July 09 2004, 12:35 AM Like The Season

We have green pasta, a deep and thick green like fresh wet banana leaves. I expect the stuff to lighten upon cooking, and I am curious to find out by how much. The lights are out in the kitchen now, and it sits on the towel looking nearly black under the dim glow of the desk lamp in the other room.

Pasta Verde is nearly as straight forward as the usual stuff that has happened around here with alarming frequency this summer: in addition to the eggs and the flour, add some amount of cleaned and cooked spinach that has been wrung out a bit. The spinach needs to be chopped, too. A good way to get it into the dough is give the eggs and spinach a turn or four in the food processor, under a stick blender, or some other method of madness and mix the resultant gloop into the flour.

I thought I had enough flour in the dough to keep it dry. This was not the case for the first half of the batch, and the dough was very sticky from all the extra moisture in the spinach. Add more flour, or rolling the stuff will turn into a nightmare of self adhesion, topology, and tears for lost time. Add more flour. Add more flour. You may think the dough is full, but it can take more. I managed to misjudge it; it was still sticky. Liberal dustings of flour helped somewhat, and we managed to get the entire batch cut without too much incident.

Squid ink is an obvious toy to try next. I have not looked into it, but I fully expect to find that a little vial of processed ink can be had or more than an equal amount vanilla extract (even with the war in Madagascar). I would guess, too, that whole squid are somewhere available, sac intact, for very much less. All that is left for me to see how much of the kitchen I can stain.