Simple Pasta (tomatoes and breadcrumbs)

So we've been doing a lot of pasta with toasted breadcrumbs, which I'll do a post on sometime in the near future, but first I wanted to share a variation on that + pasta al pomodoro we made recently.  We've been getting the first good tomatoes of the year in from Sicily in the last few weeks, so I wanted to highlight their flavors while contrasting the textures between the tomatoes and the toasted breadcrumbs.

I started out by mixing the diced tomatoes with chopped chives, marjoram, oregano and thyme, then setting them to macerate in olive oil and a small amount of red wine vinegar while the pasta cooked.  We usually do breadcrumb pasta spun towards a fairly international place, but for this I went very Italian:  minced pancetta and garlic with salt and pepper which was lightly browned in olive oil before the crumbs were added and toasted.   When the fettuccine (an egg based version using a mix of 00 and semiola flour) was finished cooking it all got tossed together and served (without parmigian, which the breadcrumbs made unnecessary).

Ribollita

Ribollita is arguably the soup of the Tuscan winter.  It's the winter version of the Tuscan Ur-Soup: stale bread with stuff.  In this case, sofrito, kale, tomatoes and beans (at a minimum).  Feels a bit weird talking about it now, after a week of sunny weather in the new month of April, but we actually made this and took all the pictures when it was dark and cold, started a post then failed to finish it for, well, a while.

Red Onions are the heart of the Sofrito