I’ve eaten my whole plate. Like my mother told me to do back when I was four.
When making dinner last night, I looked into the fridge and found a small bunch of asparagus from Andi’s. Chopped into small chunks. I sliced up a large garlic clove, paper thin, and added them to the asparagus chunks in a skillet coated with a spritz of avocado oil, sprinkled with sea salt and Italian spices. Sautéing the asparagus and garlic till they were seared brown. Then I added a pinch of white sesame seeds as decoration.
But that didn’t seem like enough for the three of us, but enough to add to something else.
There was dried spaghetti, artisanally packaged, and a jar of sauce I paid eleven dollars for. I put a large pot of water on to boil the spaghetti and dumped the sauce in a smaller pot to warm over low heat.
But that wasn’t enough.
So I got out a package of tofu, and squeezed out the water with the white and green plastic press made for this purpose, which takes several minutes to get the block of tofu from a loose gel to a harder block of curd that can be cubed. Then I tossed the tofu cubes into a bowl with liberal sprinkling of cornstarch and nutritional yeast, salt and pepper, and a little sesame oil. Then, I fried the tofu in a skillet while the pasta water boiled, the spaghetti sauce warmed and the asparagus waited off to the side.
But that wasn’t enough.
So I chopped cucumbers, a pair of rainbow carrots, one blood red, the other yellow, a half-dozen and then added them to a pile of leaves torn from two heads of bibbed lettuce in our nice salad bowl, hand painted black with vivid red tomatoes on green vines. To spruce it up, I added some tangles of radish sprouts and dressed it in a mustard/balsamic vinaigrette dressing I made on the spot.
But that wasn’t enough.
So I toasted thick slices of homemade sesame sourdough loaf I baked that morning, coated with French butter. When the spaghetti was ready, I drained it into a colander in the sink and sprinkled the hot nest of noodles with some extra virgin olive oil, working it in using scalded fingers. I didn’t have my spaghetti spoon of over 20 years because I had carelessly broken it a week ago taking it out of the dishwasher. So I plucked the noodles a handful at a time on three separate plates, added the asparagus, added the tofu, ladled a spoonful of sauce over the mass, shredded some cheese on top, a tong-full of salad next to it on each plate along with the buttered toast, and served it to Kerry and Jules.
I ate it all without savoring a single bite.