Betty's Pasta by Daisy Bateman #giveaway

MLK welcomes Daisy Bateman to the kitchen today--read all the way to the bottom for info about her giveaway! Welcome Daisy!

Betty’s Blistered Cherry Tomato and Ricotta Pasta

She finished serving up the dish of pasta, blistered cherry tomatoes, and basil, topped with a scoop of fresh ricotta and set it in front of Claudia, who thanked her friend and wondered, not for the first time, why she didn’t hate her. Betty was a city girl by birth, a self-described “culinary school dropout” who had taken to country life like a duck to a pond full of other ducks that all immediately fell in love with her. 

Claudia Simcoe, the protagonist of “Murder Goes to Market,” isn’t much of a cook. Fortunately, she has her best friend Betty living nearby, ready to serve her one of her effortlessly delicious dinners and scold her for eating too many frozen pizzas. This recipe is one she threw together when Claudia came over for dinner after finding one of her marketplace tenants murdered. It’s quick and easy and very summery, and a great way of using a surplus of cherry tomatoes if your garden is over-producing. 

Ingredients:

Pasta

Cherry tomatoes

Ricotta cheese

Basil

Salt

Olive oil

(Optional: garlic, shallots, parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes)

The quantities are very flexible here, so use as much as you like/have on hand. If you are going to add the garlic, be sure to add it near the end of the cooking, because otherwise it will burn.

Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat. Add the tomatoes to the hot oil and spread them evenly in the pan. Leave them alone, without stirring, for several minutes.

When you can’t resist any longer, and/or the tomatoes have burst and you can smell them starting to caramelize, gently turn them so they cook on the other side.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in salted water. Fun fact! Did you know you don’t actually need to use a giant pot with a huge excess of water? It’s true! You can just add enough to cover the pasta, and it works just fine. Also, this is the only way I’ve found to get the really starchy pasta water people are always talking about, to add to your sauces. (Starting with a very starchy pasta, like this one, which was all that was left at Trader Joe’s when I was pandemic-shopping, also helps.)

When the tomatoes have had about all they can take, turn off the heat and tear some basil leaves into the pan. Save the smaller ones for later. Add a couple of ladles of pasta water from the cooked pasta and drain the rest, then add the tomato mixture to the pasta pot.

Serve in bowls, topped with a scoop of ricotta and the small basil leaves. A floral white wine, like a viognier or a dry riesling, would go nicely.

Daisy Bateman is a mystery lover, cheese enthusiast, and world-renowned expert in Why You Should Buy That. In what passes for normal life, she works in biotech. She lives in Alameda, California, with her husband and a cat, only one of whom wears a tuxedo on a regular basis, and a puppy on a mission to chew the whole world into tiny pieces. 

About Murder Goes to Market: If you had asked computer programmer Claudia Simcoe what she expected to come of her leaving San Francisco for the California coast to open a farm-to-table marketplace, “assembles a mismatched team to investigate a murder” would not have been her first guess.

Lori Roth is one of the tenants of the market, or she had been until Claudia learned that the hands making her “hand-dyed” textiles belong to overseas factory workers. Claudia terminates Lori’s lease, but her hopes that this will be the last she sees of her problem tenant are dashed when she arrives at the marketplace the next morning to find Lori dead, hit over the head with a jar of pickles and strangled with a cheese wire.

The police chief thinks Claudia looks like an easy pick to be the killer, and he closes the marketplace to put the pressure on her. So, Claudia has no choice but to solve the mystery herself. Relying on the tech skills from her previous life and some help from her quirky new friends, Claudia races to save her business and herself before the killer adds her to the region’s local, artisanal murders. 

Add your comment to be entered in the drawing for a $10 gift card to Books Inc., Daisy's local indie, which sells ebooks through Kobo.  (Gift card is also good for anything else, but Murder Goes to Market is currently only available as an ebook.)