For example.

This was our second attempt at trenette, the Genoese pasta traditionally served with potatoes, green beans, and pesto. Based on Giuliano Bugiali’s instructions, we’d adjusted our dough to include a mix of whole wheat and 00 white flours, rolled it thinner than last time, and gotten a crinkled roller to cut just one side of each noodle. We also decreased the amount of garlic in our pesto, which we made with basil from our porch.

It was hot and humid in our kitchen, so even sprinkled liberally with semolina, the ultra-thin noodles stuck together when piled in little nests. We hung them to rest on wire coat hangers instead, which worked pretty well. We cut up potatoes and green beans from our farm share, and boiled an enormous pot of salted water. The potatoes took about six minutes to cook. The green beans took about two minutes. We figured the pasta would take one or two.

Being that thin and that fresh, they took about thirty seconds to cook. And removing each strand of pasta off a coat hanger and putting it into the water took more than a minute. In other words, after an entire afternoon of cooking, we had mushy pasta.

Delicious, perfectly-sauced, mushy pasta.

Another thirty or sixty years of practice and we’ll wonder how anyone could find this difficult.

I visited Rabelais on Middle Street, which is dedicated to books on food & drink. Paradise! I was eager to see what they had in the way of books on pasta. As I’ve mentioned before, there seems to be scant information on pasta making. I ended up buying two books with some chapters on making various shapes and types of pasta: Bugialli on Pasta by Giuliano Bugialli and The Splendid Table by Lynne Rosetto Kasper. I spent some time yesterday afternoon reading through some of it and there’s lots of great information.

While trying to find Longfellow Books on Monument Way, I ended up in Cunningham Books in Monument Square. The owner says this happens often. I also stumbled into a used book store on Congress street, but can’t remember the name! All I know is that there’s a giant bigfoot model to the right when you walk into the place. [Editor: Mr. Bookdwarf says that the place is Green Hand Books. Thanks!]

I can’t wait to get back up to Portland, both to eat and to find more books!

Trenette Genovese

I’m on a quest to make all of the different types of pasta that I can at home. Coincidentally one of my favorite summer dishes is Trenette Genovese that I discovered in Mario’s Molto Italiano a few years back; it’s a Ligurian dish of pasta, pesto, potatoes, and green beans. Already having made some pesto earlier in the week, I had at hand some small potatoes from my farm share and thought I had some snap peas from the farmers market to subsitute for the green beans. Turns out they were shelling peas! Oh well, I used them anyway with good results. I ended up with the alliterative dish of Pasta with Pesto, Peas, and Potatoes.

I’m discovering that there is not a lot of information on how to make various types of pasta. Pasta dough recipes flourish, but instructions on making the shapes are elusive. Trenette is a narrow flat pasta similar to linguine. I decided to try my hand at hand cut noodles. After making the dough by hand and letting it rest, I used the Kitchen Aid attachment to roll out the dough to pretty thin sheets. I dusted them generously with semolina and folded them loosely before cutting into strips with my largest knife. The trick was not letting the humid kitchen make the dough stick together.

Then it was a simple matter of boiling the water and throwing in the potatoes first. I decided it would be simpler to boil everything together. I waited until the potatoes were close to done, threw in the pasta for a minute or two and added the peas, which just needed a minute themselves. Drained it all and added pesto and of course some parmesan on top. The picture above is of the finished dish. It was delicious last night and tasted great served cold for my lunch today!

• The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone: A really strong debut novel written from the perspective of a 17 year old in a juvenile detention center. Jacob narrates his romance with Andrea; their romance is conducted through eye rolls, and stolen moments in a place with no privacy. She’s certainly a writer to watch.
• Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik: The 6th book in the Temeraire series finds Laurence and Temeraire exiled in Australia. One of my favorite series, it’s Patrick O’Brian with dragons. The historical details make the exploration of Australia all the more interesting. I wish I had read it slower, now that I have to wait a year for another!
• Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky: Dermansky excels at writing those characters whom if you met in real life, you might find exasperating at first but you find yourself liking the  more you know them. Marie is just out of prison, a live-in babysitter for a childhood friend–only they’re not really friends as it turns out–and she makes some odd choices.
• West of Here by Jonathan Evison: Okay, I really  really really liked this book, but wasn’t sure how to review it. I loved his previous novel All About Lulu and was not disappointed with this book. I won’t explain the complicated plot here. Just go read it when it comes out. I promise you’ll love it.

Mary Roach knows. In Packing for Mars, she goes on board with space monkeys, watches video of austronaut auditions, reads archives of isolation experiments and studies of what happens when you put three people in a small room for a week and don’t let them change their clothes. She eats meals designed by veterinarians for minimal excretory output. And yes, she visits the center where astronauts train to use the space-commode.

As with Stiff and Bonk, her earlier books about death and sex, Roach answers questions most of us aren’t quite brave enough to ask. The story is a combination of amazing, hilarious, and amazingly hilarious. The chapter on space bathroom technology alone is worth the price of admission.