What to Cook: Easy Summer Pasta

I was so at a loss for meal planning the other day that I dug up an oldie but goodie article from a bygone Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine. For awhile they had this great section called "One Grocery Bag, Three Great Meals". As far as I know, the one I love is the first one they ever did. I saw a few more installments but none ever looked as appetizing as this first one. (I gave you the link up there, and the first photo they show is the one I'm referring to, but for some reason, they don't have the recipes together with the shopping list?)

The premise is that they give you a shopping list of only 10 items and you are supposed to be able to get three delicious home-cooked meals out of it. As usual with these sorts of things, they assume you have some pantry items, such as salt and pepper, milk, butter, garlic, onions, etc... It was so easy for me to pop that list into my Instacart app and have it at my door in two hours! Woohoo for technology! (Sorry if you don't live in one of their zones...hopefully they get to you soon. It's one of my favorite things right now, but I'll post on it more extensively another day.)

Anyway, on to the recipe: Shells with Fresh Tomato-Tarragon Sauce! 

Some photos of my process: It really, truly only took about fifteen to twenty minutes from start to finish!!

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Never grated fresh tomatoes on a box grater before...so bizarre!

But here's what the finished product looks like: fresh tomato slurry!

Original recipe says to chop up onions and garlic fine and mix it in. Last time I made this it was just too intense a flavor to have all those raw aromatics in there. So this time: sauté!

A little goat cheese and fresh tarragon and voila!!
As you can see, I swapped shells for penne, as that is what I had on hand. 

There you go! It was such an easy and delicious way to use some fresh tomatoes on a warm summer evening! Tarragon is an herb we rarely use around here, which is a bit of shame because it is delicious. If I weren't pregnant, this dish would have been fabulous with a nice dry rosé...I really needed it after the afternoon I had, too. *sigh*

Once again, the link: Shells with Fresh Tomato-Tarragon Sauce. If you try it out, let me know what you think!