| charred tomato; olive oil; onion; feta cheese; oregano; garlic; pasta |

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My girlfriend's favorite pasta dish is what she calls "red pasta". It is basically tomato and pasta. This sounds to me like an excellent black canvas to work with. Simplicity is always the best, especially with pasta. So I challenged myself: how can I make this dish better?

For one, it is so easy to add depth of flavor with the controlled charring of anything. As the key ingredient for this dish is tomato, I went the route of charring the tomato.

The optimal choice of herbs would have been basil, but all I had on hand was some dried oregano. A pinch goes a long way.

And lastly, the feta cheese brought a nice saltiness to the dish and made it a bit creamier along with the olive oil.

So please join me as I show you how I made this dish. You can easily make this for yourself in less than 15 minutes. Everything happens while the pasta water boils.

Ingredients, or Recipe

Simplicity is key, the fewer ingredients the better. For this recipe, I used the following ingredients to make two standard portions of pasta:

• three small tomatoes,
• one small onion,
• a pinch of oregano
• three small cloves of garlic,
• 100 grams of pasta, and
• 100 grams of feta cheese.

I also added olive oil throughout the cooking process. Depending on how you feel about olive oil, add as much as possible. This adds immense flavor and pairs so well with the tomato.

Cooking Process/Method

This dish can be made all the while the pasta water comes to temperature. I started with cold water in the pot I used to cook the pasta in. While this comes to temperature, I cut the tomato into thick slices.

The goal here is to create as much surface area as possible. The more surface area, the more opportunity you get to char the tomato.

In a separate pan, heat up some oil. When the oil is hot, add the pieces of tomato so that every piece is flat.

You want a controlled char, not burning. Use your nose to tell you when to turn them. Burning will impart bitter flavors. When you get the charring just right, it will impart an incredible depth of flavor.

At this stage, I also added the onions. I could have chopped them a bit smaller so that they melt into the sauce.

My timing was spot on, so when the onions were done, and the pan started to get a little dry, my pasta was halfway through the cooking. So I added some pasta water to the sauce to add much-needed moisture.

Just be careful. The pasta water is salty, so you do not need to add salt to the tomato and onion mixture. You can always add more salt, you cannot take it out!

Whilst the pasta boiled for the last couple of minutes and the sauce thickened up, I mixed the garlic and oregano with the feta cheese.

If the pasta is cooked to your liking, and the sauce has thickened nicely, add everything together with some more olive oil.

Mix this well. The smaller feta pieces will thicken the sauce and make it creamy. The raw garlic we put in will cook slightly in the residual heat of the sauce and the pasta. Adding it at this stage really helps with the garlic flavor. If you cook it too long, the flavor will be too subtle.

And there you have it, as easy as that. I have to be honest, it is not at all that red. But the flavor is incredible. It is the second or third time that I made this for @urban.scout and she asks for it at least once a week! It is really simple and can also act as the perfect blank canvas to add different ingredients. Bacon, for meat lovers, would be the obvious choice. But something subtle, like fennel, would also work perfectly. Or maybe a touch of coconut cream. There are really a lot of different ways one can take this recipe.

Cooking is meant to be shared. It is ingrained in our way of being. So cook for your loved one!

I hope that you will make this recipe for yourself and your loved ones. Please do enjoy it!

Happy cooking, and stay well.

The photographs used in this post are my own, taken with my iPhone. The recipe is also my own creation albeit inspired by the many other recipe videos I watched throughout my life. The writings are also my own.