Weekly Challenge 1: Tomatoes "Heirloom Tomato Pasta Salad"

Our friends over at  Read It, Eat It have decided to start a weekly challenge.  To which I say:  Bring it On!

For this week, we settled on a feature ingredient: tomatoes.  This might not have been the best on planning on our parts, since it's not tomato season yet.  But nevertheless, we cooked our favorite heirloom tomato pasta salad.  We'd made it before, pre-baby, and I was curious as to how Babygirl would react.  She liked it, but with trepidation.  It took two tries for her to eat her whole portion - first time she ate only the pasta, second time we realized that some pieces of tomato had too much skin, and when we took those out she ate the tomatoes happily.

This recipe is light, and fluffy, and really highlights the tomato flavors.  You have to use heirlooms, otherwise it won't taste as good.  In all honesty, I haven't tried it with other types of tomatoes, but I just kinda have the feeling.  Also, the creme fraiche adds a wonderful lightness to the taste.

I had some questions on the fat content of this meal, because y'all, have you seen creme fraiche?  It's the creamiest milk fat e-ver! But alas, I went OCD on the recipe and calculated the nutritional information on an excel spreadsheet (yes I did, *sigh*).  And even though both olive oil and creme fraiche are straight up fat, by the time you include all the pasta and tomatoes, it balances out to a nice 35% calories from fat content.

This recipe comes from Gourmet magazine, Sept 2009

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/3 cup creme fraiche
• 1 tbs white-wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon of sugar
• 2 lbs heirloom tomatoes (about 4 mediums ones, the fresher more farmer's market friendly, the better)
• 1 medium shallot, finely chopped
• 1 lb fusilli or other short spiral pasta (whole wheat)
• 3/4 cup fresh chopped mixed herbs, we used basil and thyme

Directions

1. On a large bowl, whisk together oil, creme fraiche, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper.  
2. Coarsely chop tomatoes.  Toss them into bowl, along with shallots. 
3. Marinate tomatoes for at least 10 minutes
4. While tomatoes stand, cook fusilli in boiling water until al dente.
5. Drain pasta quickly and add to bowl with tomato mixture, tossing to combine
6. Cool to room temperature (do not chill), toss in herbs, and stir again