Pasta with Tomatoes and Pesto Rosso

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: my absolute favorite thing to do when I visit my friends at their houses is to wait until they are otherwise engaged (bathroom, phone call, paying the pizza guy), creep into their kitchens and forage in their fridges. I don’t take anything or move anything, but I’ve found that the sorts of things that a person keeps around are very telling.

I don’t know what you all look at when you visit people… photos, maybe, or how they arrange their closets. Or maybe you just leave well enough alone, and I’m a creeper. But regardless, the next time you visit someone, take a look… I promise, you’ll learn something.

Take my friend the Artist, for example. She admits to surviving almost entirely on dairy–milk, yogurt, cheese–supplemented by a steady stream of fruit. Rare is the day you’ll find milk in my fridge, though I used to always have yogurt. She finds it absurd that I can’t remember the last time I had a glass of milk. I find it absurd that she can drink a liter of it in a day.

The Almost Frenchman, on the other hand, trusts someone else to make his food almost every day. At any given point in time, he’ll have Indian, Chinese or Japanese takeout waiting for the microwave. Maybe this is why he’s always so ready to make the trek to my house when I’m struck by the urge to cook weird things…

As for me… well… I took a picture for you.

Bear in mind that this is a shared fridge, but what you see is (from bottom to top) a bag of apples, leftover lentil-tomato stew, beer, eggs (not mine), fromage frais, blackberry jam, fizzy water (not mine), butter, leftover pork stew, mustard, hot pepper paste and pesto rosso. Pretty standard. I also always have lentils and pasta on hand, and I usually have tomato purée, but I used it all up making lentils yesterday. As I said to the Artist and the Almost Frenchman last night, I subside mainly on vegetables (mmm… vegetables), with a hearty supplement of tomatoes in any form… thus the name of this here blog.

I used to stock my fridge based on recipes I planned to make, a complicated menu creating my shopping list for me. I’ve learned, however, over the past five years that that’s the key to having a lot of food that goes off. This week, my dinner plans have changed so enormously from day to day that half of the food I planned to make this week is still in the cupboard… and that’s OK. I haven’t wasted anything, and I’ll be able to make it another day. I buy fresh things most mornings I need them, and I eat leftovers as soon as I can. When I think of the number of times I bought chicken with the intention of cooking it and had to toss it… well, it just makes me all that much of a better authority when I could decisively tell my cousin, the Actress, when she called me at work today asking about her chicken–

“The expiration date is today… but it smells funny…”

–that it had most definitely gone off. It’s been awhile since I let anything sit that long in my fridge, which, as you can see, is fairly sparse on a day-to-day basis.

Which is more than I can say for my mother and grandmother, for while I love them dearly, they each have a shelf of condiments. An entire shelf of condiments, most of which have been there for as long as I can remember. There are some things that seem to last forever, like mustard, but… can I tell you another secret?

I have a secret fantasy of going through all of them, marrying the half-finished doubles, and throwing out everything that has gone bad. And then organizing them by size and country of origin.

Instead, I’ll just make dinner. One of my fallback options is pasta with pesto, fresh tomatoes and fromage frais. It’s something I nearly always have the ingredients for, and I love the way it looks… and of course the way it tastes. When I stocked my fridge this time around, there was no green pesto to be found, so I bought this red one and riffed off my favorite. It’s a different dish, for sure, but just as easy and just as tasty… if not quite as colorful. Oh well… when the pesto rosso is gone, I’ll probably buy a jar of pesto genovese… but not before. Because that’s how I roll. Minimalism, baby…

Pasta with Pesto Rosso

100 g. uncooked pasta (I like shells, but any short pasta will do)
2 small tomatoes, chopped
1 tbsp. dried basil
1 tsp. salt
50 g. pesto rosso
75 g. fromage frais

Cook the pasta according to box directions. Meanwhile, heat the chopped tomatoes, basil and salt in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally.

Drain the pasta and return to the pot. Add the pesto and stir until heated through.

Pour the pasta into your serving dish and top with tomatoes and fromage frais.