The Goon Line 017: Quarantine pasta

We spent this past Saturday with friends who were visiting for the weekend, and our time together obviously featured food — both in consumption and conversation. And at dinner that evening, we stumbled into talking about Quarantine Meals. What we’d prepared and consumed during that first weird pandemic year, how we learned about our own eating habits and if we had exhausted our tastebuds with certain items — or if those tastebuds still held on to bad memories of that time.

Our friend told us that she now has a very specific aversion to a very specific food, because they received a whole one in the very first weeks of March 2020. (It was a ham. I hope that’s not revealing too many identifying details.)

I brought up a recipe that we started making almost exactly four years ago right now. It did not fail us then, and we still, after all of that, have not yet gotten sick of it. In this household it is known as “Quarantine Pasta.” (We also started calling Mango White Claw “Quarantine Water,” and I can’t drink it anymore because of the memories it summons.)

I’m not great in the kitchen; my best skill is “knife.” I don’t have the the improvisational chops necessary to go with the flow of poorly measured ingredients or coincident timing of different dishes. But I have lately, again, been trying to use a vegetable, protein and carbohydrate to make something that resembles an edible dish contained inside of one receptacle. My kitchen space and skills are both limited, but working inside of constraints, wherever and however they exist, is where I feel most comfortable in exercising my creativity — or, in certain contexts, embracing my lack of it.

If it’s easy, reasonably beneficial and I’m not impossibly tired of it yet, I will continue to do it. A maxim for my recipes and for my life.