I used to have a funny relationship with pasta. I loved it almost above all food, and yet I was frequently too scared to cook it.

I think it all went a bit belly-up for me after visiting Italy for the first time, when I realized just how bloody marvelous it can be. It wasn’t all bolognaise and carbonara after all. No… it was subtle and simple; gentle on the palette one moment and then an explosion of flavor another. It was often less about the sauce and more about the starch. It was sophisticated yet with an air of having been nonchalantly thrown together by mama in the kitchen. It was almost relentlessly wonderful and far beyond anything I could conjure in my kitchen.

Or so I thought.

Then one day I had nothing much left to cook with. The sum total of the ingredients at my disposal was a handful of old tomatoes (wrinkled and worn by neglect), some rather tired looking parsley in the crisper of the fridge and a handful of garlic cloves (which seem to replenish themselves when you’re not looking, don’t you find?). And, naturally, a packet of pasta lurking at the back of the pantry (linguine, in this case).

I don’t know if what followed constituted anything worthy of an Italian table, but it tasted great.

And that, after all, is all that matters.

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