Our first home-cooked meal since last Wednesday!

But it wasn’t really about cooking, only assembling, using the simple ingredients indicated in this recipe suggested on the pasta maker’s own site. I chose it because I happened to already have everything it asked for, even though we had been away 4 days.

Also, with this meal I can confirm that tomatoes actually can be stored in the refrigerator, although only under certain circumstances, and with certain important provisos: A few days before we were to leave on a long weekend trip, one of the farmers I regularly visit in town slipped  4 beautiful New Jersey tomatoes into my canvas market bag without my knowing it. I tried really hard to include them in meals before we left, but without any success, so the night before we left I looked on line to see what I might do to give them a chance of surviving until we came back. I quickly pulled up on the screen, the advice, ‘How to Keep Tomatoes Fresh for Longer”, on the Food52 site. I followed it, and, after waiting a day for the fruit to recover from the refrigerator, as it warned, I found it worked like a charm.

Actually, it turns out that the question of how or where to store tomatoes may be still more complicated, as suggested by this Serious Eats article.

Still, the refrigerator worked for me this time, and in fact on the next day as well, when I cooked with the remaining 2 tomates.

• one 10-ounce package of Rana ‘Cheese Lovers Ravioli (stuffed with ricotta, mascarpone, parmigiano reggiano, mozzarella, and pecorino romano) with a sauce composed of a little more than one seeded and de-veined jalapeño pepper from Oak Grove Plantation, roughly-sliced, and a sliced section of a red spring onion from Berried Treasures Farm, sautéed for a few minutes in a tablespoon of olive oil inside an large antique copper pot over medium heat, a cup of chopped tomatoes from Alex’s Tomato Farm in the Chelsea 23rd Street sidewalk market that had first been tossed with a bit of turbinado sugar (because I suspected they might need a little sweetening) tossed in, then the cooked pasta added and the contents of the pot stirred for a minute or two over medium heat to reduce the liquid before being arranged in shallow bowls, sprinkled with dill flowers from Todd and Crystal’s kitchen herb garden at their Wild Arc farm in Pine Bush, New York, and drizzled with olive oil
• the wine was an Italian (Umbria) white, Barberani Orvieto Classico ‘Castagnolo’ 2016, from Flatiron Wines
• the music was Lawrence Dillon’s 2010 album, ‘Insects and Paper Airplanes’