Pasta with Fresh Tomato Basil Sauce

If you're like us, you love to cook but don't want to spend any more time in the kitchen than necessary. Pasta is an easy foundation for a dish and allows for lots of experimentation. Plus, you can keep most ingredients stocked in your pantry and grab them in a pinch, supplementing with whatever fresh ingredients you have on hand.

Today's recipe comes from Cooking Light and definitely delivers on quickness. It's the Pasta with Fresh Tomato Basil Sauce (September 2010), and it's a good introduction to extending your reach beyond dried noodles and canned sauce.

There are just three steps to this recipe: 1) cook and drain the noodles, 2) sautee the firm produce, and 3) remove from heat and incorporate spices, delicate ingredients, and cooked noodles. Keeping those steps in mind will allow you to modify this recipe with whatever you have on-hand.

Zucchini languishing in the fridge? Cut it into ribbons and toss it in with the tomatoes. Last night's recipe left behind some extra oregano or thyme? Throw it in! Even frozen vegetables can make a splashy addition - just let your imagination and your taste buds be your guide.

The Cooking Light recipe itself isn't particularly mind-blowing. In truth, it lacks any sort of spirit or flavor. But as a sort of "training wheels" for cooking technique, it's a confidence-building dish worth making once.

Eggplant, Zucchini, and Tomato Tian

Generally, when we try a recipe and then go find the link to share it with you guys, we end up seeing reviews on the recipe site that are very similar to ours. This time, though, we've stumbled upon something that we didn't necessarily love but that's had a positive public response. So we'll let you be the judge...

Today's recipe is Eggplant, Zucchini, and Tomato Tian (Cooking Light, June 2010). Part of our problem might be that we didn't realize this was intended to be a side dish! The issue itself didn't specify explicitly, but now that we see it on the web, we've realized our error.

This has all the makings of a delicious vegetarian dish: hearty vegetables, fine cheeses, savory breadcrumbs. (We substituted vegetable broth for chicken broth to make it completely veggie.) And it was easy enough to assemble, requiring 15 minutes of prep time to roast the vegetables and 1 hour of cooking time for the completed dish. We just found it to be seriously lacking in flavor.

We did use fresh oregano and thyme, but we think more seasoning would've provided us with some richer flavor. And maybe, as a side dish, the recipe plays better not taking center stage, but standing alone it was pretty lackluster.

The dish may also have benefited from the inclusion of more (and more melt-able!) cheese. For example, a shredded mozzarella layered over the vegetables may have brought the dish together a little better than the drier texture of the Parmesiano-Reggiano. Maybe even the incorporation of a little bit of tomato past to bring out richer flavors would help.

So we leave you with a challenge: Try this recipe and see what you think, either as a side or a main dish, making our recommended substitutions or finding your own. Then let us know what you think in the comments!

Minty Tomato Soup

If you read the recipe for Minty Tomato Soup in the September issue of Cooking Light and thought, "Gosh, that sounds time consuming," then congratulations: You are WAY smarter than we are!

After all, tomato soup is delicious, there are only 4 steps in this recipe, and it calls for very few ingredients. What could go wrong?! Well, the lady whose fingernails are still stained orange will tell you, "A LOT"!

Our idea of a good recipe is one that takes 45 minutes, start to finish. This one took a whopping 45 minutes just to get the tomatoes prepared! Careful readers will notice that you handle these tomatoes several times. The first step is cutting the tomatoes in half. (Not so bad, right?) The second step is juicing them. Yes, juicing them - pressing them through a sieve and collecting the juice. (This is where we got concerned.) Finally, you must grate them over a bowl with a box grater, tossing the skins. (What the...?)

Once we'd done all that, we were instructed to mix the reserved tomato juice, salt, red wine vinegar, and chopped mint with the tomatoes and...that's it. No heating, no pureeing - just grated tomatoes and tired hands.

It turns out the rest of the ingredients are for a pesto topping and some really weak toast. Since we'd planned to accompany this with grilled cheese sandwiches - and because we were flat-out bushed! - we called an audible and skipped the toast.

We prepared the pesto as instructed and tossed our lackluster tomato mixture in with it, pureeing everything until smooth. Then we poured the soup into a Dutch oven and warmed it while the grilled cheese sandwiches were being assembled. And then came the true test: taste.

The finished product wasn't bad, even with our improvisations. There wasn't much depth to it, though; it tasted like grated tomatoes with some mint. It could have used some black pepper and maybe a dash of oregano, too. (Our grilled cheese sandwiches were fabulous, if you wondered!)

We'd love to say we'd try this again but the bottom line was that it just didn't make an impression. For our next grilled cheese night, we'll stick to Campbell's!