If I felt ghetto, I could call this Crack Pasta.
At Easter dinner, the guests partook of Dr. Bob’s baked ham, dipped into various cartons of store-bought salads, regarded my rum-soaked strawberries with the skepticism of a clipper ship captain who fears that if there’s rum now, there’ll be pirates soon… and inhaled this pasta. This pasta was more popular than dessert.
I have no idea why. Since we’re going with the inexplicable, the obvious match is Tyrese (listen — or not, there will be vids), who may be finally about to drop an album after a six-year hiatus. I was going to start with his current single, except that it seems to be off a prior album? Or there’s some confusion of prepositions, as surely “get it in” and “get it on,” while roughly synonymous from a male perspective, should not be considered identical as lyrics? Screw it. (Tyrese writes a lot of songs about that.) Let’s just go with it.
Technically, the song belongs to Tyrese’s alter-ego, Black Ty, who raps. (Tyrese Original Flava oozes gentle R&B.)
Coarsely chop about one-quarter of a really gigantic onion. (That’s not a euphemism for anything.) Toss it into a pan that’s been drizzled with hot olive oil.
Yeah, yeah, brag about your dick. (Tyrese, not you.) Some time back, Henry Louis Gates argued — in the sort of scholarly, heavily footnoted language that allows a dude with a doctorate to get away with writing “motherfucker” every third sentence — that in rap, one’s throbbing manhood is a metonymy for one’s, well, manhood in the philosophical sense. So one must boast to establish it. However, one can boast with a more provocative rhyme scheme and perhaps a greater sense of irony.
Or wait — okay, toss a package of sliced mushrooms into the pan. Who’s the featured artist? That’s Method Man from the Wu-Tang Clan, which explains why he says “It’s Wu, bitch.” He also says this:
These silly rappers is really actors who swag jackers, flapping their lips.
Uh… isn’t Tyrese an actor? Meth, bro, did you just diss the dude you came to the party with?
Coarsely chop three-quarters of a big red pepper (I’m no schlepper, I got a big pepper) and also dice 8 or 10 cloves of roasted garlic. Into the pan it goes!
The pan is now crowded, a fact that would appall Julia Child but turns out to do us no harm. The veggies are going to sit over a medium flame for a bit. Stir them gently at intervals while we check out Tyrese’s R&B side.
Doesn’t it look pretty?
The onions, peppers, and mushrooms, silly! Okay, Tyrese looks pretty, too, and the video rarely lets up in making him an object to be gazed upon. I congratulate his trainer, his source of skin-care products, and the last 10 generations that contributed excellent genes.
All this time, I’ve been secretly boiling a box of tri-color rotini into submission. Unlike other cooking blogs, I have no complicated pasta-boiling secrets. I dump the pasta into a pot of cold water and turn up the heat. When the water boils… behold! Perfect al dente pasta. I learned this cooking method back in college, at 4 a.m. at a kegger. If it works under those circumstances, it’ll work under any conditions except maybe on the moon and in the higher bits of the Rockies above Denver.
While I was trying desperately to find something interesting in this song, my neighbor popped her head in the door to congratulate me on my excellent taste in funky music. She wasn’t being sarcastic. I think she was getting into the sexy groove. It is kind of hypnotic in a scented massage-oil way (thinking “strawberry” rather than “patchouli”).
Take about half a bunch of spinach. Take a knife. Coarsely chop the spinach. Do not cook the spinach! Repeat: do not cook the spinach!
Take the pasta, the onion-pepper-mushroom-mix, and the spinach. Mix them into a bowl. If the bowl is on the small side, it helps to layer and mix by layers, adding parmesan as you go.
To do justice to Tyrese, we need a really sexy photo for the wrap-up.
I’m trying to find a rationale for why this pasta dish works, as it ought to be grossly under-spiced. There are a lot of veggies in relation to the pasta? Crunching red peppers is fun? (It really is.) Having red and green veggies in red and green pasta confuses people? Secretly, nobody really likes the vinegar part of vinegar-and-oil dressing on pasta salad? The addition of parmesan dignifies anything except maybe vanilla ice cream?
There were maybe three scraps of spinach left in the bowl for me to take home, so I can’t review to figure out the taste. This morning-after confusion points us directly to a Tyrese song built around a reasonably clever image, though pursued at a slothlike tempo more usually associated with Warren Buffet’s investment philosophy.
