Warm Summer Pasta

The recipe for February in my lovely De Bortoli calendar is a beautiful tomato pasta. This dish couldn't have come at a better time for us, given the hundreds of tomatoes our little plants are producing at the moment!

I often make tomato based sauces for pasta, but I've never made one using balsamic vinegar as the main sauce ingredient. I thought it might have been a bit too acidic, but combined with the sweetness of homegrown tomatoes and the spicy salami, it was absolutely delicious.

Marinating the tomatoes in the vinegar, gave it a lovely intense flavour and made the whole dish very easy to put together. For an easy weeknight dinner, this was perfect.

This pasta will certainly become a regular in our household. My fruit bowl is still full of our ripe, red tomatoes, so I have a feeling I'll be making this one again very soon.

Warm Summer Pasta

5 tomatoes, chopped

8 semi dried tomatoes, sliced

60g pitted black olives, halved

3 Tbs basil, chopped

2 Tbs balsamic vinegar

300g fettucine or long pasta

1 Tbs olive oil

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 Tbs fresh sage, chopped

6 slices of spicy salami, cut into strips

Pepper to taste

Parmesan cheese to serve

Place tomatoes, olives, basil and vinegar in a bowl and stand for 30 minutes.

Cook pasta in boiling water until tender, drain and keep warm.

Heat oil in a large pan and fry garlic, sage and salami until golden.

Remove from the heat and toss through the pasta with the tomato mixture.

Season to taste with pepper and serve with parmesan cheese.

Enjoy!

And To Drink....

The wine matching suggestion for this pasta dish is the De Bortoli Yarra Valley Estate Grown Chardonnay. The grapes from this wine come from the Dixons creek vineyard, which is a cool climate region of the Yarra Valley. These vines are low yielding older vines and so produce wines with a beautiful complexity and richness. 

The wine is made with minimal intervention to ensure that the true Chardonnay flavours shine through. The grapes are hand picked, whole bunch pressed and then fermented in French oak barrels.

This Estate Grown Chardonnay is a light yellow in colour with aromas of stone fruits and brioche. To taste, it is lovely and rich with a slight butteriness, a little minerality and acidity and beautiful fruity freshness. It was a perfect match to the sweetness of the tomatoes in the pasta. I thought that the vinegar might overwhelm the wine, but it was complex and bold enough to stand up on it's own.

The De Bortoli Yarra Valley Estate Grown Chardonnay was beautiful drinking as a current vintage, but would further develop over another couple of years. I might just have to go out and buy another bottle to try again in a few years time!