“Lightening Up With Jan”
Resident Jan Marshall is a Humorologist, award-winning author, and humor columnist for adults and aspirational books for children.
HOLY CANNELLONI!
The scandal had hit gigantic proportions. Families split friends send alarming texts and Benny Barilla threatened to have a guy banned from buying noodles in general.
It started with a photo of a man eating his pasta and.. cutting it with a scissor.
The shame, the outrage was worse than eating pizza with a fork instead of the correct and only way, which is stuffing into our mouth lickety-split.
Being a professional though unpaid pasta expert, I had mixed feeling about this aberration. Understand, PASTA IS MY LIFE! (well nagging too, but that’s for another day).
To me, even a mediocre bowl of bowties (AKA as the best of the brunch👉🏼 Kasha and Varnitshkes)is
such a treat and that’s the EMMIS (truth)!
I have always had this fantasy, I’d own an Olympic size swimming pool. It would be filled with pasta. I would dive in and in order to survive, I’d have to eat my way and out. AH!
In a small way, this fantasy was realized.
No pool, no Michael Phelps racing me to the surface, but… Italy! The land of my loved Linguini.
It was a while back and we stopped in Rome.
I had some pasta.
Did I say some?
With each meal I had every kind of fantastic fettuccini, plus all other kinds of pasta.
With marinara sauce.
With garlic and olive oil and Parmesan cheese.
With butter garlic and parsley.
I had every type of ravioli, unless you have a lot of time to spare is actually kreplach they tried to pass off as Italian but I knew and ..it was yummy. They did the same with pot stickers but I played along and scoffed it down as well.
And then..there was the macaroni. Ah, the fat ones, thin ones curly ones under another name and I was in heaven.
A good meal in Rome is as memorable an experience as you can find any place in the world it seemed.
The only supposed challenge was.. the waiters were on strike. So, we ate in the kitchen of a restaurant with the owners which made this experience even more delicious.
If I were there now I would ask if they would approve of cutting pasta with a scissor.
As for me and you know, I know, twirling trimming, sawing, hammering (I’ve done that with week old bagels), using garden shears for extreme al dente pasta and simply slurping from the plate is certainly proper according to Emily Post’s Proper Pasta Protocol.
Me and Emily; Pasta Pals Forever
P.S.
Unless you have a lot of time to spare don’t’ ever get me started on my canoodling with… my current obsession while dining in Heritage Pointe with their unbelievable multifaceted array of Pasta Pies-but those in the know call it KUGEL. Wow!!
