Too Saucy

I recently had a conversation about tomato sauce with my four-year-old. You see, she refuses to eat anything but butter and salt on her pasta, and I am having a hard time just letting it go. I give her pasta with sauce. "I don't like it," she says, her jaw set, head tilted slightly to the side, with the steely glint of certainty in her eyes that belongs only to four-year-olds talking about food they don't like. "But why?" I ask. She thinks for a moment. "Too saucy," she replies.

Unfortunately I am no molecular gastronomist and I don't have equipment like liquid nitrogen tanks and candy flossing machines at my disposal, so I can't do anything about sauce being saucy. (But maybe this is a future career for the four-year-old? Perhaps she will follow in the footsteps of Ferran Adrià, and make sauce that is in no way saucy at all, but instead is foamy, crunchy, or stringy, or gelled in the shape of a cube, or perhaps take it a step further, and make sauce that is merely an essence to be inhaled in a puff of air.)

At any rate, today I present you with a sauce that the four-year-old did eat on her pasta, despite its innate sauciness. After much struggle and cajoling, and some respectably convincing faux-gagging, we somehow overcame the initial hurdle of the first bite. After that, the rest was easy. In the words of her six-year-old sister, it is "double hundred million good."

This is a sauce I made with roasted cherry tomatoes and onions. The onions are mellow and much more subtle than garlic, and balance the bright acidity of the tomatoes. If you've ever tried Marcella Hazan's famously simple tomato sauce, the one that calls for a can of tomatoes, a halved onion, and a stick of butter, you know what onions can do for tomatoes. (Make them taste really good, that's what. I'm sure the stick of butter helps too.) After roasting, everything is emulsified a bit in the blender, so the sauce has a creamy texture despite the fact that it has no cream. Which is cool, because you get the benefits of creaminess without the unwanted dilution of the tomatoey-oniony flavor.

And, um, I know this is weird, but this sauce goes really well with sliced cucumbers. It's no molecular gastronomy, but maybe you should try making a cucumber sandwich with this sauce spread on the bread. Don't say you don't like it until you try it. Of course,  it's also very, very good on pasta with a little Parmesan cheese. Angel hair or spaghetti would work best.

Roasted Onion and Cherry Tomato Sauce
2 pints cherry tomatoes, washed and dried
1½ large yellow onions, chopped into inch-wide chunks (go against the grain of the onion)
A few glugs of olive oil
Salt
Dash of sherry vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 425°. Place the cherry tomatoes and onions on a large, rimmed sheet pan. Pour a few glugs of olive oil over them, then mix with your hands to ensure all tomatoes and pieces of onion are coated with oil. Spread the onions and tomatoes evenly over the sheet pan, and sprinkle all with salt. Place the pan on the middle rack in the oven and roast for approximately 20-23 minutes, until cherry tomatoes are done. The skins should be wrinkled and split, but not charred. Remove all of the tomatoes from the pan and set them aside. Return the pan with the onions back into the oven and continue to roast until the onions are fully cooked and soft, approximately 5-7 minutes.

Scrape the onions and any juices from the pan into your blender container, and add the tomatoes. Puree until the mixture is fairly smooth and emulsified, but still has some lumps. Pour the sauce into a bowl, add just a faint dash of sherry vinegar, freshly ground black pepper to taste, and more salt if needed. Serve with pasta (or cucumbers, if you trust me).