10/20 pasta with butternut squash and tomatoes

Mark Bittman ("The Minimalist") wrote a great piece last week about the ratio of pasta-to-sauce. I have to say I've always been a bit of a fan of the 1/3 pasta - to - 2/3 sauce ratio (when cooking with dried pasta - not fresh), so this was merely a nice reinforcement of an informal practice I was already observing to some degree. I decided to try out one of the featured recipes with this article, because - guess what - I had more squash from the CSA.

I modified Bittman's recipe a bit, making it a little more complex. For one thing, I blanched, peeled, and seeded the tomatoes, reserving the juice and throwing it back in with the sauce. For another thing, I cooked the sauce longer than Bittman seems to recommend here (probably close to 45 minutes). This ensured that the tomatoes had broken down and bit more and that the sauce had time to thicken. The squash, while tender, didn't break down with the increased cooking time. I also added several good glugs of olive oil at the end to give the sauce a bit more flavor and a nice sheen.

Experiment = successful! I'll be adding this to the rotation.