One Out Of Two

Dinner was pasta the other night.

I love the ritual of cooking a good pasta sauce — the house filling with wonderful aromas after the sauce simmers on the stove for hours. When I was a child, I would always be dismayed by how chefs in cheap, pseudo-Italian restaurants (read: food trucks) prepared their pasta. They would break it into little pieces before boiling it. Sheer blasphemy! Absolute travesty!

One of the important rituals in eating good pasta is carefully twirling the long strands (if you're having spaghetti) around the fork, making sure to catch a chunky piece of tomato with every bite. That smell of garlic, basil and grated Parmesan is almost always intoxicating. I could easily become a food addict.

As I lay on the bed, lost in wonderful thoughts last night :-) I thought about what I wanted in life. Pasta. Cooking. And someone to share it with.

I could curl up with someone special on the couch and spend my life in conversation over politics, crime, cinema, religion, books, music, and plans for our next culinary foray into the kitchen. We would sit eating pasta as we talked about our day.

“Pass the Parmesan and the grater,” he would say.

I would smile as I asked him if he would like another bowl, taking great satisfaction in his enjoyment of the meal.

I realised there was no greater relationship magic than sharing a generous conversation and a bowl of pasta with someone special. I do not have much hope of ever finding this combination of conversational and culinary bliss, but I do take comfort in knowing that the next bowl of pasta is always only a few hours of cooking away.

One out of two ain’t that bad.