Easy Caprese Pasta

Hey, how have you been? Can you even believe it’s the middle of July already??? Sorry to be the one to break it to you if you hadn’t realized that calendar fact. But hopefully you’ve crossed a few things off the summer to-do list and managed to find some down time as well.

Here’s a super easy recipe…FOUR ingredients…to help you keep your summer schedule as light as possible. It’s a take on a caprese salad which is really an iconic summer dish, right?

pasta of your choice

cherry tomatoes

basil

mini bocconcini (aka buffalo mozzarella)

If you have a good kitchen garden happening then you can get half the ingredients from your own backyard. So far this is all that’s happening with our cherry tomatoes so we’re still buying those. Two small containers or one large one to serve a family. Toss them into a medium-hot pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper and give them an occasional stir while they caramelize and simmer into a a scrumptious sauce.

When the tomatoes are super soft and the skins have broken you can squish them down with a spatula and turn the heat to a really low simmer till you’re ready to assemble everything.

Meanwhile your pasta is boiling away in another pot, right? You know how much you need to feed your crowd. I use about 3/4 of a 500g package. Sometimes I feel like it’s not enough or why am I putting a quarter package of pasta back in the cupboard? and so I make it all and then it’s too much. But just sometimes. I like to make this dish with penne or rigatoni or some other tube shaped pasta, but the little bow-ties are fun sometimes too.

Basil is the easiest thing to grow. You could keep a plant right on your kitchen window-sill, or in a container garden outside like we do, or as part of a full-on herb and kitchen garden. If you have little minions whose job it is to help with dinner, give them a little pair of scissors and a small prep-sized bowl and get them to fill it with basil leaves. If you stack up the leaves and twist them up then slice the bunch on a diagonal it’s called a chiffonade and you will be very chef-y. Or you can just leave them whole. Either way is good.

Some places in the world call this kind of cheese mozzarella, here it’s called bocconcini. It’s a super-mild cheese that comes in several sizes. I like it like this, and if you buy it in bigger sizes you’ll want to slice it up a bit smaller for this dish. Why? Because when you toss it into the hot pasta and tomato sauce it will melt into a big hot messy awesomeness. That’s why.

So when all your ingredients are prepped…

Toss them all together in a great big serving bowl and season with a lot of fresh-ground pepper and also some grated parmesan if that’s what you like. The basil will wilt just a little and the cheese will melt itself all stringy and gooey and it will be delish.

It goes down pretty well with a chilled white wine while dining out on the patio. And how easy was that? Four ingredients, you don’t even need a recipe. I bet you have it memorized already, but just in case you don’t here it is one more time…

pasta of your choice

cherry tomatoes

basil

mini bocconcini (aka buffalo mozzarella)

So there you go, that can go on your dinner menu this week. And what about you? Is caprese salad a regular during the summer for you? Or do you make any variations on it to keep meals interesting but easy? Share with me…I shared with you…

Have a great week!