Spicy Tomato Pasta

This was, in fact, a mild success! I had planned on making mac n' cheese aka: pasta with half-melted cheese and ketchup which would have been pretty terrible...but then I got a craving for tomatoes, and ran across the street to my local produce supplier before it closed.

*Note: there are two 24/7 groceries near my house, but they're both small and really only have non-perishables, dairy, and questionable meat counters- no produce. During the day there are several street vendors and a store that has produce out front, pretty good quality usually (depending on the item), but with my lack of Georgian language skills, it's usually just a pointing and smiling game, since the sellers are usually not educated enough to speak either Russian or English...so I'm probably getting grossly overcharged, but it's still comparatively cheap, so I guess I'm fine with it. 

Anyway: this dish was not bad, and I'm encouraged to try it again with a few tweaks. Here's what I did...

Sad, wilted, most-likely-cilantro

Ingredients:

• Handful of spaghetti noodles
• One big tomato
• Handful of cilantro (probably...)
• Chorizo (I bought the kind with a Viking on the package)
• Smoked sulguni cheese

Instructions:

• Cook pasta
• Cut up tomato into chunks, it's not really precise, just getting them bite-sized and small enough to cook down a bit
• Wash and cut cilantro
• Pull cheese into meltable strings/chunks
• Cut chorizo into small pieces- size of a 10-tetri coin
• Once pasta is drained, leave a tiny bit of water in the pot and add tomatoes, let them stew for about 10 minutes, watching and stirring occasionally so they don't burn
• Next add the cheese and chorizo, watching until the cheese melts and the grease from the sausage has spread around the pot, coating the noodles
• Finally, add the cilantro, stir it up well, and serve!

Tips and Improvements

• Get fresh cilantro, and if you're slow like me, prepare it first so you don't get anxious at the end and just give up on adding more than a few leaves
• Add LOTS of tomatoes, cilantro, and cheese- less noodles
• Use angel hair pasta. My spaghetti was really thick and overwhelmed my mouth a bit, it would be better with a lighter noodle to focus more on the tomatoes 
• If you want to get fancy, you can remove the cooked noodles, and put the chorizo into the pot first, letting it brown and get a little more crispy, but don't drain the grease- this + tomato juice is the key to making it like a sauce, not just a bunch of separate ingredients kind of touching each other

Приятного Апетита/Priatnovo Apetita!