Delicious Demon

For those just tuning in, I should tell you right now, I have a serious substance abuse problem.

“Everything you see, I owe to pasta”, is a line attributed to I believe it was Sophia Loren. Frank Sinatra would munch on huge helpings of pasta with meatballs back in his New Jersey days, and as long as he was alive for as far as I know. Whenever I have just finished a litre of pasta with tomato and basil and I’m rolling around in the apartment, trying to look normal and not at all overstuffed – and I do eat tons of it, my man can testify to that - I always think of Jim Carrey imitating Jack Nicholson at some function in honor of Meryl Streep many years ago, where he pats his stomach with both hands, takes the Nicholson smirk on his face, and says: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!”

Whenever I watch Amélie, I immediately want a crème brûlée the very moment we see her break the hard, caramelized surface of the dessert with a spoon. I am not such a big fan of those in real life, so it could be that my craving is limited to cracking the hard sugar on top with a spoon. When I’m reading anything by Jhumpa Lahiri, I start salivating at the mouth whenever the various Indian dishes and their preparation are described. In Blue Is the Warmest Color the movie we see the protagonist Adèle eat pasta a lot, it is both a marker of her blue-collar background, but also, with the close-ups, a clue to her sensuousness, her carnal nature both in life as well as her erotic awakening. Watching Julie and Julia I always get the same idea of trying something similar to what Julie is doing with our many Italian food cookbooks as if I was just thinking it now for the first time. I also get a huge craving to put some butter on a pan and watch it melt and start sizzling.

The same thing happens with Gilmore Girls, sometimes. I watch an episode after work, tired and unwinding, with some pasta handy in front of me, because, you know, some sort of food to go with the show is kind of mandatory, and suddenly I get a huge craving for Luke’s burger meals. I’m very lucky to live in a town, where there is such an abundance of inexpensive quality burger restaurants so that I can mix it up a bit if I think I just can’t handle the out-of-this-world deliciousness of Ohana’s burger meals at the Market Hall. Their heavenly signature burger can be too much to bear, sometimes, and I try to limit my dosage to once a month tops.

While reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, I developed such an enormous craving for jollof rice, that when I finally finished the book so that I had some spare time to go hunting for ingredients, and managed to make some at home, I prepared such a gigantic batch of it that not only did I eat it for an entire week, but also got majestically sick of it towards the end. When I was reading Americanah I lusted after a huge bowl of coconut rice, and after finishing that I went right ahead, having learnt nothing from my jollof rice disaster, and made a seven litre kettle full of coconut rice. It was delicious, just like jollof rice had been, and boy was there lots of it, so much in fact that when I finally had to give up after the sixth day and throw the rest away, I dutifully performed my world eco-system penance while tossing it, thinking what was wrong with me apart from the obvious delusions of grandeur, and since then I haven’t been to the rice section at the market again. I have been forced to say no to jollof rice as well as coconut rice, or rice in general unless it comes in risotto form, I’m good for now, thanks anyway.

Out of some metaphysical fluke (and also metabolic, I might add), though, I have, as I’m writing these words in January 2017, yet to experience the sick and tired feeling concerning pasta.

Remember how in Heartburn the movie there are these caterers or waiters, I don’t recall which exactly, who in all the scenes with the large functions discuss food and recipes and eating in the background, while waiting for the proceedings to start? Well I do, because it is exactly like myself and my pasta-inclined friend J. I understand Nora Ephron was quite the chef herself. I can assure you I am not. There are about five different things I can make, but I can also tell you I make those five things better than anybody in the whole wide world. I make such a mean pasta that when I turned thirty I had to make a deal with myself to only make it once a week, or else I would have to buy a wheelbarrow to go with my enormous belly.

Of course, when on holiday, the pasta rule flies right out the window, but then it is easier to burn off the calories, too. For instance, last year in Paris, pretty much the only thing my man and I ate the whole two weeks we spent there was pasta, not to mention pizza, and of course some of the signature pastries of France: the incredible croissants, baguettes, pains-au-chocolat, what have you. Hemingway was dead on about Paris being a movable feast, and for a lover of Italian food, there are almost limitless choices.

But we also walked. During our stay we walked some 250 kilometers in and around Paris. I am lucky that way, to have met a person who doesn’t mind walking, even if it’s a very long distance, and where else can one find prettier scenery to walk past than in Paris? Also, I don’t think I have ever tasted a more aromatic garlic, or juicier tomatoes, than there, and we had pasta water boiling and black tomatoes marinating in olive oil and three cloves of that lovely garlic and some basil leaves almost every night. Why go out to dinner when one can buy the best ingredients possible at the produce stand and make one hell of a dinner by oneself at the apartment? Just around the corner there was an unbelievable fruit and vegetable stand managed by a gracious and very helpful Asian couple, who got so used to seeing us every late afternoon rummaging through their tomato selection, picking yellow plums the size of a fist in a bag, choosing avocados and herbs and lettuce and cucumbers, that very soon both parties would just exclaim “À demain!” at the checkout counter, before we rushed off to buy our Belle Arome of the day, which is a type of baguette, from our favorite bakery a little further down the street.

Here’s how you do it. First, it helps a lot if all the ingredients are actually fresh, this isn’t something Jamie Oliver invented just to bug people, especially the garlic, because the naturally grown garlic from near where you live, or the next best thing, will easily surpass in flavor the cheaper kind from China, with the moldy taste already in when you buy it at the market.

It’s okay if you don’t have the time to really soak the tomatoes in the olive oil and garlic and red chili and basil leaves and black pepper mix, the amount of time it takes for the water to boil and the pasta to cook is fine, but it is all the better if the fresh ingredients get at least an hour to release their flavor, they’ll be like oh, okay, if this is how you want us, but longer is better. Leave them on the counter, room temperature is perfect. Sometimes I add a couple of avocados and the juice of a lime in the mix; this was something brought to the attention of all Finns in the kitchen by a successful chef here, Hanna Gullichsen, whose husband’s avocado pasta recipe became such a viral hit that people hurried right off to make some, leaving the grocery stores empty-handed for a while, with every single avocado gone from the shelves, as well as all the pecorino cheese.

When at home, I indulge myself in the most perfect spaghetti I have ever tasted, the Family Martelli’s spaghetti from Tuscany, sold in yellow paper packages in exactly one place in Tampere, and this is where I buy my olive oil as well, the three-litre case that sustains me the whole year. My man loves the huge metal canister sitting at the corner of the counter, too, I think he loves the manly size and look of it. When I go to see my friend J. in the neighboring town, I usually bring the pasta with me, because it is just so lovely. I think you will understand how going on a carb-free diet is completely out of the question for me. I have no idea what I would eat if I was ever diagnosed with celiac disease. Also, as a lover of Italian food, dairy has to be included, too. Thank the lord parmesan is naturally lactose free, because otherwise, there would be hell to pay.

The one thing I am jealous of the people living in Turku is their wide and extremely high-quality selection of incredible produce at the farmer’s market, and their fruit and vegetable sections in general at the department stores. How come their pickings are so much lusher, more varied, and just plain better than anywhere else in Finland is just beyond me, and the last time I went there for a couple of days on a short holiday with my man, the selection made us both swoon. Apart from our annual stop at Sergio’s for some fabulous pizza and expensive but so totally worth it bottle of white wine, there really was no need to go out at all to eat. Granted, there are numerous restaurants there one really should check out even once, but we were so in awe of the variety of different kinds of salad that we just couldn’t drag ourselves out of the apartment, but instead, for once, lost a few kilos busy making different variations of salad for lunch every day.

It’s all my friend J.’s fault, this unending pasta craze of mine. The recipe given here is a variation of the one she had originally saved from some grocery store’s monthly recipe booklet, and it was one of those times I spent the weekend at her house when we made it for the first time. It’s been a downward spiral for me ever since. I vary it every time a little, but basically it’s always the same idea: the pasta being the only thing to go on the burner, unless there are pine seeds involved, those bad boys of course have to roast on the dry pan for a while if you want them to have that divine taste and of course you do.

The amount of parmesan or pecorino or both really is up to you. If calories is of no matter, and let’s face it, if you are making this particular dish you kind of have to already be ignoring the calories, go crazy with the grating. I have gone from the slightest possible heap to grating the whole damn chunk in, so there’s your ball park. Just remember to save some of the salted cooking water, this can be easily forgotten. Once you have tossed the pasta on top of the tomatoes and other sliced and diced ingredients in the bowl and given all of it a good couple of mixings up, and have added the enormous or not entirely enormous amount of cheese in, you’ll be sorry if you have no liquid to add in case the pasta dries up too much from the inclusion of cheese.

Nora Ephron speaks in a very self-denigrating manner about her crème brûlée -years and other crazy food fashions, but I don’t think she was kidding about the food itself, and neither am I. I must admit I worked up such an appetite for my own damn recipe while writing this story I just had to get up and make some pasta for myself, and now, once again, I’m rolling around in the apartment, trying to look normal and not at all overstuffed. So delicious!

Sorry to anyone who read the entire piece expecting to find some further reference to Björk or The Sugarcubes. And also I would like to add a general, blanket sorry, because there will be no end to eating this dish once it is mastered, and mastering it is really anything but rocket science.

Dedicated to all the pasta lovers out there, and to my pasta connection, or my pasta dealer, if you will, the kind proprietor of the kitchenware and delicacy shop Keittiöelämää. Please don’t cut me off.