La Cucina

"I'm a man's ideal of a perfect meal, right down to the demitasse." -- Comden and Green


I'm sitting at home in our windows-on-three-walls-plus-a-skylight den, watching a torrential downpour all around me. Sundays are long, slow days in these parts: I wake up at 8, spend the morning cooking, have dinner with my family at 1:00, then spend the rest of the day lazing around the house.

Sunday dinner -- when the whole extended family gathers at someone's house for an early afternoon meal -- is one of the few true Italian traditions we strictly honor. It happens every week, it's always a feast, and there's no excuse for missing it. Seriously. If you don't have to be at work, at school, at somebody's wedding, or at somebody's funeral, you'd better be there or risk the wrath of a dozen angry paisanos. And though I've been called an anti-feminist because of it, I delight in putting on an apron once a week, lugging out my great-grandmother's gravy pot and cleaver, and preparing this meal for my family. A normal, non-holiday Sunday dinner should include a little cheese and cured meat for antipasto, a pasta course with homemade gravy, some sort of meat (often cooked in the gravy), at least two vegetables, a simple salad, and, later on, coffee and cake. My grandmother prepared the same plain-yet-delicious homemade tomato gravy every week, but after learning how to work a whole meal's worth of nutrients into a pasta dish during college, I prefer to mix things up a little. This was today's offering: a flavorful pasta light enough for summer yet rich enough for a rainy day.

Penne with Goat Cheese and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

1 pound penne, pennette, rigatoni, or similar pasta

1 jar (8-10 oz) sun-dried tomatoes in oil, finely chopped or food-processed, plus 2 tbsp of the oil

1 small onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 box Pomi strained tomatoes

½ cup white wine

2 heaping tbsp herbed goat cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

Sautee the onion in the sun-dried tomato oil until nearly transparent, then add the garlic and sun-dried tomatoes and sautee until the garlic is lightly browned. Slowly add the wine and reduce for five minutes, then add the Pomi, stir, and cover. Cook on medium heat for one hour, stirring periodically. Pour over cooked pasta, crumble the goat cheese on top, and toss until the goat cheese melts into the sauce. Serves six hungry people plus leftovers.

Born Again

"Oh, you think you'll grow up by the time you're twenty-two, but I know better." -- The Kitchen Cabinet

I've started many new things lately: a new job, post-college life, the real world, and, as of 6:30 this morning, my twenty-second year on this planet. Thus, why not celebrate by re-starting this record of my life? I haven't written much lately because I tend to think of my life as boring, but since I'm a young artist/inventor/New Yorker who spends eight hours a day curing cancer, I should be able to find something to blog about. Maybe my life is truly boring, but I'll let you decide that for yourself.

I'm at work now, actually, and unlike most of the government/HIPAA/institutionally protected things I do here, I'm allowed to tell you what I'm up to today. I'm sitting in a windowless basement trying to pay attention to a training program for people who manage research studies here. Unfortunately, I've been managing research studies here for over a month now and most of the information being presented today is completely redundant. My PalmPilot battery is dead, I've already answered my slew of Happy Birthday texts, and all of my patients' schedules are plotted for the next two weeks, so I decided to pull out my Moleskine and start writing. I'll post this later when I return to civilization.

And because it's that sort of morning, I'm going to write about my yarn obsession. I'm a crocheter, and despite my college loans and meager salary, I have a nasty habit of buying yarn I don't need, yarn with no purpose, yarn with no project in mind. To make matters worse, I'm a yarn snob as well as a yarn hoarder: I only knit with silks and angoras and cottons and quality wools, which are all decidedly harder on the wallet than Wal-Mart wool and Lion Brand. And of course, every time I vow to not purchase another skein until I'm once again able to confine my existing stash to a single box, I find an unbelievable sale on a fiber so gorgeous that I simply can't pass it up.

I recently placed a pretty massive order to Webs and purchased enough taupe cabled cotton to make a sweater (which is almost finished), dark green cotton to make a sleeveless tunic, orange nylon ribbon to make a Mobius scarf, and tan bamboo tape to make a shawl of undetermined dimensions. I promised myself that I'd work through some of my stash before I even look at yarn again, and for a good two weeks, I stayed away from all of my favorite clearance spots.

Two nights ago, my fingers acted entirely of their own accord and pointed my keyboard towards Knit Picks. I spotted a sampler of gorgeous laceweight in stunning colors at a price of approximately $1.00 per 100 yards. I placed an order. I even ordered a pair of chunky knitting needles even though I don't really knit. Question is now: what do I make with it? How many thin scarves and pairs of gloves can I possibly knit before I'm sick of them?

At least laceweight is light enough to carry around without a problem. I'm getting tired of commuting with three-quarters of a sweater and an arsenal of needles every day.

Why can't the English?

"There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years." -- Alan Jay Lerner, from My Fair Lady

Though I often fall in love with things I don't and can never have, a regional accent isn't one of them. I am the proud owner of a bona-fide Brooklyn accent, and though it tends to fade when I'm away from my family for long stretches of time, it never completely vanishes. It's so much a part of me that it took me 3/4ths of my life to realize it even existed.

The New Yawk dye-uh-leckt is so mundane in my neighborhood that I didn't know I possessed it until I was seventeen, when I went shopping in the mall at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I was perusing racks of sneakers and a sales associate came over to help me out. We started chatting, then she asked what part of New York City I was from.

"How'd you know I'm from New York City?"
"Well, you have an accent."
"No I don't!"
"I'm afraid you do."

Sure, I'm a New Yorker, but it never occurred to me that I actually sounded like one. The New York accent was reserved for Barbra Streisand, Fran Drescher, gangsters, and the cast of My Cousin Vinny, not a Catholic school girl of above-average intelligence!

I thought that saleswoman was absolutely insane until I started college at the melting pot of the Ivy League and discovered that everyone could spot that I was a city native after only a few words. (Well, other native New Yorkers couldn't tell, but that's expected.) Three years later, my closest college friends told me that they had written me off as unintelligent when we first met because of my accent, and were honestly surprised when they realized that I was a skilled writer and competent engineer!

And though (or, perhaps, because) I speak with the most unabashedly uneducated-sounding dialect imaginable, I'm completely obsessed with the elegance of the British accent. Who knows, maybe I watched too much Heckle and Jeckle as a kid and enjoy British TV shows starring dashing Americans a little too much now, but to me there's something intriguing about the contrast between British English and Brooklyn English. I tried to write a short story about my feelings on the matter when I was a senior in high school, but failed miserably. You know why? My inner monologue speaks in Brooklynese, therefore I can never make my British characters sound as graceful as they should.

Take tonight, for instance. I was standing around eating hors d' oeuvres after a seminar, and paused to note that the piece of chicken in my hand was prepared strangely. The British man standing next to me seemed to think along the same lines.

My remark: Did they put the bone back in after they cooked the thing?
His remark: It is a bit dodgy, don't you reckon?

I wouldn't trade my r-dropping, dipthong-riddled, dental, nasal pronunciations for anything, but oh, to be able to speak, write, and think with such poise!

For all time.

"It will be a love story, for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name is Viola." -- Tom Stoppard, from Shakespeare in Love

I am Ashley, a writer, illustrator, scientist, and innovator. I'm all of that in my own head, at least; in reality, I'm an overextended engineering student with no time to draw and a case of writer's block so debilitating that I've started to wonder if the impulse has vanished for good. I'm a blogger in both realms, but due to changing tastes, my aforementioned lack of inspiration, and the last incarnation of this blog getting deleted by my host because I had all but abandoned it, this will be my fourth stab at it.

My writer's block is still in full swing, but since I'm taking a fiction writing class and need to generate a good sixty pages of original material during the next three months, I'm forcing myself to get over it. That means journaling, that means recording my dreams, that means going with whatever inspiration strikes regardless of how infuriating it is. Henry Roth had his writer's block for sixty years, and I'll be damned if I go down the same way.

Only one thing in life seems to be inspiring me, so, in accordance with my new philosophy, I'm working with it. If you were wondering where my Quote of the Day came from, I tried to cure my writer's block by watching movies about writer's block. One of those was Shakespeare in Love, in which William Shakespeare meets a woman who inspires him to write Romeo and Juliet. They love the first and last kind of love, then she marries some other bastard and sails off to America. Yeah, it's an unhappy ending, but though he and his soulmate couldn't live happily ever after, Shakespeare ends the movie by saying that "She will be my heroine for all time. And her name is... Viola." He then starts writing Twelfth Night.

This story has a point. Though I thought I had written myself out of wanting to write about the closest thing I've ever met to my soulmate, he keeps begging me for the chance to make him my hero for all time. Ergo, a character I've been sitting on for five years, Bryan, is no longer a struggling actor with daddy issues. He is now staring down at a name tag tacked to his shirt as he serves people drinks. He keeps casting glances at a woman across the room, wondering if she notices that he's wearing pink because she once suggested it.

She doesn't notice, but maybe, secretly, she does.

Stay tuned, and wish me luck.