Simple Cooking: Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes and Scallions

By Anthony Todd in Food on Mar 7, 2008 7:00PM

We like pasta. It’s tasty, it’s quick, it’s cheap and it’s a very easy way to use up things in your refrigerator. This week, we just happened to have some scallions and some slightly wrinkly cherry tomatoes in our fridge, and with some inspiration from Marcella Hazan, we created this dish. It sounds a little odd, but trust us – give it a try.

Pasta with Scallions and Cherry Tomatoes (inspired by M.H.)
1 lb Pasta (farfalle seems best)
2 bunches of scallions, chopped into 2 inch long chunks
2 cups of cherry/grape tomatoes – cut the bigger ones in half
1 jalapeño pepper
5 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
1/3 cup Olive Oil

Put a pot of lightly salted water on to boil for the pasta. Heat up the olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat, and when the oil is hot, add the scallions, garlic and jalapeño. Top it off with 2 generous pinches of salt. Sauté these until the scallions begin to wilt.

At this point, add the pasta to the boiling water. Put in the tomatoes, reduce to medium heat and let it cook, stirring frequently to prevent the garlic from burning. If you need to, feel free to add more oil. When the pasta is done, the sauce should be perfectly cooked! Drain the pasta, mix it all together and serve.

This dish is easy to modify to your individual tastes. If you don’t like it spicy, take out the pepper. If you want it to have more of a kick, or a different flavor, try a different kind of pepper – Serrano chilies work well here. Don’t worry that it doesn’t seem to have much of a “sauce” – thanks to the garlic and scallions, the oil takes on a strong flavor and coats the pasta.