Rossini’s “Thieving Magpie Overture” is impossible for me to listen to without remembering the scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex slices his droogies. It’s also very hard to get the timing right on pasta when I’m defrosting a sauce (which was a tad too watery last week and which hopefully will be tastier now that its molecules have stopped vibrating and gotten used to each other). All of this started because the people staying with me are reading Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle (big Murakami fans they are, read six of his books and say that this one is his masterpiece) and in the first sentence he writes that the Magpie Overture is the best pasta making music, and it’s pretty good, except I’m confronted with visions of bloodletting from the back of an English hand…
But this pasta will be tasty. It won’t be that unorganized either. It’s the sauce I’m worried about, being not quite as thick and meaty as I prefer. Spaghetti is my comfort food, as Saturday afternoon leftovers or Wednesday night rainy day feel-good food, or on Sunday night after coming home from a long journey with nothing else to eat. I microwave it and it’s so good. Like so good that while I’m eating it I remind myself to slow down and enjoy it, but pretty soon I’m back in, slurping and freckling little tomato splatters on the kitchen table from my aggression and it’s gone and –I’ve just remembered I’ll be able to shred that white flavorful hard Italian cheese which I can’t remember the name of onto my spaghetti instead of the silly overpriced shredded and ultimately flavorless parmesan Matthew bought from the organic food store. Give me Romano at least.
Aurrichio. Delicious. Daniel Adler takes a bite of spaghetti and slurps the watery sauce for balance, pasta with sauce. He scraped the sauce from the large red iced chunk in its Tupperware and then microwaved it after putting it on the pasta. He’s going to do it again since the water level is getting low in the bowl and he still has about half the pasta left.
I like the gobs, the chunks of tomato and beef and eggplant. Food is so carnal, more of it should be included in classic literature. The way someone eats says a lot about who they are. The aurrichio really brings out all the flavors, especially the serrano pepper.
Daniel the Writer 