based on a true story

by request from silentq:

(note: slightly fictionalized )

She called when I was in the middle of chopping tomatoes, and I had to wipe the juice off my hands before answering the phone, just barely beating the machine. She asked what I was up to and I said not much, just making dinner. There's this Italian restaurant down the street that specializes in a couple dozen different pasta sauces and tonight's mission was trying to reverse-engineer their tomato, rosemary and cream sauce. I asked her if she had dinner yet and she said no, and I told her to come over and she said she'd be by in a half hour.

The sauce was about half way done when the doorbell rang, the tomatoes and onions starting to lose shape and identity as they gave their liquids over to the simmering heat. She asked if there was anything she could do to help, and I pointed at the small covered pan on the burner next to me, where cloves of garlic had been toasting over a slow flame and their scent had wafted across the kitchen and into the rest of the apartment. I showed her how to peel the loose skin from each of the cloves, press them lightly with the flat of a knife and rub their tender, exposed interiors against slices of toasted baguettes. She drizzled a small stream of olive oil over the bread and I said, "we've just made bruschetta."

We munched on pieces of toast as we talked and waited for the sauce to finish cooking. She told me of the times she visited Italy and how the best food she ever had were in no-name hole-in-the wall trattorias in the middle of Tuscany, and I told her how cooking noodles was one of the first things I learned when I began figuring out how to cook and how it wasn't just Italian pasta but rice vermicelli and udon. It was all just about being a poor student back then, and a packet of noodles being the cheapest way to make a dish more sumptuous and substantial. It's a habit that still lingers with me now, in evenings when I'm exhausted and want nothing simpler than a bowl of miso, udon noodles and spinach. She asks me if this was one of those evenings and I said no, that I wouldn't have asked her over if it was.

I bring another pot to boil and add the spaghetti shortly afterwards, stirring the dried noodles into water before dipping the spoon into the sauce and taking another taste then offering the spoon for her opinion, watching her lips purse to blow away the steam and heat. Later, as I stir the noodles, she asks how long it takes to cook the spaghetti, and I reply that it's a matter of feel really. Stir enough noodles and you get an idea for how they flow when they're still undercooked and how they swim when they've been in the water too long. You can go with the time recommended on the box and in every recipe you'll read, but, like many things in life, it just comes down to experience and knowing when the time is right. And she comes up to peer over my shoulder, and I can smell the shampoo in her hair as she asks if it's done yet. And I lift a couple of noodles to my mouth, take a small bite and say, "No. Not yet. I know you're hungry, but it's not one of those things that you can rush."