Stories

I love pasta and seafood together, especially shrimp and pasta. This dish is dressed fra diavolo, like a devilish friar. Supposedly named after a Neapolitan guerrilla fighter, this recipe is a rathertraditional take on the southern Italian specialty. A little heat withpeperoncino (red pepper flakes) along with the red color of the tomatosauce give the meal a hellish flair. Pair with wine and no one canresist.

Make sure you start cooking the linguine in time so thatit is ready to go once the sauce has finished cooking. You don't needto drain or rinse the pasta. Simply use tongs to transfer the cookedlinguine directly to the sauce, which will better adhere to the starchypasta.

“This will make you feel awake, and healthy.” The promise made to me as I ordered a 3 day Blueprint Cleanse online recently. The healthy part I believed, but awake? How could 3 straight days of just juice and no solids make me feel anything that I aspire to feel in my waking hours, especially if I’m not even allowed coffee, or as it was gently explained to me, ‘you can have coffee, but you’ll feel better if you don’t have it.’ Marketing disguised as self-motivation proved extremely effective, and sure enough, on Day 3 of the ‘Cleanse,’ I felt extremely awake and alert (albeit short-winded) on a run up Runyon Canyon, (truthfully more of a slow jog behind my brother whose college fraternity has apparently turned him into a drill sergeant.)

But I wasn’t starving, and I wasn’t lethargic.

I am not somebody who can go without food for four hours, let alone three days. I have never been successful on a diet, if you don’t count when I was five years old and had to stop eating French Toast in order to lower my cholesterol. These days I have a genuine interest in being healthy, but not exactly a full-fledged allegiance. So the Blueprint Cleanse, a local New York company, seemed perfect for me.

First, here’s what I didn’t read: anything that included a vampire or a werewolf. I did read about one ghost—in Anne Tyler’s The Beginner's Goodbye.

Much of my summer reading focused, as usual, on mysteries: I read all three of Gillian Flynn’s novels, starting with this summer’s blockbuster Gone Girl and then working my way through her two earlier ones — Dark Places and the even darker Sharp Objects. Three clever and engaging picks were Joanne Dobson’s academic mystery Cold and Pure and Very Dead, Harry Dolan’s pomo noir tale Bad Things Happen, and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (just as riveting as her other novels).  

I devoted two nights to James Renner’s The Man from Primrose Lane, which veered from noir to sci fi, and made me think longingly of the relatively simpler physics of The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffinegger, a past summer’s selection. It did occur to me that some might find my liking for mysteries obsessive when I realized that I was reading Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters while watching an episode of Inspector Lewis. Mysteries, however, with their murders, trickery, and restoration of order, remain an excellent antidote to articles on education (I read roughly 500 of those).

It is one of life’s little truths that the simplest dishes are usually the most satisfying.  While I often dream about elaborate feasts consisting of all sorts of exotic dishes and breathtaking desserts, the recipes that I come back to again and again are the ones that were introduced to me as a child.

A paper-thin slice of veal flash-fried in a bit of olive oil with garlic and oregano. Creamy arborio rice served with a pat of butter and a handful of freshly-grated parmiggiano. Apple or peach slices dipped quickly in homemade wine and then gobbled up.

Simple yet completely satisfying, these are the dishes that guided me through childhood, and guide me still. I’m not sure what it is about these dishes that makes them so important to me. Maybe it’s that these dishes remind me of home. And maybe it’s that they are the dishes that I associate with the people that have had the greatest impact on my life: my parents and grandparents. Somehow, I am comforted knowing that these are the foods that they ate as children.