Pasta

How is this pasta’s first appearance?

Pasta meets ALL of the most important criteria for dietary inclusion – read: cheap – yet somehow only ends up on the table maybe once or twice a month. I think it’s because I’m skeptical of carbs. Or not so much skeptical as just astoundingly uninformed. Or not so much astoundingly uninformed as just I’m an idiot. To wit – for a while I had zero idea how pasta was made, or even that pasta existed outside of boxes. I assumed dehydration was an integral part of pasta creation, that even the restaurants with menus featuring a disorienting amount of Italian words made the pasta (out of, I had no idea…grains?) and immediately sucked the moisture out (with, I had no idea…the sun?) and stored it until I came in a week later and ordered the Spaghetti Bologna.

Idiot.

And to be honest, I still don’t know how pasta gets made. I just know pasta = carbs. Not pasta HAS carbs, pasta IS carbs. Which I think is where my brain just gives up. Because, according to the internet, carbs are bad, but also good, but also fattening, but also necessary, but also they’ll kill you, but also you’ll die without them. Which is difficult for me to wrap my head around. So every carb must be confronted and questioned. Are you worth it? Is there a different, superior carb I could be eating? The hope is that these interrogations will uncover some sort of nutritional hierarchy within the pasta/rice/bread triumvirate that rules over all other carbs, but the reality may be that the margins between them are too thin to really make a difference. Likely it’s a duel between rice and pasta at the top, and I’ve been leaning rice since the Instant Pot came into my house and made perfectly cooked brown rice attainable. Bread is probably at the bottom, but bread is also delicious and unavoidable. The primary non-nutritional difference between rice and pasta is one of supplemental ingredients. Rice with chicken breast and sriracha is a very edible meal, whereas pasta deprived of sauce stays dry and chewy to a point where jaw fatigue becomes a real issue.

So why not use sauce? The math doesn’t add up.

I’m not about to start making pasta sauce from scratch, which leaves me to sort through the roughly five hundred thousand varieties of sauce in the Ethnic Foods aisle of the local Safeway. It sounds like a lot, but really it’s just a battle of Expensive vs Salty vs Alfredo. Alfredo, frankly, isn’t fair. Do I want pulverized tomato or do I want cream and butter and cheese? Every trip to the store is a clash with the natural, or maybe just personal, instinct to surround the organs with blubber. Eliminate Alfredo and you’re left with a host of obvious starter wives and only a few minutes to convince yourself that one of them is worth the commitment. It’s like the Bachelor except if instead of getting engaged, the winner was disemboweled and eaten.

Health is priority number one, and those ornate jars with the words RUSTIC and ORGANIC and NATURAL and SAUCE perched on the top shelf sure are healthy. They’re also seven dollars. Maybe that’s not unreasonable if you’re able to limit yourself to the label-dictated half cup serving size, which itself is maybe not unreasonable if you follow the recommended one cup (cooked) serving size for pasta, which is to say the whole goddamn thing is unreasonable. This is the first time I’ve actually done research for this blog, and I promise it won’t happen again, but one cup of pasta (cooked) topped with one half-cup of sauce comes to just two hundred and sixty calories. That’s a rounding error’s worth of pasta.

One box of pasta (uncooked), one jar of sauce, two servings. It’s about a quarter cup of sauce too much if you’re eating white pasta, but unless you’re impressing a girl or making mac and cheese you should NEVER eat white pasta at home, so you’re gonna want that extra dollop of flair to help combat the cardboard flavor of whole grain noodles. If I’m only getting two meals out of it, a seven dollar price point is way over budget. But as you follow the shelves downward, sugar and sodium levels start to spike and the words PASTE and RAGU start showing up on labels. For a while I rode with Prego Garden Harvest, which managed to be healthy and cheap because it was basically just chunky tomato water. Taste is easily the least important factor in sauce selection, but a man can only eat so many bowls of soggy cardboard. That said, you have to respect the balls on Prego’s flavor development team for greenlighting a jar of liquid tomato burp. At least it’s low sodium.

The correct answer might be Newman’s Own Roasted Garlic, which checks in at a little over three bucks and a little under five grams of sugar and half a gram of sodium, and almost tastes like something you’d want to eat. The garlic provides enough of a pop to smooth over the worst tendencies of the whole grain without being all up in your face about it. Plus the Newman’s Own brand helps charity or something.

And, again, I’m sorry. The death of the Neighbor Steve Report was apparently just the birth of the Detective Cosden Report. But at least it’s a quick one. He called today to tell me he called me yesterday to ask if I’d seen any sign of Neighbor Steve. And the way he said it made it sound like I was on some sort of civilian stakeout, like I’d abandoned my post last night and punishment would be forthcoming. I said I wished I could be more helpful and he was quiet for a few beats, and I wanted to tell him, to help him, that he was on the phone with the neighbor of a man who was no longer a suspect or relevant at all to the investigation, which meant the neighbor was less than irrelevant – a separate data point on a whole other chart. But I didn’t. It was unclear where he fell between Clouseau and Holmes, but he at least knew he had nothing to go on. He finally sighed and told me to let him know if anything changed.

Sure thing.