Pasta + Creativity

I am slowly building self esteem through carbohydrates. Here's a riddle: would you rather lose ten pounds or feel good about your current weight? I think the answer is the latter which is why shapewear exists and I once skipped a kickboxing class to go purchase some. Sadly, I am too weak for the flesh and organ-shifting necessary to make me look slightly thinner, that shit is hot and uncomfortable and I returned my future-corset after deciding I'm pretty much done with bras (would you rather pay money for bras that make your tits look great or feel good for zero dollars? Uh, duh)(everyone in this air conditioned library can probably see my nipples).

So perhaps the expense and time and sweat and potential chubbiness of making pasta is worth it for the pride. Because now I'm not just playing around with different dough textures, finding the right one for me as if I were dating looking for the one except less sad and more possible. Oh no. Now, I'm fucking with sauces.

On the night I decided to fuck with sauces, I made a gorgeous batch of fettucine.

I mean, come on.

Martha Stewart's pasta recipe is so easy it might be insider trading?

Having decided earlier that I would fuck with sauces, I walked down the hill to get a bottle of white wine for the base. While doing that and returning a library book, I high fived a man carrying a pizza in the middle of a dangerous crosswalk. Side note: if you know this man, please propose marriage to him on my behalf. Back up the hill, I treated myself to a La Croix to quench my hill-thirst and got to work chopping.

For vegetables/aromatics, I went with carrot, shallots, garlic and... lemongrass! Oh yeah, I was getting creative. I love bright, herby lemongrass in Thai food, so why not here? I sauteed those up, then added saffron threads, white wine and some old Parmesan rinds I had for richness. When the alcohol had cooked off, + butter and lemon. Finally, I had defrosted some langoustine tails from Trader Joe's, so I warmed those up (they're precooked) in the sauce right before I cooked my pasta.

My aromatics! 

As any creative person knows, self-editing is difficult, but crucial. While my pasta sauce was awesome, I think it would be way more awesome if, after cooking, I blended everything except the langoustines together to make it saucier instead of the warm salad I had going on. Maybe a touch of cream to help it stick together? But I will definitely be saucing without a recipe again soon, as it was surprisingly easy and way too much fun. Just like not wearing a bra!

Pasta + Lipstick

I am thirty! Behold my radiating wisdom, my sudden certainty, my unambiguous confidence that will never again tremble like a sad leaf upon seeing an offensively hot fitness instructor! All of my problems have been solved now that I am no longer a twenty-something, but rather a thirty-person.

To celebrate the last night of my twenties, I enjoyed an evening of wine, pasta and forced lipstick application with a tremendous group of women. If you've never turned thirty, tried Maybelline's Vivid Liquid Matte lip colors or dined at Alimento, I highly recommend doing all three. Also, look how cuuuuute:

Alimento's pasta is on another level. It is, it's perfectly al dente, it's draped in layered, creative, delicious sauces. Their tortellini en brodo al contrario is the famous menu item, and it's basically a tortellini soup dumpling. My favorites were the gnoc and the radiatori, two meat-sauce pastas that were both luscious in their own distinct ways.

I will never, ever make pasta this good. But I will make more of it! I received two different ravioli makers for my birthday (and have since used them both). I felt very known. But as I step into my thirties, there's a natural instinct to assess my life and compare it to others, or even to certain benchmarks. I'm single, unemployed and will never, ever make pasta like Zach Pollack (age 32) (and married) (to a light-eyed Jewess named Ali who, in a cruel twist of fate, IS NOT ME).

wishing to have a Freaky Friday with that other Ali

I compare myself to other people all the time, so the whole turning 30 thing just gave me another excuse. But in an effort to slightly remedy this, I'm going to leave other people out of the equation and just compare myself to past me. Here are some ways I am much, much better than past me:

-I am way more confident wearing lipstick.

-I can make more things without using a recipe.

-When I go over to someone's house and they have a cat, I don't make a thing about it anymore, since I almost always carry allergy medicine.

-I still bite my nails, but less severely.

-I have fully accepted that I hate running.

-My skin's been pretty good lately, and I'm gonna give myself credit for that one cause I've been pretty good about washing my face.

-This list is making me less sad than I think it would have a few years ago.

Pasta + Going Green

I'm not that big on vegetables. When my family would eat salad, I would eat just plain tomatoes or a chunk of a cucumber, both of which are fruits and both of which are great. I'll still eat a tomato like an apple and tongue a cucumber all on its own, no sex workshop or anything. Basically, I think most vegetable dishes are lies. People act so appalled that french fries were once considered a vegetable (source needed), yet your precious brussels sprouts are only delicious because they are fried beyond recognition and then tossed with a generous helping of bacon. Salads are wet vehicles for the fat farm that is dressing, plus they leave you in need of a snack approximately ten minutes after consuming them. I eat kale the same way everyone else does: by trickery. Some people put it in a smoothie, I treat it, along with some quinoa, like fried rice, sauteeing with soy sauce, sesame oil and garlic and only looking at my plate of food sideways so I don't really have to acknowledge it. 

Though spinach has fallen out of fashion, it was once the kale, the brussels sprout, the, if you will, wheatgrass (remember??) of its day. And so it was subject to wildly unhealthy preparations. Creamed spinach, as well as salads full of bad shit that was somehow mitigated by its spinachy presence. It also gave us a family of health-adjacent green things, like wraps, and of course, green pasta dough. Now that is a vegetable I can fuck with.

Though I usually see pictures of uniformly green pasta dough, I don't think this is achievable without vitamixing your spinach (chopped, frozen from Trader Joe's. There is no reason to use anything else) to death. My dough looked like this:

I split this bad boy in half. Not on purpose, I just got fed up making raviolis with it so I turned the rest into pappardelle. The raviolis were a stress reducer, something to do with my hands while waiting to hear the results of a job interview (which I did not hear for another week and a half and I didn't get it, so... it worked! What am I talking about again?). I was recreating a dish I'd made a few weeks back with some friends, little half moon raviolis (perfect circles thanks to my super advanced cutting device, a jam jar) filled with goat cheese and basil, smoothed out in the food processor with salt and olive oil. In fact, the stuffing of the raviolis took so long that I forgot to take pictures of the actually very pretty finished product, which I arranged on a slate tray on a bed of flour, and asked for a ravioli maker for my birthday. I ended up getting two!!!

I'm getting better at understanding dough feel, so that's good. It wasn't too scary for me to navigate the extra flour to compensate for the moisture in the spinach (as usual, the recipe called for way less than I needed). I also made the pappardelle thicker (6 setting on the crank) and cooked them only slightly, so they had a bite. The ravioli make it easy, like the gnocchi: they float when done. My confidence in cooking times grows! Then, because my "vegetable" was so pretty, I took the time to freshly grate some parm, and, of course, made a sauce out of my favorite fruit, the tomato. For that I simply sauteed cherry tomatoes, chopped garlic and chopped anchovies, then upended a thing of two buck Chuck Pinot Grigio in there, let the alcohol burn off and bam! Sauce for both my pastas. The pappardelle result looks like mush, but tasted way better than any vegetable I've had in a long time. How healthy am I?

Pasta + Terror

This is a horror story. Jk, but it is about my fear of making gnocchi and my deep love of eating it.

I got all my pasta equipment a couple weeks ago. I have made fresh pasta five times, two under the supervision of an instructor. I am not quick or confident, and have managed to screw up the pasta dough itself by overworking it, a mistake I have been told is nearly impossible to commit that requires one to totally start over. So I thought I'd turn to the very vague recipe in the definitive Italian cookbook (Silver Spoon) and make gnocchi.

The pasta snobs reading this are already like, LOLOLOLOLLLL. For everyone else, me deciding to make gnocchi at this point in my pasta-crafting history was like a beaver attempting to build a dam without having been born yet. Gnocchi, and in particular potato gnocchi (as opposed to ricotta), is the great challenge of pasta. "Pillowy" is the term you're going for here. I had been warned about my hubris in this area, but I grabbed my bag of flour and peeled some potatoes anyway. It's not like anyone was coming for dinner (which was the case the night I overworked my dough). The only person who'd be affected by a massive screwup was me.

Photo break!

I also foolproofed this plan by making a simple tomato sauce, something I'm very comfortable doing. If the gnocchi failed, as I was assured they would, I could cook up some dried pasta from Smart n Final and still have something awesome to eat. This is what I like to call the backup technique: if you have a backup, it takes the pressure off and you're more likely to succeed. I plan to publish many academic papers on this subject in an alternate universe where I wear glasses.

A perfect tomato sauce is different in everyone's mind. For me, it's the sauce at Bertucci's, an East Coast chain restaurant whose artichoke and portobello mushroom pizza I require my family to administer within twelve hours of my arrival at home. I want to tell you it's the childhood memory that makes it good, but no, every time I eat it, I'm fully on board with my basic bitch assessment that this chain restaurant is the pizza boss. I would love to open a franchise in LA. Who will give me the money to do so? The sauce is chunky and tart, so those are my flavor goals. To that end, I use crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, sugar, white balsamic vinegar and plenty of fresh garlic and basil. I also do a pretty large chop on the garlic and fry it for just a moment in the oil before added the crushed tomatoes and letting it cook through in those, which gives it great flavor and a little more texture.

This is like half the garlic I used...

I made the sauce while my potatoes were cooking. The recipe told me to peel, chop then "steam" the potatoes. Wait, what? My steamer can fit like three pieces of broccoli on the days when I can even find the damn thing. I mostly use it for those frozen potstickers from Trader Joes on the occasion that I can't use my microwave because I just read something where Gwyneth Paltrow told me not to. I put some water in a pot but kept the level low, I thought. In reality, I boiled my potatoes. That's what I did. No idea how I would've steamed them. Off to a great start.

Is this a steam room?

The instructions told me to mash the potatoes while they were still hot. Garage sale masher in hand, I was all over this. Then I was instructed to stir in the flour, egg and salt and knead until I had dough. I poured in the ingredients, started kneading, and promptly burnt my hands on the still very hot potatoes. Here's the great thing about making pasta dough: when you fuck it up, your hands are a mess, so you can't do anything stupid like give up and look at pictures of your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's third husband on Instagram (Calvin, please DM me back, I feel like we could have a connection). I grabbed a spoon and did this "stirring" thing that had been recommended.

So far I've found every pasta dough recipe lies to you about how much flour you need. You need way, way more and the only way to know this is by the feel of the dough. But if you're inexperienced, like I am, and especially if you're making a new kind of dough, like I was, you don't know what this magical feel feels like. The recipe told me not to make the gnocchi too soft or too hard, but not what those things felt like in the gnocchi dough world. What the Silver Spoon cookbook presupposes is that you are an Italian grandmother with no time for nonsense and a perfect understanding of pasta, who received this cookbook as a gag gift from a close friend or an insult present from a power-hungry daughter in law who you call Angie, because the only Angela in your family is your great aunt, God rest her soul, and this upjumped pretender isn't family until she gives you a grandchild. My former high school dorm-mate, coincidentally current neighbor and reluctant pasta guru Lillian Kingery had warned me of this, but then she made me amazing Italian food and credited the book so clearly I had to buy that shit.

How it was supposed to look...

My dough was too wet, even I could tell that. So I kept adding flour and stirring and kneading and hoping and imagining all of this filtered through David Sedaris, author of the book I listened to while performing these tasks. Which took ages, of course. Pasta takes forever when you are a noob and also probably always. Dough at a somewhat acceptable feel (???), I set about rolling pieces of it into ropes, which I then cut up. The instructions wanted small, delicate gnocchi with a light thumbprint and a gentle rubbing with a grater on each one. Thumbprints, I did, though they seemed to smush my otherwise pillowy gnocchi. Smallness and grating? Who has the time? Some of my gnocchi looked super cute, but they all wound up looking like my last batch of uggos once I cooked them. I ended up throwing a little dough away when it all got too difficult.

Pretties, kind of!

Uggos, definitely!

Into the water they went. Gnocchi are done when they float to the surface, so I watched anxiously. My early, pretty gnocchi, made from sturdier dough that hadn't been lazing around my kitchen, floated quickly, at which point I scooped them out and plopped them in my sauce. The uggos floated more slowly, taking longer to cook, and they probably tasted different, but who's to say, cause they all ended up mixed up together? Oh, I was also supposed to taste my dough for salt level, but again, how salty was my dough supposed to be??

So how did my gnocchi, a labor of love that took two and a half hours, possibly more, stand up? Well, let's see. Were they pretty? No. Were they pillows? No. But were they a delicious combination of pasta and dumplings so who even cares? Big time. Honestly, I think even bad homemade gnocchi is delicious. Or maybe I'm secretly an Italian grandmother who thinks Angie and her cookbook should stay the hell out of my kitchen. The thing I learned about gnocchi and life is that some imperfect love in a bowl is better than frozen mac and cheese, it's not about the journey it's about the tomato sauce and that fresh parm and basil make everything look pretty which is why I now use both as makeup. But really, it's like my mom always says: "Perfect is the opposite of good."

I loved this.