Pasta solo

A handful of years ago I was at my local Barnes & Noble, standing in my comfort zone and perusing cookbooks. I heard a weathered voice behind me say, "Say...do you ever make noodles?" I turned to find an old man with hunched shoulders eagerly awaiting my answer, as though we were old acquaintances. "Uh, well...no. I like pasta, though." Over the course of the next few minutes, we struck up a conversation, this Italian grandpa and me. He lived alone but made noodles every week. It's the easiest thing to make - "the key is to make sure the dough is homogenous," I remember him saying. He liked his TV shows and they kept him company. He had seen my Obama pin on my purse and let me know he was voting in that direction. And then he told me a joke about Bill and Hillary Clinton, very quietly: "Remember when President Clinton said 'I never had sexual relations with that woman'? He wasn't lying; he was talking about his wife!"

Now that I've gone on to make noodles, I think of that guy sometimes and realize how right he was about homogeneous dough. It's pretty much the only thing you have to worry about.

It's also good to let things rest; the dough should sit for about an hour before you put it through rollers, and the pasta sheets should rest for 10 minutes or so before placing them through the cutters.

We ate some for dinner on Sunday with our Cacio e Pepe recipe, but then I saved some for a solo dinner the next night. I thought of Old Itali-man again and how perhaps, somewhere in Spokane, he was slurping up some noodles by himself, too.