Here's something I've been doing lately. It's not so much a tomato sauce as a Nage and it's not so much a recipe as a technique. It involves dry toasting the ingredients in a frying pan, Mexican Style. This is a light brothy emulsion so I like to use a thin pasta like Tagliolini. For 1/2 lb. Tagliolini I use about 10 oz of fresh Cherry Tomatoes (enough to almost make 1 layer in a 10" non-stick frying pan), 2 cloves of garlic un-peeled, 1 hot red chili pepper (fresh or dried). Start this and your pasta water at the same time. Just lay it all in the pan and turn the heat to med-high and cook until tomatoes have charred spots and start to split. By this time the garlic and chili have toasted a bit. This takes all of 5 minutes. It doesn't have to be a non-stick pan but the juices from the tomatoes caramelize instantly in the pan when they start to split and since this a mid-week easy meal for me I want to keep cleanup simple. You can film the pan lightly with olive oil as well but I don't think it necessary and it changes the way the tomatoes cook a bit. Turn off the heat and pull the tomatoes out of the pan into a food processor or blender (I use a mini Cuisinart for this). Pull the stem end off of the chili, peel the garlic cloves and throw the garlic and chili (whole) in with the tomatoes. Whiz the whole thing into a puree. It will seem quite watery. Set aside. Cook your pasta on the under-done side in rather salty water (I go for an almost seawater saltiness). Reserve 3/4 cup or so of pasta water in a bowl. The Tagliolini I use says 6-8 minutes and I pull it out at five because you're finishing it in the sauce. Drain the pasta, rinse the pot briefly to remove excess starch and return to burner on low-med heat. Add a fairly thick film of good Olive Oil to the pot, let it heat briefly, then pour in the tomato mixture. It should start bubbling immediately. Add the pasta back in to the pot along with a little of the pasta water. Toss it gently, adding more pasta water as needed until pasta is done to your liking and the sauce has tightened up. You should have perfectly cooked pasta lightly coated with a bright, brothy, tomatoey, sauce with a garlic/chili kick. Finish with the herb of your choice and a hit of fresh Olive Oil if you like. You can do any number of variations on this but the main point is that it's an almost raw sauce but the toasting gives some caramelized notes as the tomatoes basically start to cook in their own skins, and also mellows the garlic and chili notes. Also if you time it all right you can do the whole dish in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta. I know this all sounds off the cuff and sketchy, but hey, it's my first post H2H
