Pasta Prime

Back from doing my laundry at night. Usually I do it around 11 am, but I figured since I wasn't sleeping anyway and the laundramat is open 24 hours, what the hell.

I've also cleaned out my fridge of leftover pasta. Which brings me to a weird thought:

The evolution of leftover pasta is an interesting one. Pasta is not really a food that becomes leftover well (the best leftover food is pizza, the second best is Chinese food). For one thing, pasta is only really good when it is hot and soft, straight from the pot. Mix in sauce and parmeson and it's a wonderful meal (which I always invariably make too much of, thus leading to leftovers).

Refridgerated pasta is, on the other hand, not quite as good. For one thing, it's cold. Reheating it in the microwave does it some good, but it's not quite the same as it was. For one thing, there's always some pasta that will stay cold, no matter how long you nuke it. For another thing, something happens to some of the pasta in the fridge: it becomes hard. So hard, it'll chip your tooth.

So, perhaps on the first day of pasta leftovers, you eat some it. Then you put it back and the next day, more of it becomes hard. So you leave it in there and forget about it and it no longer becomes leftovers, it becomes That Thing In The Fridge That You Move Aside to Get At The Tortillas. Cold and hard, it has ceased to be pasta. It is, if you'll forgive the pun, antipasta.

Now, suppose you get hungry for pasta again. You don't want leftovers, you want it hot and fresh, so you make a new batch. And, of course, there is more than you can eat, so you put tin foil on that and stick it in the fridge and four weeks later, you have four dishes of cold, hard leftovers. You can't reach the tortillas anymore. Every time you open the fridge, they seem to taunt you.

Finally, I got sick of it and decided tonight was the night to be rid of them. I removed the tin foil from each one and tossed it in the trash. The worse ones were the ones where the pasta had started to turn blue.

So: beware of leftover pasta. Be sure only to make the correct amount of pasta for you or anyone who eats with you. Leftover pasta is not your friend.