Mi amore

I have an obsession with pasta.  It's not at all something I've recently discovered.  I'm not having a whiny, middle-aged woman-who-takes-a-gap-year Italian food renaissance,  My passion for pasta has always been and always will be, to the point where I first considered writing a blog about spaghetti long before I even entertained the idea of writing about poetry. 

Pasta and I go way back to a time when I was a toddler and it was a pastina.  My mother used to coax me with a mixture of pastina and egg when I refused all other food, and to this day it is still my go-to dish when I'm sick.  The pasta's and my relationship escalated last year when I was no longer satisfied with simply emptying a box of linguine into boiling water.  I wanted to get my hands dirty.  So I bought a $40 pasta-maker at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and, armed with a book of recipes from Mom, I hand-cranked my first batch of noodles.  Well.  What can I say that will convince you to live a life of only homemade spaghetti?  That it is like nothing else in the world?  That angels and Etta James sang? That it really is the easiest thing to do and cooks up in about 2 minutes?  That true pasta in its plainest form actually tastes rich and eggy and not at all like cardboard?  

Now that I have found gastronomic bliss with my pasta maker, I am continuing to build our relationship.  I have discovered two things in the last month, during which I made a Christmas and a New Year's batch: 

1) Using Italian "00" flour really does make a difference and only costs about $3 if you can find it.  It is so finely ground, it is like working with talcum powder.
2) Instead of relying on a food processor to mix the dough, make an old-fashioned well out of the flour, put the eggs and olive oil in the middle and mix it up yourself.  Ten minutes of kneading dough will certainly help you feel less guilty about that big bowl of fettuccine you're about to eat.

And for those of you who are reading this and thinking, when did I sign up for a cooking blog?  I say, come over and I'll show you what all the fuss is about.

Pumpernickel

Monday mornings Grandma rose an hour early to make rye,
onion & challah, but it was pumpernickel she broke her hands for,
pumpernickel that demanded cornmeal, ripe caraway, mashed potatoes
& several Old Testament stories about patience & fortitude & for
which she cursed in five languages if it didn’t pop out fat
as an apple-cheeked peasant bride. But bread, after all,
is only bread & who has time to fuss all day & end up
with a dead heart if it flops? Why bother? I’ll tell you why.
For the moment when the steam curls off the black crust like a strip
of pure sunlight & the hard oily flesh breaks open like a poem
pulling out of its own stubborn complexity a single glistening truth
& who can help but wonder at the mystery of the human heart when you
hold a slice up to the light in all its absurd splendor & I tell you
we must risk everything for the raw recipe of our passion.

-Philip Schultz

Glaring is caring?

The other day when I was waiting for the airport shuttle to pick me up, I was getting angry because it was a half an hour late.  I called the company twice and was assured the driver was "almost there," "almost there" but cars came and went and my blood pressure continued to rise.  When the van finally pulled up I rushed down the driveway and loaded my stuff inside.  I was already in a bad mood, exhausted from moving right up until the hour I had to leave, and I really wasn't planning to tip this driver.  Then he struck up a conversation.  I was surprised that I was the only person in the shuttle.  The driver asked if the company had called to tell me that he was running late.  I said, no, but I called them.  He told me they gave him this assignment at the last minute and he had to hurry down from Burbank.  They told him he had to be here by 10:30 and he said, there's no way with traffic, but I'll be there as soon as I can.  We proceeded to have a really nice conversation the entire way to the airport.  The company let him give all his other passengers to someone else so he could rush me to my plane once he picked me up.  I was ashamed by my bad attitude.  Here I was ready to unleash my stress and frustrations out on someone who was only doing their best to help me.

Over and over this year, I have been struck by the good nature and simple human kindness displayed by strangers.  Another example:  On my flight, the overhead bins were completely full by the time my section was boarded.  I had a laptop bag and a large purse, but they couldn't both fit under the seat in front of me.  I was debating whether I was really going to have to check my laptop when the woman beside me offered to let me put my purse with hers under the seat in front of her.  Who does that?  Nice people, apparently! 

I know I have a terrible tendency to myopically view things when life gets too crazy or times are tough, but meanwhile all around the city doors are being held open and even postal workers have been greeting people with a smile.  Then I watched this video a friend posted on facebook, and boy did I feel sheepish.  Yes, I'll try to be better in the new year.

The God of Loneliness

It’s a cold Sunday February morning
and I’m one of eight men waiting
for the doors of Toys R Us to open
in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island.
We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game
that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited
three hours for a store in Manhattan
to disappoint me. The first today, bundled
in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light
reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid
when the others came, stamping boots
and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about
sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke
two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing
shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons
will leap into my arms, remember this morning
all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy,
just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says
from the back of the line. “He plays these games
in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it,
he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay
foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.
They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas
founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that
death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness.
Through the window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.”
The others seem not to know what to do with their hands,
tuck them under their arms, or let them hang,
naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember
what they held, the promises they made? I know
exactly when my boys will be old enough for war.
Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,
because it’s what men do for their sons.

-Philip Schultz