The awkward purgatory between summer and fall always leaves me feeling strangely bereft and filled with longing for something I don't understand and can't name. I think part of it is the schizophrenic weather we've been having: super-warm days followed by lightly cool ones. Perhaps it's also that I'm accustomed, still, to the feeling of a school year. As a child, summers seemed endless, indolent, filled with fat novels I couldn't wait to read. It always ended more quickly than I expected, and ever since I graduated from grad school in May, I've been dreading the end of this particular summer, because it's the last one I'll have as a student.
What's fall like in Chicago? I know it's already cooler there, and I'm envious. Though it's still warm here, already the evenings are darkening earlier and earlier, the leaves are beginning to color, and I am drawn more and more to slow cooking, hoping to force fall into its leaf-swirling, cardigan- and scarf-wearing potential.
Apparently, I'm in too much of a hurry for fall to get here, because I fell down the stairs in our apartment building and busted my lip open this past weekend. Though impossible to eat elegantly or pain-free with a busted lip, I wanted, for some reason, spaghetti: plain old, tomato sauce-laden spaghetti. Food of childhoods, of a pot filled with magic stirred and simmered and stirred some more.
Except my mother never really made spaghetti. I realized this when J and I sat down to eat, and I said, "This really takes me back." Except, it didn't really. When I thought about it, I ate South Asian food at home, almost always. I must have eaten it at friends' houses, or in the cafeteria, but I don't actually remember any specific time when I ate a bowl of spaghetti as a child...but what about the pot, and the smell in the air, and the children's voices, and the wooden spoon tipped with red sauce? Stuff of dreams (though J, apparently, has memories of y'all's mother making spaghetti sauce that way, so maybe I just borrowed his) and Ragu commercials. Who says advertising doesn't work?
Anyway, made-up childhood aside, this sauce tasted pretty magical, though it's a more grownup version of what I "remember" eating as a child. Fall, take notice! Slow cooking season has arrived.
Adult-erated Tomato Sauce (adapted from Giada de Laurentis' Everyday Italian)
2 tbls olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
1-2 pinches crushed red pepper flakes
1-2 pinches dried sweet basil (though you could use any amenable herb)
1 28-oz can tomato puree or crushed tomatoes
3-4 ripe tomatoes, chopped (optional, but my friend Katie gave me some from her garden that were about to go bad, so I thought I'd throw them in there)
1/2 c. pecorino romano
salt and pepper, to taste
1-2 tbls unsalted butter
1. Cook onion and garlic in olive oil until soft. Add crushed red pepper flakes and dried or fresh herbs; cook until fragrant.
2. Pour in tomato puree and a few glugs of cooking wine, chopped tomatoes, and let simmer all afternoon, stirring occasionally.
3. When almost ready to serve, stir in pecorino romano, and let sit for a few minutes.
4. Stir in butter until melted. Pour over spaghetti. Swirl onto fork and try to avoid getting tomato sauce in the open wound on your lip.
It would have been great to have some of your arugula for a salad to accompany the pasta! I'm going to think about what else you could use arugula for besides that marvelous looking pizza - inspired, perhaps, by that amazing pizza place near your house you took us to this past spring? I love arugula because it's so peppery, and I can't imagine a single recipe that calls for fresh spinach that you couldn't renovate with arugula.
We haven't gotten our CSA stuff yet, but when we do, I'll let you know. J, the economist, was also reluctant (birds of a feather, you eggplant haters, you), but I think I brought him around. (It's good and good for you! It's actually cheaper than our usual groceries! I'll make it worth our while, I promise!) Though if there are lots of eggplants and cantaloupes, I may have a problem, since J isn't a fan of either.
Oh, also - the idea of a CAT fills me with joy and delight. I want to go to there, please! Let's make that happen. When I was in NY, we mainly ate in Brooklyn, which was so fun because I was born there but have never had a chance to really explore it. The pics: 1) tapas at this place 2) brunch at this place (I was so starved for good Mexican food that, yes, I ate Mexican food in NYC - the chilaquiles, I promise you, were divine) 3) and finally, a sampling of West Indies delights at the Brooklyn West Indian Carnival, a mere 5-minute walk away from my friend Laurel's place.
I'm anxious to hear from you about what else you're doing with that arugula - I'll let you know if I find something fun to make with it. Hope you and B are well, and much love to you both -
-TF
Fia - so funny to think of spaghetti as childhood food, tho it sure was for my kids. For us, it was grad school company's coming! food. It was a real hostess-with-the-mostest moment if you used parmesan that didn't come from a green can. I was kinda scared the first time someone served real parmesan - it just seemed weird. And I thought, wow, she's _really_ a grownup! And she must have a private income!
ReplyDeleteI love the borrowed childhood! I borrow fragments of other people's lives all the time, constructing my personal mythos. I think it's important to have agency over yourself, stitch up your own reality; besides, stories almost always sound better when told in the first person, even if you're only telling them to yourself.
ReplyDeleteSo I know precisely what you mean. I am always collecting (typically unconsciously, or only barely consciously) fragments of other people's childhoods--typically things that were very popular in my region at the time, affording me a more "normal" experience, but occasionally I'll try to snag something completely impossible (the image of pulling a camel through the sands of Saudi, ripped directly from my friend Jen, who actually did grow up there and told me about doing precisely that). But typically, I keep it pretty tame, affecting a childhood love for The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Count Chocula cereal, or ET. Truth is: I never pretended to be a ninja, my mom would never let me have sugary cereals, and I didn't see ET until I was nearly 20. But these are all such a part of our collective understanding of what an American 80's childhood is about that I have definitely made references to them, or agreed with someone about their importance, or laughed at some reference made, without fully understanding the context.
As we're all constantly fabricating our current selves to some degree, why not allow for some collective-unconsciousy, impressionistic childhood memories? I am certain that many recent memoirists have made their own more gruesome, so by comparison it can only be a minor sin to invent nostalgia for foods and toys, games and pets.
Truth is, I loathed tomato sauce as a child, and I still can't bring myself to say "spaghetti," only "pasta," and will typically make capellini instead just so I can avoid the sound of that word. These days, I think it's the most comforting, delicious, simple dish. My mom has learned how to make it gorgeously since moving to Spain, and taught me her method--yours looks much, much healthier, and more reasonable, as hers is about 1/2 olive oil and has a nice liberal splash of heavy cream. Delicious, but a little impossible to make on a budget/without dieting the rest of the week. I think I'm going to use your recipe to bring about an early autumn myself--today seems like a good day for it. Speaking of fall! Want to go apple picking and make pies?