two survival recipes
Recently best newsletter-er on this cursed internet, Sam Irby, sent out another masterpiece in spite of the fact that she has a horrible diarrhea disease (I'll let her amply fill you in on the details). In that newsletter she somehow managed to include a recipe. I was awed and inspired, both by the recipe itself and Sam's doggedness in writing it, or for that matter anything. We all hate food and are bored of food. But if Sam can overcome being acutely as well as chronically gastrointestinally ravaged in order to share a recipe for "deathbed risotto" what excuse do the rest of us have?
In the past year I've gone through several iterations of the same cyclical cooking ruts that might sound familiar to you if you also are in charge of feeding meals to yourself and/or others in, mostly, a total vacuum of edible inspiration. At first there was the dramatically overcompesating/performative domesticity/distraction and disassociation phase lots of people went through last spring -- keywords: beans, sourdough, shallot pasta. Then a giving up phase. Then an effortful, agonized attempt to optimize: maybe this is a chance to re-evalute everything, eliminate inefficiency, finally bulk order staples and meal-plan! Batch-cooking kale! Freezing tupperwares of soup! I posted a menu on the fridge and followed it for, maybe, two weeks. Cue: recommence giving up phase. Et cetera, et cetera, repeated with various levels of enthusiasm coupled with newly-discovered nadirs of giving up. A sample dinner from the bottom rung of this ladder: a buffet of pouch yogurts, veggie sticks (the chip, not the vegetable) and seaweed for the children, the combined detritus of which has already formed a trash gyre in the Pacific ocean to rival the size of the first one, plus something for the adults that I can't even remember, maybe scrambled eggs? A packet of shelf stable gnocchi with jarred sauce that was so inadequate on every level that I later ate a bowl of cereal? Sigh.
Then last week for some reason I remembered a meal I made all the time circa 2003, a pasta dish based on the one I ate all the time for shift meal when I worked at an oddball diner in the East Village. It was always my experience that when I worked at a restaurant that let you order what you wanted from the actual menu I would be overwhelmed by choice at first and want to try everything, then eventually narrow it down to one favorite and eat that meal every single shift. This restaurant, which (!!) still exists, was a weird but nice place to work. I made very little money but it was reliable and no one was a jerk to me. At Chinese New Year, the owners gave me lucky money in a little red envelope. Most of their business was (is? no idea, I literally haven't walked down First avenue in years) delivery to the nearby dorms and hospitals, and they had bottles of wine and cakes/pies on their menu which some possibly homebound people would order daily. Much of the job of a server there was actually just manning the phone and handing off delivery orders. So it was very peaceful and chill, and everyone who worked there got to know each other well because we spent a lot of time standing around being bored. I didn't have a phone because it was 2003. I doodled on my order pad and even sometimes did homework. When I went on break I would eat my dinner on the back steps of the restaurant, accessed by walking past a back dining room that was almost always empty because, to reiterate, literally almost no one ever ate at this place in person, and if they did they usually got a hot water with lemon and a side salad and tipped in pocket change. In retrospect, this was still quite possibly the best job I've ever had. Certainly it was a good fit for my waitressing skill set (poor executive functioning, uncoordinated, medium-good at chitchat).
On their menu this dish is called "Pasta Alla Mama" but I would call it "pasta a la 1990s." The really genius aspect of it is that it contains only pantry ingredients that, if you don't have a pantry, are also available at any "fancy bodega." If you want it to, it could also contain a green vegetable or even pieces of leftover chicken, but that might be gilding the lily - really the entire point of this pasta is that you put in as little effort as possible for maximum comfort, what my friend Jess used to call a "pasta and Kardashians" vibe. If you want you can also think of baby Emily eating it in an East Village backyard, probably chasing it with a Camel Light and an infinite fountain Coke/drip coffee from an always-on percolator. Oh also they put shitake mushrooms in it which I leave out.
Ingredients:
1 lb pasta (I use jovial brand gf spaghetti, my best friend) butter (or oil, if out of butter) half and half small jar of sundried tomatoes, drained of oil, sliced 2 sliced cloves of garlic (optional if you are desperate) grated parmesan (any format, even the most debased, leftover from pizza order has happened in my life) s&p
Directions:
As the salted pasta water boils, make the sauce by browning the garlic slices, then adding the sundried tomatoes and letting it all get sizzled together. If your tomatoes aren't highly seasoned you can add some red pepper or aleppo pepper flakes (fancy!), salt and pepper. Then add the half and half and simmer til the sauce is reduced by about half, which is probably also circa when the pasta will be done. Add some parmesan to the sauce - 'coats a spoon' is the texture you want - then drain and add the pasta to your sauce skillet, toss, put into a giant bowl, top with more freshly ground pepper and parmesan.
I'm not here to pretend that this pasta is more than the sum of its parts. It's fully just okay. It's like annie's mac n cheese for nominal grownups, but actual annie's mac n cheese is that too. Speaking of which, remember the annie's "Mexican" flavor? What happened to it? I ate a lot of it around that time in my life, too. It was like cool ranch mac n cheese, so good.
The other recipe that I've made lately and not hated/resented is Deb Smitten Kitchen's mildly cursed recipe for chicken, leek and rice soup, published March 12 2020. I made it that week and later was too scarred to revisit it, even though it's objectively great. I made it that week because we were all sick. I had a fever and a super sore throat and Keith was in bed, miserable. Later on we all tested negative for COVID antibodies as soon as antibody tests were available, which effectively scotched my burgeoning friendship with a local mom whose family had legit tested-positive COVID and had seemed like she would have been more amenable to hanging out at the park (playgrounds were closed) and letting my feral children inevitably touch hers if we'd legitimately had it. (I get it!!)
This is a delicious and super easy soup but unless you are okay with the leftovers becoming a porridge/congee situation, you need to keep the rice part separate. I would never dream of imagining that I could improve on Deb but if you lack homemade (or good store-bought, Fresh Direct's works) chicken stock, you can use bone in skin on thighs and rely on those plus maybe a boullion cube or just lots of salt and replace the stock with water.