Pasta with Slow-Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic, and Parmesan

Cody graduated from TCC’s restaurant-arts certificate program Saturday afternoon. The ceremony was at the Tulsa Community College main-campus auditorium at four PM, the room about three-quarters full, the program lasting an hour and twenty minutes including the keynote from a local restaurateur who’d come up through TCC fifteen years earlier. Mama, Aunt Linda, Roy, and I all sat in the third row of the center section because we’d gotten there forty-five minutes early at Cody’s insistence and he’d insisted because he’d been imagining this exact ceremony from the inside of the unit eight months earlier and had specific seat-row preferences he’d been holding onto.

Cody walked across the stage in a black graduation gown with a small gold cord draped around his neck for academic honors. He’d finished with a 3.94 GPA across the certificate program — the single B-plus he received was in food-cost theory, a class he later told me he’d found insulting because he didn’t need a class to teach him how to budget against revenue, having effectively run a household budget against his unit-stipend for fourteen months. The 3.94 was the highest in his graduating class of forty-three. The instructor who’d written “Better than the Nashville bird” on his rubric in March handed him the certificate at the front of the stage and shook his hand for ten full seconds while leaning in to say something into his ear that Cody later told me was “Don’t cook for restaurants. Open the cafe. I’ll be the first customer.”

Mama cried. I cried. Aunt Linda cried. Roy didn’t cry but kept his hand on Linda’s shoulder the whole time, which is its own form of crying for him. Cody held it together while crossing the stage and only broke when he came down the side stairs and saw Mama crying in the third row, at which point he cried into the lapel of his black gown for about ten seconds before getting back to himself and walking toward us. Mama hugged him with both arms for a long time at the bottom of the stairs and didn’t say anything. She still has the program from the ceremony in the same drawer where she keeps my anthology paperback.

Sunday I made pasta with slow-roasted tomatoes, garlic, and parmesan because Cody had said all week that he wanted something simple after the ceremony and I had two pints of cherry tomatoes I’d picked up at the Sapulpa farmers market Saturday morning before driving to Tulsa. The simple-after-the-ceremony was important — nothing fussy, nothing expensive, nothing requiring more than two pots and a sheet pan. Cody had had two weeks of culinary final exams; he didn’t want to eat a meal that needed reviewing.

Slow-roasted tomatoes are the best technique nobody teaches you for transforming average grocery-store cherry tomatoes into something almost like sun-dried tomatoes but with the juice still in them. The technique is dead simple and takes two hours of unattended oven time, which means you can do it on a Sunday morning while you do everything else. Halve a quart of cherry tomatoes — or grape tomatoes, or any small tomato, even quartered Roma tomatoes if that’s what you have — lay them cut-side-up on a parchment-lined sheet pan in a single layer, scatter four cloves of smashed garlic in their papery skins on top, drizzle with two tablespoons of good olive oil, sprinkle generously with salt, fresh black pepper, dried oregano, and a pinch of red-pepper flakes. The whole tray goes into a two-twenty-five-degree oven (low, low, low — the entire technique is the low temperature) for two hours. Don’t touch them. Don’t flip them. Don’t check them until the timer.

The tomatoes come out collapsed slightly, the skins shriveled and beginning to crack, the cut sides darkened and concentrated, the juice partially evaporated and partially caramelized into the oil at the bottom of the pan. The garlic cloves are now soft and sweet, the papery skins easy to slip off. Squeeze the soft garlic out of the skins into the tomato-oil pool. The whole tray smells like summer.

While the tomatoes are roasting, cook a pound of pasta — spaghetti, linguine, bucatini, or rigatoni all work; we used rigatoni Sunday because the tube traps the tomato juice in a way the long pastas don’t — al dente in heavily salted water. Drain, reserving a cup of the pasta water. Slide the pasta directly into the tomato sheet pan, scrape every bit of the oil and the caramelized juice from the pan onto the pasta, toss with the back of a wooden spoon, splash in a couple tablespoons of the pasta water if it needs loosening, finish with a generous handful of grated parmesan and a fistful of torn fresh basil.

That’s the dish. Cody ate two bowls and told me it was the right Sunday meal. He didn’t say more. The compliment was in the brevity.

Two-twenty-five for two hours. Don’t touch them. Here’s the slow-roast and the toss.

Pasta with Slow-Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic & Parmesan

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 50 min | Total Time: 1 hr | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 lbs cherry or Roma tomatoes, halved
• 6 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled
• 1/4 cup olive oil, plus more for drizzling
• 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp kosher salt, divided
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 12 oz spaghetti or linguine
• 1/2 cup pasta cooking water, reserved
• 3/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan, plus more for serving
• 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, torn

Instructions

1. Roast the tomatoes. Preheat oven to 300°F. Arrange tomato halves cut-side up on a rimmed baking sheet. Nestle garlic cloves among the tomatoes. Drizzle with 1/4 cup olive oil, sprinkle with red pepper flakes, 3/4 tsp salt, and black pepper. Roast for 45–50 minutes until tomatoes are shriveled, jammy, and beginning to caramelize at the edges.
2. Cook the pasta. About 15 minutes before tomatoes finish, bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Cook pasta according to package directions until al dente. Before draining, ladle out 1/2 cup pasta water and set aside. Drain pasta.
3. Build the sauce. Transfer the roasted tomatoes and garlic (with all their oil and juices) to the empty pasta pot over medium-low heat. Use the back of a spoon to gently crush the garlic and some of the tomatoes into a rough sauce. Pour in 1/4 cup of the reserved pasta water and stir to combine.
4. Combine and finish. Add the drained pasta directly to the pot and toss to coat. Add Parmesan a handful at a time, tossing after each addition and adding more pasta water as needed to keep the sauce silky and loose. Taste and adjust salt.
5. Serve. Divide among bowls, top with torn basil, an extra drizzle of olive oil, and a generous shower of Parmesan. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 520 | Protein: 17g | Fat: 18g | Carbs: 73g | Fiber: 5g | Sodium: 620mg