quick sausage pasta to make u strong

low effort high reward single serving carbo loading yummy dinner

I write to you from the Amtrak zipping up to Albany, New York, with the Hudson to my right and a colossal week behind me. Last Monday I drove up to Bennington, VT to begin a teaching fellowship¹ that will last until June; on Wednesday I helped teach my first class; on Friday I took the train back down to New York; on Saturday morning I woke up at 5 a.m. to compete in my first powerlifting meet. A whirlwind, a thrill, a pleasure, until the inevitable Friday-afternoon preparedness meltdown, when I learned the Amtrak is just as good a place to cry as any MTA train. At least I got it all out a day early.

Luckily I knew I had pasta waiting for me at home. Growing up in Massachusetts I was raised on plenty of Boston Marathon lore, and I always fantasized about the pre-race pasta dinner that happened every year for runners. I also grew up on Strega Nona, so I long conflated the two, imagining wiry adults in running gear stuffing their faces while surrounded by overflowing pots of red sauce spaghetti.

Given this long-marinating fact and the anecdotal knowledge that I usually feel strong when I lift the day after a pasta dinner: pasta it was. And it was a pasta recipe I’ve been making for myself for months, usually as a solo dinner, or a last-minute lunch. The sauce has four ingredients and cooks up before the pasta is boiled. It is tomato-reddened but does not require anything in a can; most of its flavor comes from a single link of sausage. It is soft and spiced and rich and slick. If you want, you can make it vegan. If you want, you can add cheese. It is a dish that invites you to play it fast and loose. It is so good that when Jackson ate it for the first time, he looked at me as if betrayed, as if I’d been hiding some enormous vacation house from him, as if I’d never told him my middle name: how long have you been making this?²

will you just LOOK at the color on that sauce

(Also I know that I have now written about pasta two blogs in a row—but at least now we know how to reheat our leftovers. Next week will be something different.)

The pasta worked. While I’ll spare you a full meet recap—I did a short one on instagram—I felt strong and met my primary goals (make at least 6 out of 9 attempts, don’t get injured, have fun). I hit significant PRs on both squat and deadlift (181.5 pounds and 236.5 pounds, respectively). I failed just one lift (a 121.5 pound bench press) which was good in that I felt I was pushing myself “enough”. I cried three times but only because I felt so supported by friends and fellow lifters and friends’ coaches who adopted me for the day. I ate lots of PB&Js³ and drank a pint of tengerine juice. I ate about half a bag of XL sour patch kids and drank a fizz-free celsius, a combination which made me feel like this. I made an admittedly perfect playlist:

And the pasta, it seems, worked. I made another batch this morning⁴, partially to photograph it, and partially to eat something cozy on the train while I switch gears again—there’s already snow outside the window, thank god. I can’t promise that this recipe will make you strong enough to squat your own body weight⁵, but I can promise that it will probably make you happy, and not require too much fuss.