and identify with those cultures, too. having recently watched scarface, i felt a surge of italian-american pride and decided to make pasta. (i know that al pacino's character is cuban, but al pacino himself is as italian as the louvre's greatest hits.)

i'm lucky enough to have access to dry-farmed tomatoes, which are the best tomatoes on the planet. their dense, flavorful flesh exposes those pink supermarket tomatoes for the mealy crap pellets they are. so i sauteed onions and garlic in olive oil, added the tomatoes and spices and immersion blended the hell out of it until it was a creamy orange sauce.

i then cooked some fusilli al dente, reserved a bit of the water, added my sauce and a bit of cream until i got this bad boy:

i tore some basil, threw it on top, put on my eating pants and went to town.

i don't mean to toot my own horn, but i did real good. i've paid good money for pasta that was vastly inferior to this.

as i was eating it, i thought that it could use some cubed mozzarella, but i didn't have any, so i melted some provolone on top of what was left: jackpot.

this was a really nice effort, i'll probably do this again. the only problem was the amount of salt i used. if salt were still a currency, this dish would be the federal reserve.

i'll tone down my liberal salt usage and use a more republican approach next time; not only will my pasta have less salt, but it will also get a tax cut, wiretapped and no public option.