Friday Night Pasta Rules

If there is a good food around which to assemble rules for ritual cooking, it would have to be pasta. First of all, I love pasta. Second of all, it's easy, so it makes an easy centerpiece to cooking-as-ritual. Pasta, salad, a bottle of cheap but reliable red wine--that's a recipe, so to speak, for a relaxed evening's bout of cookery.

Rules for cooking pasta:

1) Assemble key ingredients. If you have good ingredients, you can generally guess that you will do okay, especially when it comes to salad. Salad is hard to screw up, unless you set it on fire, which I do NOT recommend.

It is, I suppose, possible to over-salad a salad. In Trader Joe's this evening, I saw a box of strawberries near the produce, and I got inspired to include them in the meal. When it came to considering what to pair the strawberries with, though, I wasn't sure how much to throw in. Finally, I decided to err on the minimalist side, and bought a bag of baby spinach and a single red bell pepper. I was delighted with how this turned out. The pepper added a certain counterpoint to the sweetness of the strawberry, and when I took a bite of pepper and strawberry and spinach right before a sip of Yellow Tail Merlot, it was a surprise to find out how the salad affected the taste of the wine. It seemed to enhance the undertones of the wine in a way I can't really describe and do it full justice.



2) Wear fitting attire. In my case, this involves slacks, a t-shirt and my cooking fedora--which is my regular fedora, just worn while cooking--and pouring a glass of wine while looking out the window at Sutro Tower. This makes me feel delightfully bohemian without having to bother with the whole starving-artist reality.

3) Distract the audience. I cleverly made sure Marina would be hungry by suggesting a walk before dinner. In this way, it was almost eight o'clock before we ate, at which point we were both really hungry, which lent my cooking a little je ne sais quoi. Actually, that's not true. Je totally sais quoi. By eight o'clock, anything would taste good. Except sauerkraut. But that's why one doesn't cook sauerkraut in polite society.

4) Add protein. Trader Joe's chicken garlic sausage is perfect; easy to cook, flavorful, and productive of a rich, mouth-watering scent. I chopped it up in roughly evenly sized ovals and fried them in a pan with olive oil, and when the sausage was almost done, I added the spaghetti sauce. I'm a fan of mixing sauces and sausage and pasta in the frying pan these days, because the pasta seems to absorb the taste.



All in all, pasta is always a satisfying way to cook a healthy meal at the end of the week. Fruits and vegetables, protein, carbohydrates in the pasta--but not too much of them. The garlic basil linguine packets from Trader Joe's are the perfect size for two people, and allow you to focus as much on the sauce and the sausage as you do on the noodles.

This isn't the most complex pasta dish we've cooked. We've done the smoked salmon pasta dishes that I loved as a kid, throwing in some blanched asparagus for a hint of sophistication, the lemon zest for the weirdness factor. But the great thing about this meal is that it took about fifteen minutes to prepare from the time I started the salad to when I served up. And I think it was worth it.



What rituals do you enjoy with cooking? What's your favorite pasta dish, and why should I try it? And if it is so good, why haven't you invited me over to try it yet?