"pasta caesar"

Without wanting to harp on about the misnomer of slow food, and the questionable appeal of marketing the slow food movement to the mentality of modern day, fast paced society, convenience society, I want to revisit this concept.

There is something remarkably satisfying about preparing meals "from scratch". Using natural ingredients, fresh and good quality produce, makes sense at a spiritual level as well as the physical . Let's face it, if I don't eat for a week, I'm not going to die!

Take for example, home made pasta. It's not a difficult thing to make. It's not even that time consuming once you get the hang of the pasta mangle thingy! And the satisfaction derived from a bowl home made pasta is something that the packet stuff cannot replicate.

This bowl of pasta, I dubbed "pasta caesar". Once the pasta was cooked it was tossed with prosciutto, cos, toasted pine nuts, chilli & p.reggiano, then topped with a poached egg.

The pasta is no longer "the carbs" put together to carry the sauce or toppings; the pasta is now a feature in its own right, with texture and flavour that packet pasta does not carry. And yet whilst this is a more-ish outcome, the desire to over eat that often presents when eating this kind of comfort food, is not there. Doubting Thomas is already thinking, "Of course there's no urge to keep eating, you'd have to make more pasta!" but that's not it.

You see, anyone girl that's been to a private school knows a little about anorexia, and one of the things about anorexia is that it creeps up on the sufferer's friends and family.

"Of course she's not anorexic, she even cooked the family dinner last night!"

"Don't be silly, she was baking cookies on the weekend!"

"Look for yourself, she's in the kitchen right now..."
One of the habits employed by people suffering from this mind boggling illness is an obsession with being around food - cooking it, presenting it, buying it. But never eating it.

And if you think about times when prepared food is prepared en masse (for an occasion) at serving time the cook is frequently not hungry, or at least not particularly interested in eating the food they prepared - after all they've been surrounded by the smell of it all day.

So, whilst slow food advocates eating natural and wholesome foods, preparing and assembling ingredients with minimum bastardisation, it also discourages, albeit inadvertantly, over eating.

2 comments:

purple goddess said...

Private school gel here, complete with hat and gloves in the street.

While all my girlfriends had eating disorders as you describe, I seem to have got every last one of their eat-food genes.

Nice twist on the caesar thing, too.

This is a must try for this weekend.

Pat Churchill said...

Me, too, purple goddess. I was a boarder at a private school where their aim was to fill our plates with carbs and fat - and make sure we ate the lot. To this day, decades later, the thought of sweet suet dumplings with caramel sauce still makes me feel rather distressed.