Summer Spaghetti
Mom modeling a vintage Brooks Brothers raccoon coat purchased at an auction in upstate New York. Conesus Lake, NY 1979.
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on in Texas, I feel like the photo above perfectly sums up our situation! Last week it was 5 degrees and yesterday it was 80 degrees. Weather whiplash! So, what to cook? I’m going to offer up a recipe with the somewhat misleading name of “Summer Spaghetti”. It’s called this because the only thing you need to cook is the pasta (so as not to heat up your kitchen), but I believe it is delicious - and simple - ANY time of the year!
This recipe was a standby for dinners at the lake when I was a kid. My family spent a lot of time on lakes. The one in the photo above is Conesus Lake in upstate New York. My Reed grandmother was from Rochester and her extended family had places scattered around the Finger Lakes. This photo is from a family reunion we had in 1979. My parents both grew up in East Tennessee with the Tennessee Valley Authority lakes as a backdrop to their adventures. On one of their first dates they went water skiing. So, it was natural for my family to get a place on Lake Hyco in North Carolina when we had the money. Now, let me explain, this was no Kennedy Compound. The land was beautiful, a wooded point jutting into the lake with a little sandy beach area, but the house was not. In an effort to have something fast, affordable, and easy, my parents trucked in a mobile home, plunked it down, and painted it dark brown so you *might not* notice it was a mobile home or, better yet, you might not notice it at all. As long as the plumbing worked, it didn’t really matter because we spent all of our time on the huge screen porch they built or in the water. Mom was eternally in the kitchen because, as this blog suggests, Dale knew how to host!
We had some good times on Lake Hyco. We bought a cute yellow boat but decided to forego a boat cover for some reason, so all of the seats rotted out. No seats? No problem! Dad bought folding lawn chairs and placed them in the boat. This sort of worked except for when the boat was accelerating to, say, pull up a water skier, at which point the chairs would tip back and we would fall over, hoping that the driver didn’t follow suit. And, who might that driver be? Well, quite possibly it was a 10 year old ME! No one else liked to drive except for my Dad, so if he water skied, odds were I was driving him. It’s horrifying to think of now. I had no training and he was basically blind because he couldn’t ski with his glasses on, but we made it out alive. He *did* ski into an island once, but once is enough to learn that lesson! When he was driving, Dad used to pull us around on a good old fashioned inner tube tied to the boat with a rope. He liked to do donuts until one of us fell off. (I remember once doing something like 6 flips underwater IN A LIFE JACKET - which is hard to do!)
Anyway, we would come back to the house STARVING after a day of death defying water activities and Mom would always have something delicious for us. Summer spaghetti was a fave.
SUMMER SPAGHETTI
4 to 6 tomatoes -- peeled and chopped
Sarah’s note: I’m lazy and rarely peel
1 pound cheese (mozzarella, swiss, gruyere) diced
Sarah’s note: I always just use mozzarella)
1/2 cup fresh basil -- chopped
3 or 4 cloves garlic -- minced
olives, black olives, mushrooms, peppers (optional)
Sarah’s note: I typically just do black olives
1 1/2 cups olive oil
Sarah’s note: I always thought this was too much, maybe use a little less for the marinating part and add more later if needed?
1 pound spaghetti
Mix all ingredients except spaghetti and let stand 30 min to 1 hour.
Cook spaghetti and add to mixture when hot (it melts the cheese)
Top with capers and parmesan if desired
Serve immediately!
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