Pasta with Feta Cheese and Cherry Tomatoes

This is from...well, what? It's called Pasta, the publisher is Hermes House, which is an imprint of Anness Publishing in London, and Jeni Wright is listed as the Contributing Editor. It's a wonderful collection of pasta recipes. But good luck finding it.

The Anness Publishing website says that Hermes is the imprint "...for non-trade sales, promotional sales and customised publishing for major customers" and assures us that "...products can seldom be supplied from stock..." This is the publisher promising you can't get it, let alone Amazon or Alibris.

Your best bet appears to be to time-travel to 2006 or so, when it was on the shelf at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley, and buy the copy before I did, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum. Or at least erasing this blog post.

Spaghetti (all quantities negotiable, see below)
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
8-12 cherry tomatoes, halved
pinch nutmeg, optional
3-6 oz. feta cheese
1-2 tbsp. chopped fresh basil
4-8 pitted and halved Kalamata olives

For this recipe, everything is up for grabs. Cherry tomatoes vary in size and juiciness, and you rarely can just go buy 8, as the original recipe suggests. The original recipe calls for 3 oz. of pasta, but I've found this much sauce will easily serve for twice that much. And feta cheese also comes in non-negotiable discrete hunks. I suggest you see which of these limitations affects you, and just try to adjust everything else.

Heat the olive oil, and then cook but do not brown the garlic (a minute or so). Add the halved cherry tomatoes and cook on fairly high heat for a minute or so. You want the cherry tomatoes to wilt and give up some of their juice. At this point you can mix with cooked and drained spaghetti, stirring in the feta, basil, and optional nutmeg (I'm not a fan) afterwards, or you can add the cheese and basil and cook another minute. If it doesn't look saucy enough, add a few tablespoons of the reserved pasta cooking water (you did reserve some pasta cooking water, didn't you? Don't you always reserve some of the pasta cooking water?), and serve with the pasta. Olives scattered on top of each serving, maybe with a little more chopped basil and grated Parmesan or Asiago if you're a real cheese nut.

If you cook this too long with the feta cheese, it will disintegrate and you'll have sort of a cheese sauce dish. It's not bad, but I like it better with the discrete chunks of feta.