Sliced Trees and Dead Words

30 - A dangerous combination.

- WOLFE -

I've eaten a lot of pasta over the years. Cooked it a bunch of times too, considering how easy it is to carry the packaged, dehydrated shit and jars of bland sauce in the back of your car, and how quick it is to cook over a campfire or portable stovetop.

I've never attempted to make it from scratch like I have this afternoon, and I'm understanding why. The packaged stuff is easy, unmessy, and requires a lot less focus than this fresh stuff does. All the measuring, and kneading, rolling and cutting. Even after I found Luna's motorised pasta machine tucked away in one of her bottom cupboards, where you just have to throw everything in, wait for it to knead itself, then start squeezing the spaghetti out through little holes, I felt like I was making a colossal mistake by trying to surprise her with a home-cooked meal from scratch.

I left her work this morning so thoroughly impressed with her and how kind and generous she is with people so easily disregarded by the majority of the population, that I stopped by a supermarket on the way home and looked up a recipe on my phone for a simple pasta and sauce I could make and have ready by the time she got home from work. But stupid me didn't bother to actually read the recipe beyond the ingredients list, so bought everything and a rolling pin, figuring that was how you make pasta, then faced significant difficulties when I got to the 'pass the dough through the pasta machine' portion of the recipe.

I went searching through Luna's kitchen trying to find one and actually found two, including the all-in-one, electronic one I am now using, and the disassembled, manual one I couldn't even begin to figure out how to put back together. But I had to start again because my first batch was so over-kneaded by this point that it was starting to feel like a rock. It was a good thing I bought double of everything from the supermarket for this exact novice-working-beyond-his-capabilities-and-bound-to-fuck-it-up reason. I read the instruction book for the machine carefully, followed the recipe perfectly, and even looked up a YouTube video of someone using this specific model first so I could make sure I was doing it right.

A couple hours later, I'd made four batches of spaghetti which were current drying out across the bench, the counter top (apart from the section containing said pasta) had been cleared completely and cleaned, and I had a fresh sauce bubbling away and 'reducing' on the stovetop. I'd had a few tasters of it, and after debating back and forth between the recipe and my better judgment about adding a teaspoon of sugar to my precious sauce, which just made no sense to me because it was a savoury dish with quite a bit of salt already, it was actually tasting pretty good, and I was excited to see Luna's face when she came home and tasted it, too.

I feel like a proper house husband, spending hours in the kitchen cooking and cleaning while my wife is busy at work making the money. The sad thing is that the idea of it doesn't even sound awful to me. As long as it was this house and this woman I now hear pulling up outside, I could probably make ten batches of pasta every day for the rest of my life and never tire of it.

It was about five o'clock by the time Luna walked in her front door carrying Medusa, who looked like she was exhausted from her big day out. Medusa, that is. Luna just looked as beautiful as ever, energised even from getting back to her work which she so clearly loves, and I watched as her eyes grew wide as she took in the sights and smells of her kitchen. For a second I thought she was going to get upset at me for taking her offer for me to make myself at home while she was gone literally, but then her dimples arrived and kept me from panicking any longer.

"What's all this?" she asked, putting Medusa down on the couch and walking into her kitchen to observe everything I'd done. I'd even set the table with some white flowers I'd picked from her garden, currently sitting in a beer bottle I'd grabbed from the recycling bin after I was unable to find a vase that didn't look ridiculous with only two small flowers in it.