Well spring has sprung and I, for one, am excited about the summer cooking season. Mrs. Stephenson and I are moving to a new part of the city – Corso Italia, or Old Little Italy in our fair city of Toronto. One of the main reasons we love the neighborhood is the food. The restaurants are unassuming, friendly and quite amazing. Not fancy, just good. The bakeries and the grocers are also very down to earth and you’ve never seen better Italian groceries that you see there..places like Dianna’s and Tre Marie bakery were reasons to make the trip up there and now just around the corner to what will be our new place.

Also, on the new place list, is our excitement about having a shop space and nice big back yard. This means a few things: salami curing chamber, cold smoker, and all round fabrication shenanigans.

In honor of our new, Little Italy destination, I’m posting a nice dish that we made – Pici with a roasted tomato sauce. I was insporied by one of the best meals of our Italian trip a couple years back. In Cortona I ordered the same thing in a tiny hole in the wall place and it was the best meal I had the entire trip – simple, extraordinarily flavourful, and clean. You could not ask for more.

I started the meal with an arugala sald with cornmeal cursted king oyster mushrooms. Again very simple – cut mushrooms tossed in olive oil and cornmeal with a touch of salt, roasted in the oven.

Making the sauce for the Pici is super simple:

• cut and toss some tomatoes and garlic (a few cloves – how much do you like it?)  in olive oil  and a touch of salt

• roast the oven for 45-1h at 400-450, until the skins start to brown

• blend (I use a hand blender…super simple, you could also use a food mill if you’re looking for rustic texture)

• reduce on the stove on low for an hour or so

• season – salt, pepper, herbs (I did mine with a hand full of fresh basil…awesome!)

Thats it. Really good, really simple. Perfect for spring, though It’ll be even better when we get the field tomatoes going!