Tomato Time! Easiest Tomato Sauce Ever!

Hopefully some of you still have an abundance of cherry tomatoes in your garden. Unfortunately, I do not, although our tomato plants, after anemically growing all summer, seem to have gone crazy the last couple of weeks. I am hopeful that in the next week or two, we'll be up to our ears in tomatoes, which will go to tomato sandwiches, BLTs and sauce. However, for now, I still have to buy them. It's kind of sad, but this recipe for Burst Cherry Tomato Sauce is really good and very easy, so I am happy to buy a few pints of tomatoes just for this!

Epicurious, where I found the recipe, claims it's a 15-minute sauce, but it took my tomatoes longer to cook, and even then, not all of them burst. If you decide to take matters into your own hands (like me) and pop the "unburst" tomatoes with a paring knife, beware of squirting juices. Consider yourself warned! Even so, with the garlic and tomato prep, you can get this started after you put a pot of water on to boil for the pasta and still have dinner on the table in less than 30 minutes, so this is a great weeknight meal to have in your arsenal.

Along with the pasta and olive oil, this is pretty much all you need for this recipe! We still have basil, so that's the one thing from our garden...

There were some suggestions in the comments, and I liked the idea of putting the garlic in the oil at the same time you put the tomatoes in, otherwise the garlic might get too brown (or even burnt). Doing it this way, the garlic still flavors the oil, but the risk of burning is less. From this picture, you can see the pasta simmering away in the background. 

I chopped up the basil while the sauce was cooking and tossed it in right at the end, just to incorporate everything before I put it on top of the noodles. And, following up on my theme last week of satisfying different palates, you could serve up some of the pasta plain (or with butter and cheese as my youngest loved when he was a todder, serving raw cherry tomatoes on the side if your child has an aversion to cooked veggies), or top the pasta just with the tomatoes, and then add the basil to the rest of the sauce for everyone else. See how easy that is? And you don't even have to dirty extra pans!

Finished product! If you are gluten free or doing Whole 30, I'm sure this would be delicious with zucchini noodles as well!