The Other Night and Tonight

I enjoyed the dinner I put together on Tuesday night enough to want to note it here, for future reference. No pictures, but let's be honest, it's doubtful they would have come out well. I'm not much of a food photographer, and my attempts to capture deliciousness often appears to be meant for a Dire Warning.

It started when I bought some fresh cherry tomatoes; the place I stopped for ice cream on Sunday is a small cafe and often has things like jams for sale, but they also had a good-sized container of wee cherry tomatoes for a dollar, and I felt like the chances were, they were pretty close to the garden and so would taste good (I'm not the biggest consumer of raw tomatoes; they have to be really good). They mostly did taste good, too: a few were fabulous, most were good, and only a few were less than good.

What I did was wash them and put them in a bowl, then while some pasta was cooking, I cut some mozzarella into bite-size chunks and layered that on top. I had been thinking of adding basil, but then remembered that I bought pesto recently, so I globbed some of that in instead. When the rotini was cooked, I drained it and added it, then stirred it all together. It was delicious Tuesday night, warm, and equally good cold on Wednesday.

A few other notes:

• If the tomatoes had been any larger, I would have cut them in half, to facilitate the ratio of ingredients per mouthful.
• It could have used even more pesto.
• I want to make it again, but I have to get more (and trustworthy) tomatoes.

So! To that last point, after work, off to the farmer's market I went; the one nearest me just happens to be on Thursdays (through the end of the month, anyway), and I was there and back in half an hour. There weren't a lot of produce vendors, understandably, and they didn't have any cherry tomatoes, so I'm going to try chopping up these heirlooms and see how it compares.

I also got a few other things, all "our own": Gala apples, white peaches, and a handful of green beans. For the princely total of $8.85, virtuous feelings not included.

So now my evening's plans include making more of the pasta salad thing. Plus, although the Bruins game last night started after my bedtime, NESN (bless them) is replaying it tonight, so I can see the first win of the season. Yay!

And yes, I will be the dork watching the TV and joking to the cats that I have a good feeling about the game (knowing that they won, 6-2).