in praise of simple food
a recipe for spaghetti with a cherry tomato sauce
Welcome to mama eats, a twice-weekly newsletter (Tues. & Sat.) inspired by a simple + seasonal home life. This week’s post on spaghetti with cherry tomato sauce is free to all readers, barring the video of me making this recipe, which is viewable to paid subscribers. I try to provide as much free content as possible, however, this newsletter is a labor of love and I am a busy mother of three. If you have the means and find value in what I share, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which also gives you the benefit of access to the growing archive (posts over a month old).
Lately I’ve been thinking alot about food and simplicity. I am often overwhelmed by the food I see on Instagram or Pinterest or magazines or something like that, the food is always made to be MORE. Lots of ingredients (and fancy/trendy/imported ones added just for the sake of it, burrata coming to mind here), the photo edited and filtered within an inch of its life to look more colorful, more glossy, more more more. This is one of the reasons why I do not own many cookbooks. I love cookbooks- they are beautiful to look at and get inspiration from, but it’s usually not what I’m going to cook on a Tuesday night to serve to my family, you know? I am here for the simple meals, the ones that aren’t usually written down because they’re just something one throws together or makes from memory. Tell me about these meals. Tell me about the pancakes your dad made on Sautrday mornings, how your grandma swirled sugar and cream and blackberries still warm from the garden sun in a bowl for your after school snack. Tell me about the things your mother made for you with tender love when you were a child, sick on the couch with a cool rag on your head.
Food can be both quite simple and extremely tasty. We do not have to go to 3 specialty stores and overspend. We can be content, well nourished, and satisfied with going back to basics, simple meals done well and so good that we are happy to make and eat them over and over again. Thus saving mental and physical energy, time, money, and really savoring and deeply enjoying the ingredients. When I was growing up, my mother had a rotation of a small collection of dishes per season, based on what we had available. As a child especially, this brought so much comfort to me, and still to this day many of the dishes we ate are very fond food memories of mine.
My sweet 100 cherry tomato plants have been so gracious with their yields of very small glowing cherry tomatoes, sugar sweet yet balanced with acid. They are excellent fresh eating, but also superb cooked down into a sauce. You don’t have to faff about with skinning them as you do with the larger tomatoes, which makes it all the easier, and they simmer away, not needing anything much, until you peek in the pan and there is a jammy, incredibly rich and delicious sauce. For all these reasons, it has been a simple yet luxurious tasting meal we have enjoyed in the late summer for years. I hope my children will remember it and others in our repertoire fondly someday, and perhaps make it for their own families in time.
M.F.K. Fisher writes it beautifully,
“...but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.”