Refried pasta

Toast. I’m sure the first hot food I learned to prepare for myself was toast, but that doesn’t count. The second was probably instant ramen: an indulgence, a salty treat.

Pasta comes into the picture soon after ramen. We kept all manner of shapes in the house: penne, fusilli, spaghetti, bowties. I was partial to the latter two. These days, I keep neither in my pantry, opting instead for more sophisticated siblings: bucatini, reginetti. Rigatoni, radiatore.

Dinner was always family style; it was always a family dinner. Carbs, meat, salad, vegetables, give or take. Pasta would sit naked in a bowl, condiments on the side. Sometimes, we’d have a meat sauce — ground beef or pork cooked down with garlic and onion, a jar of red sauce poured in and warmed at the end.

Pesto nights were the best, treasured. Every summer on the farm, we’d grow bushels of basil in a small greenhouse, a converted wing of our barn — “the seedhouse.” I loved watering those plants, loved feeling the basilic air, so humid as to wrap itself around me.

When the basil plants stretched a foot-and-a-half above their four-inch pots, my mother would cut them down and prepare pesto. This happened a few times during the season. Into the Cuisinart with garlic a family friend grew out in the mountains, with pine nuts and parmesan from Costco, and, as she said once when I asked her the recipe, with a beer — not for the pesto, but for the cook.

Fresh pesto is life-affirming. Such wealth, a bowl of the stuff, the centerpiece herb perfuming the house, the table, the texture rough and loose.

You can’t have fresh pesto every night, nor should you.

Most nights, my pasta story was this: scoop from the bowl to my plate, add nutritional yeast, parmesan, soy sauce, enjoy. Side of veg — steamed green beans perhaps, which I ate sometimes by the literal fistful — piece of meat. A pork chop, a steak.

A rare pleasure I enjoyed as a child was pasta refried the next day for lunch or dinner. Hot pan, melt butter, add pasta, cook until warmed through and blistered here and there to crispiness. Apply same yeast, parmesan, soy sauce toppings. Absolutely divine, best with spaghetti, so the curves crisp in place.

I cannot remember the last time I had refried pasta; I reheat it now with sauce or water. I don’t even have yeast in my pantry as I write.

Recently, most pasta I’ve eaten has been sauced with a brothy spinach-tofu situation.

I sauté garlic and yellow onion, add soft tofu, spinach. Seasons change: oregano and cumin, a sweet curry spice mix. Salt and pepper, red and black both. Maybe sweet chili sauce or Valentina hot sauce. Finish with enough pasta water to constitute a sauce, perhaps parmesan or feta. Squeeze a lemon. Add pasta a minute or two before the prescribed cooking time finishes, let it simmer.

I need to go buy butter.