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