Spaghetti with Tomatoes, Basil, Olives, and Fresh Mozzarella

This dish made me think of summer. It's light, doesn't require lots of cooking time and would be perfect with fresh ingredients from the farmer's market. It was really a hit. We did add a few extra items, which I'll get to, but the recipe in its original state would be so good for a light, summer dinner.

Spaghetti with Tomatoes, Basil, Olives, and Fresh Mozzarella

Ingredients
2 pounds vine-ripened tomatoes (about 6), chopped
3/4 pound salted fresh mozzarella, cut into 1/4-inch cubes, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups chopped fresh basil
1/2 cup halved and pitted black olives
4 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper
1 pound spaghetti
1/2 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced

Directions
In a large glass or stainless-steel bowl, combine the chopped tomatoes with the mozzarella, basil, olives, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper.

In a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook the spaghetti until just done, about 12 minutes. Drain, add to the tomato mixture, and toss.

Heat the oil in a small frying pan over moderately low heat. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Pour the oil over the pasta and toss again.

Like I mentioned above, we added a few extra ingredients to increase the bulk and protein in this dish. First we did whole wheat pasta to get the good, healthy grains. We added some shrimp, thawed from the freezer, and some sliced and pan-cooked prosciutto. Maybe we're just conditioned to seeing large portions, but I don't think the original recipe would have filled us up for dinner. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way, the extra goodies tasted great and were a nice addition.

Tomato, mozzarella and basil mixture.

For the prosciutto, I found it sliced in the local grocery store. I chopped up two thin slices and cook them in a pan with a little olive oil along with the oil and garlic in the last step of the directions. Oh, and the olive oil. We halved this recipe, and even then we most certainly didn't use the whole amount of olive oil to pour over the pasta in the last step. That's a lot of olive oil, and I can understand using that if you need to slick up your insides to get rid of a hairball or something, but I don't think normal people (myself and the Husband) need that much oil floating around in our dinners. We did a fraction of that, and while we didn't have much of a sauce, it still was fine.


Another thing we did was attempt to warm the pasta for a few minutes before we ate. We drained the pasta, added the tomato mixture, along with the mozzarella, and put it on low heat while the prosciutto-garlic mixture cooked. In retrospect, we should have reconsidered what happens to cheese when you heat it up - it melts. And gets really stringy, mozzarella especially. So when we removed it from the heat we did have hot pasta, but we also had a mass of melted cheese goo in the bottom of the pan. Not quite what was supposed to happen. Maybe next time we'll just prep everything faster.


But even with the melty cheese, it was really good. See for yourself.

Finished product, including shrimp and prosciutto.