6 cloves of garlic
½ cup pine nuts (unroasted!)
4 servings of papardelle pasta
Salt, cheese to taste.
It’s a little cooler than comfortable. The cat is hiding in his bed. He will not be moved by promise of treat or pats on his head, or big, human claws raking his belly. Wake up from a nap (you hardly ever nap, but stress is sheets of wax on your mind being yanked off, leaving your brain smooth).
Pour a little more-than-normal oil into a pan, add 6 cloves of peeled garlic. Fill another pot with water, let it sit, covered, on high heat.
As the garlic simmers, place a handful of pine nuts into a mortar and pestle. The nuts hardly need pressure to yield a rich cream. Add salt.
The oil in the pan bubbles around the cloves. When I try to turn them, they pop back onto their burned sides, stubbornly refusing to brown, self-immolating on the one side. The heat is too high. Turn the heat to low and coax them over-evenly.
The lid of the pot whispers that the water inside is boiling. It exhales a cloud of steam without a scent. Pour a little more-than-normal salt into the spoon of your hand and drop it into the blistering, clear water. Slide handfuls of stiff pasta into the water.
When the garlic is brown on all sides now, and it yields to the prick of a fork, drop it into the creamy pine nut mortar and pestle, and one-by-one pound the roasted garlic into the paste, until you can’t tell garlic from pine nut.
Pour the oil from the pan into the garlic/nut mix too quickly, and splash two big drops of oil onto your sweater by accident. Dab dish soap onto the darkened spots on your poor sweater. Stir the now-golden mixture a little more carefully.
Test the pasta; take out the biggest pan you have, and toss in the golden garlic and stir until the fragrance lifts to your nose. Skim a ladle of pasta water into the garlic mixture and stir to loosen. Slip the pasta into the sauce one spoonful at a time, tossing until the water disappears.
You’d swear it was made with cream.
Something missing: pecorino romano (a week with me, already he’s half-gone). Plane on the cheese like mardi gras confetti.
Serve on a blue, chipped plate with a bowl of fresh, little tomatoes. Admire your mismatched dinnerware. Leave the TV off, candlesticks unlit.
