Sometimes I splash a dry white wine in to deglaze the onions and garlic in their buttery tack, but sometimes lemon juice is all I’ve got, and it does the trick. Sometimes I use minced, sometimes chopped. I’ve done it with fresh clams, round littlenecks choked with sand that must be purged before cooking, their little bodies opening in steam. In all my nine years of making clam pasta, it’s never exactly the same as the bowl that came before. Sometimes you just gotta go with what you’ve got. But I can’t remember how that first bowl tasted, if I used Kraft parmesan or splurged for something nicer. I remembered the shitty can opener that could barely break through the seal of the clam tins, how I cut my finger. Then I remembered the podcast I remembered the boy. Even now, it took me a second to remember when and where my clam pasta ritual started. I can’t remember actually eating the First Clam Pasta though. This was before I made my own recipes up in my head, when I was still learning by absorbing from others. I jotted the recipe in my Notes app and made it for a boy. I heard Chelsea Peretti talking on her podcast nine years ago about a family recipe for super simple clam pasta - was it her mother’s or her grandmother’s? I can no longer recall - using canned clams, a whole onion, white wine, lemon. The origins of the recipe I first used are unexpected. I realized recently I’ve been making clam pasta for almost a decade. There’s no such thing as subtle at Olive Garden. Even the cheese comes with cheese, as you can see from the photo above. It is everything I want it to be, every time, as constant as my love for her, and I know that’s cheesy to say, but we’re little talking about cheese - the food and the general vibe of Olive Garden, which is all cheese literally and figuratively. The love of my life loves Olive Garden, and she has sown a love of Olive Garden into me. They are more like fried mozzarella pillows, and I would indeed like to rest my head upon one. They are not technically mozzarella sticks - in shape or in name. I wish I could say the reason the Olive Garden fried mozzarella didn’t make my ranking of mozzarella sticks in 2019 was due to a matter of taxonomy. You can pick your own metaphor adventure, I think. One thing that’s always the same, and one thing that’s a constant but different every time. Welcome to Messy Kitchen, a Sunday smorgasbord of micro essays about my favorite things I ate this week.
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