6-ingredient garlic spinach pantry pasta for one
This is one of those diary entry posts into the abyss, so click here if you just want the recipe.
Today we’re cooking for just ourselves, which means: time for some fun and sexy New Year’s Eve-Eve self-reflection!
For as long as I can remember, I’ve patched holes in my identity with extroverted performance art. I would go out on weeknights when I shouldn’t and stay out later than I should. I would chat up strangers about their choice of tequila at the bar. I would introduce myself to musicians after the show and stay in touch with them on Instagram. I always had someone. If I didn’t, I always knew where to look.
Things are usually clearer in the rearview mirror than they are out the window: I didn’t actually have an identity-level extroversion quota to fulfill. It was driven by a paralyzing fear of having to deal with myself, By Myself.
Cooking solo would reliably trigger it. Chopping garlic alone in silence imagining other people with fuller life-cups clinking glasses, listening to neighbors laughing next door while you eat on the couch alone with the TV off: was it just me who was so sad all the time? But the reason my cup wasn’t full had nothing to do with a fuel-source deficit, because while extroverts get it from other people the way introverts get it from themselves, there was no pour that would’ve ever filled it back then. Any energy I gathered from anywhere was expelled right back out from me like a gas leak, paid into a bank with a black hole where the vault was supposed to be.
During the darkest part of 2020—in spring, a time strikingly similar in tone to the one we’re living in now—I was finally forced to repair all the rusted-out infrastructure responsible for these leaks. There was simply no other choice. It was not a pleasant process, during which I received more than one welfare check from friends gravely concerned about what these repairs, conducted entirely in solitude, might ultimately cost me.
Then one day, I started to notice a change. Being alone had begun to shift from a form of waking sleep paralysis to the relief of removing an underwire at the long day. For the first time ever, I got what all the Alone Time fuss was about.
But as a longtime card-carrying member of the Myers-Briggs extrovert club, I have to wonder: do people ever really just change personalities spontaneously, or do they just finally slough off whatever dead residue was in the way of exposing the real one? Being alive for awhile certainly has a way of helping you rack up a body count of disappointments and disloyalties; maybe that’s enough to begin to adapt to require less of the human stimulus that ails you. But maybe my “old self” was only ever a social callus, crusted up to withstand people just enough to be able to squirrel some of their light into my purse like a roadie basket of Olive Garden breadsticks. I wanted to take it with me so I could sustain myself in the dark at home.
Regardless of how it happened, since then I’ve reassessed the value of my own company, and found its worth to be far higher than I once did when “myself” was a weird and unwelcome stranger glaring at me on the sofa. I sometimes treat this companion to a really good pasta dish, cooked my way with my amount of garlic, served in my favorite bowl with a glass of my favorite wine that no longer requires any better company to justify opening. We don’t trouble ourselves with fancy ingredients or unnecessary pretense: instead, we get creative with what we have, light a candle on the counter and sit at the bar in our restaurant of self-exaltation, toast together to ourselves, and enjoy the serenity of knowing our peace will not be shattered in 30 minutes by being solely responsible for washing these few dishes.
It’s not to say that I’m no longer afraid of being alone, because I’m still terrified. I run from it with the same fight-or-flight energy burst that used to propel me up from the basement after being told to go turn off the light switch at the bottom of the stairs. It’s just that my own company now has just enough structure to it that, even with no one else around, I can trust that the cup that structure creates won’t leak wine all over the table when I turn away.
So, while I never thought cooking and eating “alone” could offer any value that a social meal couldn’t, no one is truly alone who knows themselves well enough to enjoy having dinner with that self once in awhile. For that reason, I look forward to showing you more For Ones here next year.
Happy self-reflecting!
recipe
Pasta, frozen spinach, garlic, and crispy panko do their thing to create a single serving of Desperation Pasta™ at its (vegan) finest.
Effortful time: too low to even calculate
Total time: maybe 15 minutes if you count boiling water
Proudly serves ONE
you need
4 oz. pasta, your choice—this is fusili bucati corti that I accidentally received in a 48-pack for $8 at Amazon in 2018
6 oz. frozen chopped spinach, straight from the freezer
2 tbsp. olive oil, divided
1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs
6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
Pinch of chili flakes
Salt and pepper, to taste
1/2 a lemon’s worth of juice
MAKE IT
Get prepped. Bring salted water to a boil in a 3-4 qt. pot. Heat 1 tbsp. olive oil in a small skillet. Slice 6 cloves of garlic.
Toast the panko. Add 1/4 cup panko crumbs to the olive oil skillet and stir to coat. Add a pinch of salt and cook until just golden brown. Pull off the heat and set aside.
Cook 4 oz. pasta and 6 oz. spinach in the salty water according to the pasta’s package directions. Save 1/2 cup of pasta water and drain.
Sauté the garlic. In your now-empty pasta pot, heat the other 1 tbsp. olive oil. Add the sliced garlic and chili flakes and sauté until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Put the pasta and spinach back in the pot (spinach tends to stick to colanders when cooked like this; use your spoon to scrape it out). Add a splash of pasta water until the pasta looks glossy, about a minute.
Season and finish. Add the lemon juice and adjust for salt; this dish sometimes needs a little more because there is no cheese. Toss in the breadcrumbs. That’s it.