it puts the butter on the paccheri

In a few weeks i’m driving out to LA to spend a few months. I alternate between using the phrases “snowbirding” and “semester abroad” as explanations for my soon-to-be situation when people accuse me of moving. I don’t feel like being cold for five months and there are some friends I want to see, and I’ve always wanted to drive out there, to get painfully bored by wide dry landscapes for a few days then be in a big sprawling creepy city. When you grow up in New England the desert is this strange myth you don’t believe even once you’ve seen it. “All that dirt with nothing on it” as Eve Babitz calls it. (And then she goes on to say "The idea of trying to 'find yourself' in some kind of geographical illusion is enough to make me so disgusted and bored that I am likely to get nasty,' which, fair.)

Before I leave there’s the small issue of packing my world up, and then there’s the issue of consuming as much of the food I’ve hoarded over the past two years as I possibly can, because I can’t throw it away and it seems annoying to pack up, say, a half cup of rice alongside dresses and ceramics and books. I’ve told myself I can buy vegetables but that’s it—everything else cooked will be the result of recipe testing (does anyone know where a girl can find some Boston mackerel in this city, please god) or made from foodstuffs that already exist inside my home. It’s a nice constraint, like figuring out a puzzle, or putting together a kicky outfit with a limited wardrobe, et cetera. Painting with only three of the many colors of the wind.

A few months ago I was schlepping around Eataly for work purposes and found myself holding, like an oversized carnival prize or one of those anime body pillows, the largest bag of pasta I have ever laid eyes on which also coincidentally contained the largest pasta I have ever put in my mouth, aside from those enormous snakes of pappardelle you buy in tangles.

Here, I found a photo, it's paccheri:

This is true Fancy Pasta, a suitable treat for when you’re looking to treat yourself, but it’s also so large you’re not really sure what to do with it. Any little bits of vegetal matter you try to toss onto it get lost as if they’ve gone on an unsuccessful spelunking trip, or they just cower at the bottom of the bowl, unsure how to attach themselves to such enormous swaths of starch. Sauce is occasionally more successful. Giant beans are almost big enough to stand up for themselves. Honestly the bag was so big and the pasta so burly that an enormous zip-loc of it has been in my pantry for months, hibernating until I could or had to find something to do with it. And then I got lazy and fed up and decided to just slick it with butter, because i have some of that too, the fancy stuff. I have a friend who once told me “always spring for the fancy butter” or maybe her friend told her that and she was relaying the sentiment, and if you’re not completely broke I do think it’s good advice.

So now I’ve taken to boiling the Big Fancy Pasta, which takes a very long time to boil and is too easy to undercook—I think Amanda Hesser once said that al dente pasta should have the consistency of a stick of gum, which is something I like thinking about—but once you get it just right, you can drain off most of the water, toss in a chunk of fancy butter, and let it melt and get glossy with the pasta water. It’s a nice meal for when you’ve decided to go back out at 12 on a saturday night or you feel a sense of existential dread on a sunday evening. And you can swish in some other things too, like such as last night I had some romesco lying around (I am an elegant woman of leisure) so I glopped some of that in there too, swirled it all around, added some large beans. Not A Bad Choice.

If you had any Parmesan cheese, fancy or otherwise, wouldn’t that be nice as well! Even if you had mediocre pasta and mediocre butter, and fake cheese, you’d end up feeling like you were eating middle school lunch, in a really pleasant way. The guy who made all our food in middle school—I think we just referred to him by his last name? Mister Taylor?—had this very dramatic rat tail and would occasionally wear funny hats, he was always amusing in an Embarrassing Dad kind of way. My favorite of his specialties was always buttered pasta, those miniature shells that would hold little individual vernal pools of melted butter, shook with the powdered cheez that comes in a can. But if you happen to have bought a large container of fancy pasta because you were at a large fancy store and wanted to feel like you had some semblance of control over the world and purchasing things makes you feel giddy and flushed, well, maybe don’t overthink things and just throw some butter on there.

okay—
 

Here’s a thing I recently wrote for GQ about cooking a whole fish—it’s really easy and impressive, the recipe I mean, and I hope you’ll read it. Like and subscribe.

Also, the author of one of my very favorite books of poetry is coming out with a new collection on Halloween. You can preorder it here; I’ve already bought two.

I can't stop listening to this song, it brings me such joy.

stay spooky,
m