Pasta With Homemade Ricotta & Oven Roasted Tomatoes

Two of my favorite Italian ingredients are oven roasted tomatoes and creamy homemade ricotta cheese, and I decided recently to combine them both in a pasta dish as I was craving a big bowl of comfort food. There are two ways to enjoy this pasta dish depending on what you prefer. I leave my ingredients separated, and enjoy the different flavors on each forkful as I eat my pasta, while my husband mixes the ricotta into the pasta with the other ingredients before he eats, creating a creamy, more blended pasta sauce.
Roasting brings out the natural sweetness of tomatoes through caramelization which once roasted, are wonderful used in many recipes. Although the cooking time is a long one since you roast them at a low temperature, it takes only minutes to prepare the tomatoes for the oven, so while they are roasting you can be busy doing other things. Homemade ricotta cheese can in fact be made in mere minutes, and is so much better than many of the commercial brands you buy in the grocery stores. The steps in this recipe may look long, but you can roast the tomatoes and make your ricotta cheese on one day, then cook and assemble your pasta dish the next.
To simplify this recipe, you can buy your ricotta cheese and pesto sauce if you are short on time, but do choose the best quality whole milk ricotta cheese and pesto you can find. I simply coarsely chopped my tomatoes after I roast them, but if you prefer, you could puree them into a smoother sauce. This “sauce” is great served on long pasta like the strangozzi pasta (similar to spaghetti) from Umbria shown in the photos, or on short pasta such as rigatoni or penne. You will have leftover ricotta cheese and pesto sauce if you follow the recipe below, but both can be used again for another recipe. Do bring all the ingredients to room temperature before preparing the pasta.