tahini and spinach pasta

Ingredients:

chopped garlic, chopped onion, butter, oil for initial sautee

linguini [approx 1.3 standard bags makes a healthy looking big glass bowl]

tahini [approx 4-6 oz, stirred up well]

spinach [fresh is nice and probably necessary, but it takes a lot because it wilts]

white wine

whole kernel black pepper

herbs and spices as you see fit and will learn from

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Start off with sautee'ing the garlic and onion in the 50% butter, 50% oil puddle. Do this not in a small sauce pan, but rather in a deep pan. Once that flavor has the kitchen smelling, you start justifying the deep pan by filling it with spinach. Stir it around to rub the oily garlic and onion all over the spinach. The spinach will wilt into a small mass. Add more spinach then. Once that second round is wilted, add more until it seems like the right amount. Now you have a lot of wilted spinach in a pan that needs to take some time. Instead of adding water and covering the pot with the lid slightly ajar, add wine and decrease the heat to just keep it steaming a bit.

Now boil the pasta. I've been told that a bit of salt in the pasta water makes it boil sooner, and a bit of oil keeps the pasta from sticking together. Add both. Once that's done, drain it.

Now add the tahini to the spinach mixture and get that all mixed up. The spinach will want to clump up so you may need two forks to keep it split up and mixing well with the tahini. Once it's folded together, put it over the pasta and mix that up.

Add some fresh cilantro to the top. Serve.

Charter

I titled beecherinnepal's last post 'out of asia, out of blogging'. Less than a month after closing beecherinnepal out, here I am again.

beecherinnepal turned into my hobby in Nepal. That is, writing turned out to be my hobby. I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut and exile.ru columnists Gary Brecher and Mark Ames.

This blog is an internal reference - more so than beecherinnepal became. That blog ended up being around 40,000 words. From an engineer.

I considered whether to include interesting tidbits from my life in the in-flight menagerie. Like this. Writing for an audience implies a commitment to write regularly for that audience. The audience infers as much, at the very least.

It's been twenty-three days since I got back to the US. I have no great reflections, other than that living in America is hard and fast. Maybe it's the summer party house. I don't think it is entirely the summer party house. All the 'things I have to do' were harder in Nepal, all the 'things I have to think/worry/stay-up-late about' were so much simpler.