10:00 PM Pasta

I got home late the other night and didn’t want to eat too much lest I have more dreams involving a mountain lion driving me recklessly around a curvey road in an old car. A small pasta dish, the size you get in Italy where they expect you to eat pasta as a precursor to the main course, sounded right. The fridge seemed pretty bare but I had the remains of a roast chicken I had made for dinner a few nights earlier, a small chunk of blue cheese left from when I made blue cheese dressing about a week ago, and the first few cherry tomatoes off my tomato plant that is thriving in the front flower bed. The only herb I have in the yard is a rosemary plant and a hearty herb like rosemary seemed like a good compliment to the pungent blue cheese, so I snipped some off a sprig and minced it. The time it took to cook the thin spaghetti (9 minutes) was all the time I needed to slice the chicken, mince the rosemary, crumble the cheese and halve the tomatoes. I drained the pasta, leaving the pasta and a tiny bit of sticky pasta water behind in the pot then drizzled some olive oil over it to for a little flavor and texture. I’m lazy and hate doing dishes so I was determined to prepare the entire dish in the single pot. It actually worked out perfectly because I just threw the aforementioned ingredients in with the pasta and let the residual heat do the little “cooking” it needed. The liquid from the fresh tomatoes, the cheese and the pasta water constituted the sauce, which I boosted with a splash of cream and a sprinkling of kosher salt. After about 30 seconds of stirring I dumped it into a pasta bowl, ground pepper over it and dug in. I couldn’t believe how good it was and it was scraped together with ingredients I half expected to chuck in the garbage the next couple days. In all honesty, it was better than any pasta I’ve had at a restaurant in at least the last 6 months (yes, we are lacking good restaurants here).