Dinner

Tonight I made spaghetti (well, angel hair “spaghetti”, really), and meatballs from scratch. Yes, even the angel hair part (starting with semolina, eggs, salt, & a little olive oil). It was super-fancy & unbelievably tasty. It has been a long while since I made home-made pasta. It reminds me of what our friend E said when I brought them down a gift of home-made pasta (I think it had dill & tarragon mixed in hers too), “I didn’t realize pasta actually was supposed to taste like something!” But it does — it tastes like… what it’s supposed to taste like as opposed to the mostly bland commercial pasta. And it’s funny how simple canned diced tomatoes can turn into something nearly decadent when mixed with a little olive oil, a little red wine vinegar, some simple herbs, a touch of salt and simmered over meatballs in the oven with pockets of the tiny fresh mozzarella balls spotting the top, here & there.

I’m making croûtons now out of the extra left over potato-rosemary bread from last weekend. We’re too close to being out of olive oil so I went with the butter on them. It smells really good. Sometimes cooking is just another chore that has to get done to get through the day, but sometimes, weekends like this, making food is really grounding & rewarding. I love to make good food. I love having time to think through what I want to make & then taking three or four hours or all day to make a single meal. It’s luxurious in a sense of luxury that I just don’t get very often. And it feels good.

The little girls “helped”, which is to say they got in the way and underfoot. But we were all in it together, and aside from, “M2! Stop crawling across the counter through the flour!” the rest of the time, we were all just content to be doing what we were doing and sharing the small space of our kitchen making tasty food. I don’t know of a better way to spend an afternoon.

Dinner was real food. Filling, too. And so very, very tasty. Clearly I need to make pasta again soon. Maybe next time we’ll do linguine with alfredo sauce. Or bow tie pastas… or maybe I’ll think *really* big & go tortellini or ravioli. Or maybe I’ll wait until inspiration strikes.