As I labored over tonight's dinner, I kept thinking of a phrase from reality-tv cooking shows: "Even good cooks have bad days in the kitchen." (I think Alton Brown says this most often, when sending The Next Iron Chef contestants packing.) Tonight was an example of a pretty good cook having a pretty awful time of it in the kitchen.
I had high hopes for the meal: pasta with dark red duck sauce, a Mark Bittman recipe. Plus, we had something to celebrate; we learned today that one of my poems has been nominated by the journal Ploughshares for a Pushcart Prize. We planned to make homemade pasta, and this afternoon I decided to go a step further and shape the pieces into farfalle. What could go wrong?
Things started out well--before Jim came home, I placed two duck legs in a skillet and began the long process of cooking them over low heat. Jim came in, made egg pasta dough, then let it rest for an hour. So far so good. The problems began when the dough was ready--suddenly everything needed attention at once, and there weren't enough hands to do it all. Or at least not to do it all gracefully.
Jim took over cooking the onions, reducing the wine for the sauce, and shredding the cooked duck meat, while I struggled to get the pasta rolled out and then cut and formed into those blasted bow-ties. What was I thinking?? In a single night, I had managed to forget everything I know about pasta making. By this point, it was approaching 9 p.m., I was very hangry, and the sauce, when I tasted it, seemed to have only one note (wine, wine, wine). Things spiraled downhill from there, with me telling the bow-tie pasta pieces exactly what I thought of them.
The worst part of the night? The finished product was fantastic. I think the extra half hour of simmering while I cursed at the pasta made all the difference in the sauce. The pasta was horribly misshapen, but delicous, and the sauce was rich, tender, complex... honestly, it was one of the best dishes I've had in recent memory. Which means I have to go through all of this again some other night. Only next time I'll be serving fettuccine.
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