The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
In lieu of a View From My Hotel Window post, since it’s ludicrously dark: my family has never been a Traditions Family, and neither has my wife’s. My brother, on the other hand, very much married into a Traditions Family, and one of those traditions is fresh pasta on Thanksgiving.
‘Twas a good day.
Other than discovering at the last second that we were out of garlic and doubling the recipe, I made this without modification. Delicious– especially with bread and butter.
Yesterday was kinda weird. Right after waking up in the morning (in fact, what woke me up in the morning) I got sick again. At least as sick as I’d been the other night, but… uh… different directionality, if you know what I mean, and if you don’t feel free to make something up. I spent all morning lying around and moaning, with my wife alternately telling me just to go back to bed or to at least try and take a shower.
Then lunch happened. I had to force myself to eat something; I don’t even remember what I had. And suddenly, wonder of wonders, I felt a hundred percent better. In fact, I felt so much better that I ended up making dinner: farfalle! Nothing super complicated; pasta with onions, garlic, red pepper, and spicy Italian sausage sautéed in olive oil, with a sauce made from heavy cream and crushed tomatoes, topped with fresh basil and pecorino cheese. I’d not had farfalle before; it’s delicious and I may well reach for it instead of spaghetti the next time I want pasta.
This is how healthy I was feeling, by the way: it seemed to me a good idea to make spicy food for dinner.
It was not. It took about an hour after dinner to be certain of that. But trust me. It was not.
I went to bed weak and shaky again and not sure if I was going to work today; waking up at 4:30 in the morning with urgent needs answered that question, and I’m typing this at my desk in my office, back in “completely fine except for five minutes out of every sixty” mode. I will be at work tomorrow and for the rest of the week if I have to install a Port-A-Potty in the hallway outside my room; putting a sub into the last week before Winter Break is just not fair and it would probably be good if my kids actually learned something during this window.
I am making Experimental Dessert tonight; I shall report back on that tomorrow. Assuming I can walk and breathe, which I ought to be able to. (I’m eating the rest of the pasta for lunch, BTdubs; digestive issues be damned, it was good.)
More later; I have a Real Post planned but 350 words of lead-in about illness and food doesn’t really seem right.
I am, as I’ve mentioned before, a macaroni and cheese aficionado. I’ve made it roughly two dozen different ways this year, and I found a new one tonight. My wife made a late-night grocery run last night, and asked me if I’d found my present while we were unbagging everything and using Pym Particles to fit all the food into the pantry.
I had not.
“I have not,” I said.
She digs around, all excited, and hands me this box. It’s new Kraft Mystery Taste Sand! Jalapeño Mystery Taste Sand! With, apparently, special new ridged macaroni! Which I think technically makes it something else, but hell if I know anything about what to call pasta.
I was as excited as she was. Then I forgot about it until tonight, when she called me to let me know that she and the boy had been roped into dinner at her parents’ house and I was therefore on my own for dinner. Batching it, as dudebros might say. Which I’m not. So I kind of feel dirty right now. But whatever.
Oh shit I can make the new macaroni.
Which I have now eaten. And taken a picture of.
Guys… I don’t quite know what to do about this. Kraft Jalapeño Mystery Taste Sand Macaroni and Cheese smells and tastes exactly like Chili Cheese Fritos. The smell is uncanny. And kind of horrifying, because when you put something in your mouth that smells exactly like Chili Cheese Fritos, only it’s on a spoon and it’s not Chili Cheese Fritos, it’s… a little… well, off-putting? Sure. Off-putting. Which maybe shouldn’t have a hyphen; the autocorrect fixed it once and left it alone the second time. I’m not even sure it’s a word.
So I covered it with sriracha. And then it was delicious. As all things covered in sriracha tend to be.
I will vouch for the thicker, ridged macaroni, although it would have boiled to limp nastiness had I not decided to taste it with about two minutes left– it boils quicker than they want you to think it does, but it’s good and they should use it for all their macaroni and cheese. I can’t really vouch for the macaroni, though. Unless eating Chili Cheese Fritos (owned by Kraft, I think?) transformed magically into pasta appeals to you. In that case, go for it.
There, you learned something today.
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