Recipes

Pasta is one of our favorite summer dishes. At the end of a hot day when we don't know what to cook, the garden always appeals to us, whether we make pesto, a fresh tomato sauce, or use zucchini, hot peppers, or simply herbs. What we find in our garden is, more often than not, served over pasta. It is a rich, comforting summer dish.

I love pasta with raw tomato sauce, a dish that I learned from my friend Ed Giobbi, who makes a tomato salad and tosses it with pasta. Through the years I have made all kinds of variations of this recipe, using different vegetables as well as different pastas, from bow-tie to linguine to spaghetti. Here I use fettuccine, combining it with summer tomatoes and herbs just out of the garden.

To give the recipe more depth, I add crisp bacon and chicken livers, a special favorite of ours that we often enjoy sautéed and sliced on toast with aperitifs. I like to put my raw tomato sauce in a large glass measuring cup or bowl and heat it in a microwave oven for a couple of minutes to make it tepid, so the sauce doesn’t cool the warm pasta too much when it is tossed with it. Make sure that the plates for the pasta are hot.

For the sauce, peel about 2 pounds of tomatoes by dipping them in boiling water for a few seconds to loosen the peels. Set them aside for a few minutes to cool, then slide off and discard the skin. Cut the tomatoes in half, press out the seeds, and chop the flesh coarsely into ½-inch pieces. (If you prefer, don't peel or seed the tomatoes, but just coarsely chop them.) Put the tomato pieces in a glass bowl large enough for serving the pasta. Add 1½ teaspoons of finely chopped garlic, 1 tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper, and 3 tablespoons of shredded basil. Set aside.

Bring a pot of water to a boil for cooking the pasta. For serving four people as a first course, I cook about ¾ pound of fettuccine. Arrange 8 slices of lean bacon on a ridged microwave tray and cover with a paper towel. Microwave until crisp, about 5 to 6 minutes, depending on the thickness of the bacon. Break into ½-inch pieces and set aside.

Add salt to the boiling water, and cook the pasta for 12 to 15 minutes, or until it is firm but not too raw. Meanwhile, separate 6 chicken livers into halves, and then cut each in half again. Chop enough onion to have ¼ cup.

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over high heat, and sprinkle the chicken livers with salt and pepper. When the oil is very hot, add the chicken livers to the pan. Cook for about 1 minute on one side, then turn, and sprinkle the onions around and on top of the livers in the pan. Cook for an additional minute, and set aside off the heat.

Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil to the tomato mixture in the glass bowl, and microwave the mixture for 2 to 2½ minutes to warm it. Drain the pasta carefully in a colander, and add it to the tomato sauce with about 2 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese and 2 tablespoons of chopped chives. Toss well, and divide among four hot plates. Sprinkle with the chicken livers (including the juice) and bacon, and serve with extra Parmesan cheese.

Excerpted from Chez Jacques
Copyright © 2007 by Jacques Pepin. All rights reserved.