A Simple Spaghetti Recipe

One job I think I'd be good at is the guy who texts you when your loved one dies. I've got compassion, and I'm tech savvy.

Another thing I'm good at is spaghetti. Spaghetti seems like it would be difficult, but it isn't. Just fill a big pot about halfway with water, and set it on high on the stove till it boils over. Then, add a tablespoon of salt, stir it in, and let it come back to temp. Next, dump a box of spaghetti into the pot, and when it starts to get out of control with water about to spill out, dial back the fire to medium or medium low. Don't forget to set a timer for ten or eleven minutes, which is when it'll be done.

While all that is going on, or before if you're organized, squeeze some minced garlic out of the bottle into a mixing bowl. Use more than you think you'll need, because any amount of garlic is the right amount of garlic, especially if you use a lot. Don't tell Matthew Beaudin you're using bottled garlic, or you'll never hear the end of it. Add olive oil and mix it all together.

If you're lucky, like me, your wife will have left some tomatoes on the counter she was planning to eat later. Stick those in a pan with some butter and olive oil, and cook them till you think they're done, and the stove is covered in splattered oil. Add those to the bowl of olive oil and garlic.

Once the timer goes off at ten or eleven minutes, use a pair of tongs to fish out a spaghetti to make sure it's cooked the way you like. Put it on a paper towel next to the stove before sticking it in your mouth so that you don't burn yourself or end up with too many strands. If it's good, turn off the fire and grab the pot of spaghetti with your bare hands or oven mitts, and pour it through a spaghetti strainer. Make sure all the water's gone and transfer the spaghetti to a big mixing bowl. Pour the olive oil, garlic, and tomatoes onto the bowled spaghetti, and you're pretty much done except for the eating. Some people add cheese, but I don't see why. Cheese should only be eaten on pizza.

If, while eating spaghetti, you happen to get a text, that could be me with that message about your loved one. Wait till you're done eating, as there's nothing you can do about it now.

A Potato for the Russet of Us

My wife and I like to watch programs that have a negative impact on your soul, like Dateline. That’s how I came up with the idea to dig a hole in the backyard using the shovel my wife keeps by my office door, fill it with a couple inches of water, take a whole bunch of Benadryl and stand in the hole waiting for a lightning storm. The idea’s a composite of a couple of Idaho-based episodes, both involving the wife murdering her husband, the difference being that in one of the episodes, the wife buries the body in the backyard, and in the other, she shoves him overboard into a lake after feeding him Benadryl on a cold, February morning, and leaves him there to drown. The beauty of my plan is simplicity, and since I am both plotter and victim, no murder is involved.

Not really what I want to do, but I take comfort having a plan in case my life goes south.

We also watch cooking shows, like Top Chef and America’s Culinary Cup. Those shows are more uplifting, with less of a focus on murder and more on not slicing your fingers off in the kitchen. Neither Penny nor I are especially fond of cooking. She enjoys watching them cook, and I enjoy comparing myself to people who know how. I think about the few things I’m competent at making, and what it would take to get from where I am to where I could be on one of those shows. I don’t think I’m even qualified to be in the audience. I can’t imagine how I would begin the journey, other than start life over and go to cooking school, but even then, that still might not be enough.

I decided a while back to concentrate on doing a few foods well, like hot chocolate and Thai iced coffee. BBQ, yes, as long as it’s simple. Mostly chicken and tritip, which don’t take too long. Hot and fast, not low and slow. If you’re into BBQ, you know what I mean.

The other thing I’ve gotten good at, though not good enough to make it to Top Chef, is potatoes. Roasted potatoes, specifically. I’ve been through several generations of improvement since I first started a few years ago. I used to only like red potatoes or Yukon Gold potatoes. Never russets, which technically are the Idaho Potato. That was before we lived here. Now that we’re here, I figured I better get with the russet, so I did. I read somewhere you should boil them first, and that helped. I won’t go through all the gyrations, but I eventually dropped boiling as unnecessarily complicating the process. Same for a five minute zap in the microwave. Extra steps no bueno.

A bit about the gear. A cast iron pan.

I slice my potatoes into quarters, partly because I like how they look, but also because these are not baked potatoes, for crying out loud. I season with garlic salt.

What about proper lubrication? Butter? Oil? Vegetable oil? Olive oil? I couldn’t decide, so I went with both butter and vegetable oil, but now that we’re talking about it, I realize I inadvertently switched back to olive oil, and lots of it. No big deal, the important point is that it’s both butter and oil, not one or the other. If you can’t decide on a thing, do both.

At a certain moment, not sure when, I decided to flip the potatoes halfway through the cook, to make the surface crispy. That seemed to work pretty well for a while, but then I noticed I was ending up with burnt potatoes. Instead of halfway through, I adjusted to about 85% of the way through, but they were still getting burnt.

Then it hit me. Crank up the heat to 425ºF instead of 350ºF. Go shorter. And don’t flip.

That’s where we are today. And it works. At least once.

I could look this up on the internet and settle on a repeatable formula that’s better than mine. Maybe that would land me on Top Chef, but let’s face it, nothing I am ever likely to do between now and when lightning strikes me in my shallow pit in the yard is going to be enough to get me past the initial rejection letter. I doubt I’ll even apply in the first place. Why should I? Until they launch a program for people like me, let’s call it Worst Chef Survivor, I’ll just stick to the recipes I know.

Coffee Can’t Kill You, It Can Only Make You Stronger

There are things I know are bad for me, like most food and drink. I react to just about everything, including the liquid diet my world-renowned gastroenterologist, Dr Mark Pimentel, put me on for three weeks about twenty years ago. This state of affairs makes me perpetually discouraged, with an attitude of, "might as well make it even worse."

Everybody knows coffee is bad for people with sensitive constitutions like mine. I didn't even start to drink it till I was 35 years old. Hated the stuff. But then one day, having recently experienced my first full-blown panic attack (without knowing what it was), I figured, heck, let's see what coffee can do. I was working at an ad agency, and there was a young man named Rob who'd glommed onto me, not yet figuring out I couldn't do anything for him. He convinced me to walk to Starbucks with him and get a Mocha Frappuccino. That drink made me feel good for a while. It became a weekend ritual. Once a week, I'd have a Mocha Frappuccino and drive down Pacific Coast Highway from LA to San Diego, or out to Palm Springs.

Eventually, the weekend ritual became a daily ritual, sometimes multiple times daily. The panic attacks didn't go away, but they didn't get worse, either.

Every now and then, I'd quit coffee, sometimes for as long as five years. But I always came back. Coffee FOMO. Never mind it makes me feel worse, physically. Emotionally, it reminds me of what life must be like for people whose digestive tracts aren't ruined. I still don't like the taste.

Cold brew is supposed to be gentle on your stomach. So I ordered a bag of Goat Locker from Bonefrog Coffee Company. That's the coffee roaster owned by Tim Cruickshank, retired Navy SEAL. I don't have a sophisticated coffee palate, but when I opened the bag, it smelled and looked delicious. Here's what I did with it.

Measured out 180g and made an extra course grind. Poured it into a standard 1L French press. Filled to the top with water, covered it, and stuck it in the fridge for about 16 hours. A 1:5 ratio of coffee to water. Once that was over, I took it out of the fridge, pressed down the plunger, then poured through a Melitta gizmo with #2 filter into a quart Mason jar. Now we've got cold brew concentrate that you can store in the fridge for up to a week, I'm told.

To make my favorite concoction, a sort of Louis version of Thai iced coffee, I pour a couple of ounces of concentrate into a small Mason jar, and I mix it with two coffee spoons of sweetened condensed milk that I already put into the jar. Lick the spoon. Add whole milk, a bit over 1:1 ratio. The coffee concentrate is strong. You can add as much milk as you like. Then, enough ice to top off the jar. That's it. Simple. Next, I'm going to try it with coconut milk, because maybe it's the milk that's causing me grief.

They say if you do the same thing over and over, expecting different results, it's called dog logic. Doing the same thing over and over, knowing you'll get the same results, and knowing you won't like it, is what I call Louis logic. No matter how much it might seem like coffee will kill me if I go on like this, the truth is that it won't. My digestive tract is already ruined, and there's not much else I can do that will make it worse.

Might as well wake up and suffer the coffee.