Recipe: Yellow Summer Squash and Tomato Pasta

They call me mellow yellow...

After weeks of eating zucchini, I decided I needed to move on to squash for my experimental cooking.  While wandering through Whole Foods one afternoon, I stumbled across yellow cherry tomatoes, and voila!  My yellow pasta recipe was born! (with the help of a vegetarian cookbook - my recipe is loosely modeled after another recipe I've made before from said cookbook)

 

Ingredients:

- 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved - yellow or red will do

- 1 cup dry pasta

- 2 small yellow squashes (or the equivalent) chopped into small, bite sized pieces

- 1 tablespoon olive oil

- garlic salt to taste

- finely minced garlic - I like a lot of garlic, but use what you like

- Parmesan cheese (optional)

Serves 2 - 4

Method:

1. Place oil, squash, and garlic in a large skillet  and heat on high.  Add a touch of water to the skillet to help steam the squash. Stir frequently.  Add salt as needed.
2. While squash is steaming/cooking, prepare noodles following directions on the package.  Drain and set aside.
3. When squash is tender/crisp, add cooked noodles and cherry tomatoes to the squash mix.  Stir frequently.  Cook until cherry tomatoes just begin to soften.
4. (optional) Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and serve.

I really liked this recipe.  Squash has a really mellow flavor on its own, so it absorbed a lot of the garlic flavor. The mix of garlicy squash with the acidic tomatoes (although less acidic than normal because I used yellow tomatoes) created a great flavor.

Have you tried cooking with yellow tomatoes?  I like them more for their exotic look than their flavor.