STRESS-RELIEVING COOKING AND OTHER INSPIRATIONS

Cooking used to come so naturally to me. I used to spend hours on allrecipes.com, using the ingredient list search engine for that night's dinner inspiration, reading reviews, and dreaming of ways to personalize it, dashes of this and that from my pantry to make it my own. If I liked a recipe, I would copy it down carefully in a notebook, with notes in the margins on how to even better it for next time.

These days, my refrigerator is rarely even half full and I'm content eating cup of noodles and other scraps and things for the day's meals. It's only when I'm really inspired, have a dinner party to cook for, or really stressed, that I'll break out the apron and break in the kitchen. Tonight is one of those nights.


I'm making an inventive marinara sauce with cajun sausages, mushrooms, garlic, onion and peas. The noodles are all wrong though - asian noodles, the only thing in my kitchen resembling penne. We'll see how that goes.

I did want to share one of my all time favorite recipes here, and it's from Ruth Riechl's glorious Comfort Me with Apples, sequel to Tender at the Bones - a memoir series from the editor of Gourmet magazine. She describes her youth with succinct liveliness, and splatters the pages with the most precious recipes and stories. This one's called "Danny's Lemon Pasta":

1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
1 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 pound fresh egg fettucine
2 tsp finely grated fresh lemon zest
salt
freshly ground black pepper
freshley grated Parmesan cheese

Melt the butter in a deep, heavy 12-inch skillet and stir in the cream and lemon juice. Remove the heat and keep it warm and covered.

Cook the pasta in a large pot of salted boiling water until al dente, 2 to 3 minutes. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta cooking liquid and drain the pasta in a colander. Add the pasta to the skillet with the lemon zest and 2 tablespoons of the pasta cooking liquid and toss well. (Add more pasta cooking liquid 1 tablespoon at a time, if necessary, to thin the sauce.)

Season the pasta with salt and pepper and serve with Parmesan cheese.

Enjoy.