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I dwell my truest life in that hour from 12 a.m. to 1 a.m., within the spirit of a spaghettata di mezzanotte, a late-night Italian spaghetti party, which frequently evolves (or devolves, relying on the way you have a look at it) from the sort of night that desires to linger. It’s one of many few issues in life that’s all the time inside attain, even when your fridge is virtually empty. As my colleague David Tanis as soon as wrote, “The scent of pasta boiling is a heady low cost thrill.”
What I like to eat most throughout this cherished time is spaghetti, with its comforting slipperiness. Other shapes work, too: I’ve been identified to make a imply midnight orzo with guanciale, Pecorino Romano and black pepper, typically egg yolks if I’m feeling “within the carbonara approach.” Other nights, it’s one thing punchier, like an alla vodka sauce made à la minute with fusilli: tomato paste bloomed in some fats, equivalent to butter or olive oil, then swirled with a splash of vodka and cream. For the person, it’s a ragù, made the best way of his grandfather’s household in Ferrara. Maybe for you, midnight pasta is a fridge clear-out, the place you flip your entire leftover crisper-drawer greens right into a nubby sauce.
I’ve all the time felt that my greatest recipes come from actual life, from discoveries I make within the kitchen after I’m strapped for time and components. One mezzanotte, I tossed skinny spaghetti with chopped capers and umeboshi, these salty, pink Japanese plums, in butter to nice impact. Having simply returned from Kyoto and Osaka, I missed these sorts of briny accents in my everyday. Another evening, it was a easy lemon-buttered angel hair in opposition to a defend of merely dressed arugula with balsamic vinegar, like a yin and yang of salad and pasta, a remnant of my Macaroni Grill years in suburban Atlanta. Recently, I tossed a bit of tagliatelle with the leftovers of our Sunday roast hen, with pine nuts and rosemary like a Venetian feast, one thing I realized from Nigella Lawson’s first ebook, my culinary bible, “How to Eat.”
A meal that’s all the time inside attain, even when your fridge is virtually empty.
Midnight spaghetti, I’ve since gathered, is much less a recipe than it’s a means by which to linger into the evening. My strategy modifications relying on the season, with my newest involving a jar of creamy peanut butter and a block of cheese. This nutty pasta is a dream to prepare dinner, requiring only a handful of pantry staples and one pot. Industrially produced peanut butter anchors a creamy sauce swathed in umami. Accentuated by a great, salty Parmesan, these noodles recall these tacky peanut-butter crackers you possibly can all the time discover in a freeway merchandising machine. They additionally occur to be an excellent dinner for one, whether or not you’re on the street or at your desk. Most nights, I like slurping these noodles hunched over my laptop computer, a glass of pink wine in attain, my canine sleeping to my proper.
