Further Adventures from Sylvia's 5x5 Kitchen...

When I met Himself, Eugene Allen Thompson, he was a 30 year-old graduate student living in a tiny down-the-outside-staircase apartment in Berkeley. His kitchen was a passageway two steps up from the bedroom/study leading to the bathroom...small fridge on one side, one-burner hotplate opposite. Waterwise, the bathroom was the rest of the kitchen.

Gene asked me to marry him on our third date, and on our fourth date, I decided I would dazzle my new husband-to-be with my spaghetti--let him know what a great cook he'd caught. In my euphoria, I gave no thought to HOW, exactly, I would cook everything, so we went to the Co-op and bought the makings, came back to his apartment, and I set to it. I chopped the sauce vegetables (onions, carrots, celery, garlic, parsley) on a cutting board on the bed, then softened them in olive oil in a skillet on the hotplate. Stirred in crushed canned tomatoes (it was February), simmered, and when the sauce was ready, set the covered pan on the top of the warm gas heater. I heated the spaghetti water in its pot on the hotplate, boiled the pasta, then drained it and kept it warm on a low setting on the hotplate. Oh no! I forgot the mushrooms! There was no room on the gas heater for the spaghetti pot, so I wrapped it in a thick towel and sunk it in the bathtub, covered it with a pillow. Sauteed the mushrooms on the hotplate--meanwhile asking Gene to stir the sauce on the heater, shake the pot of pasta in the bathtub so the pieces wouldn't stick. Mushrooms ready, I put it all together, sprinkled the top with boxed grated Parmesan (no, I didn't know about Parmagiano-Reggiano when I was 19), and we feasted, our plates on our laps, sitting on his twin bed. I can't think when spaghetti was more delectable.

Turns out that now, 55 years later, I'm back to cooking the way I cooked in those early days for my true love...only it's just for me now, alas. In my 5 x 5 galley kitchen (no stove), I do a lot of resourceful shuffling to get things done that in my other kitchen--the one with a stove--I don't have to think about. But I'm finding that after all these years of, effectively, cooking by rote, it's kind of fun to have to rethink operations...

For example, tonight--taking a break from finishing up my mother's taxes--I put together a dish of pasta for myself in about 15 minutes. It's very unlikely you will have to take the same steps because you probably have a standard kitchen, but it does no harm to break out of the old patterns once in awhile, eh?

I heated water in my electric kettle while the tall narrow pasta cooker heated on the smaller burner of my two-burner hotplate (a slosh of water in the bottom of the pot so it wouldn't burn). Set my skillet with a drizzle of olive oil on the larger of the hotplates on high while I cut up half an onion, doused it with olive oil, covered it with plastic film, softened the onions in my miraculous new microwave for 4 minutes. By now the water in the electric kettle was boiling and I added it to the pasta pot, sprinkled in salt, covered it to come to a full boil. Sliced half a sweet red pepper into the onion, mixed the pieces together, covered them with film, nuked another 2 minutes. Quartered most of a box of brown mushrooms into the hot skillet, shook it to stir, let the pieces saute over high heat. Now the pasta water was boiling so I dropped in about 2/3 cup of frozen little cheese tortellini, set the timer for 8 minutes. Turned the onion/pepper mixture into a deep dish and cut up the pieces to be not much bigger than the tortellini. Stirred the mushrooms, stirred the pasta, dropped two big handfuls of fresh spinach leaves with their rinse water into the empty onion/pepper dish (perhaps my favorite vessel in the kitchen nowadays, a deep and ruffled caramel-colored ceramic pie dish from Burgundy), covered the spinach with a Nordic Ware plastic lid, nuked the spinach for 2 minutes. The tortellini were al dente, drained them, mixed them with the onions/peppers, the spinach was ready (leaves were intensely green, nicely tender), turned everything into the mushrooms in the skillet (why put the finished dish together in the skillet and not the more presentable Burgundian pie dish? because the skillet was still hot)...THEN! stirred in a heaping spoonful of pesto. I ground over black pepper, sprinkled over a tad of salt, stirred well with a wooden spoon. I brought the skillet--beautiful colors and shapes, rich green rags of leaves, scarlet flashes of peppers, creamy curlicues of pasta, brown nubbins of mushrooms, translucent tags of onions--to my desk and, reviving, returned to Ma's taxes.

When I first explored Gene's apartment, I found a lone cookbook: "One-dish Meals for the Busy Gourmet." That charmed me. Tonight I'm there again.