Taste: My Life through Food(17)

Try the following recipe and you will see what I mean. It is my derivation of a recipe I grew up with. I often make a big pot and eat it over a few days for lunch at home or bring it to film sets as an antidote to the usually horrid food served off a truck to cast and crew by beleaguered caterers.





Spaghetti with Lentils


— SERVES 4 —

? carrot, finely chopped

? onion, finely chopped

? stalk celery, finely chopped

? garlic clove, sliced

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling

1 cup dried brown lentils, rinsed and picked over

? pound spaghetti

1 ? cups salsa marinara

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper



In a medium or large saucepan (all the ingredients, including the pasta, will end up in this saucepan, so make sure it is large enough), sauté the carrot, onion, celery, and garlic in the olive oil over medium-low heat until they are soft, about 7 minutes.

Place the lentils in another medium saucepan. Fill the pan with cold water to a level 1 inch above the lentils. Slowly bring to a simmer and cook until the lentils are just tender, about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

To break the spaghetti, lay out a clean dish towel, wrap the spaghetti in it, and fold over the ends of the towel. Roll, squeeze, and/or bend this bundle until you can feel the spaghetti has broken down into 1-to 1 ?-inch pieces. Place the bundle over a large bowl and unfurl, thus emptying it of all the bits of spaghetti.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the spaghetti until al dente.

Reserve ? cup of the cooking water before draining the pasta.

Meanwhile, drain the lentils and transfer them to the saucepan with the sautéed vegetables. Add the salsa marinara. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook until the lentils have blended with the sauce, about 10 minutes. Add the drained pasta, along with the reserved pasta water to make a liquid consistency. Season with salt and pepper as desired. Simmer the pasta and sauce together to allow the flavors to combine, about 3 minutes. Serve immediately.





I?Regarding the meatball, I would say that the key to a great one is good ground beef with a fair amount of fat, mixed with an almost one-to-one meat/bread ratio. The bread should be stale Italian or French white, crusts removed, soaked in water, and strained. Meatballs should actually be renamed “meat-bread balls” or “breatballs”—or something like that but not as stupid—as the proper ratio of both ingredients is the key to their success according to this palate.





5


I moved to New York City after graduating college and into my first apartment on 76th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue in 1982. The neighborhood, known as the Upper West Side, stretches from 59th Street, south of Lincoln Center, to 110th Street, and from Riverside Drive to Central Park West, both of which, like the smaller cross streets, are purely residential. Running parallel to the latter two north-south streets are West End Avenue (also only residential), Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and Columbus Avenue. It is on these last three streets where shops, restaurants, gyms, and other places of business occupy the ground floor of countless apartment buildings. For generations the Upper West Side was home to a great many Jewish families, and the number of Jewish delis and bakeries was proof of that. It was also inhabited by mostly working-and middle-class families as well as gaggles of actors (particularly those who worked in the theater, as the Great White Way was at most a thirty-minute walk downtown), many of whom resided in large rent-controlled apartments. I had a small one-bedroom apartment on the first floor, and I shared the space and the $660-a-month rent with my girlfriend at the time and a college friend of ours. (Yes, we all slept in the same bedroom. That’s bedroom, not bed.) The place had a living area off which there were a tiny galley kitchen and a small bathroom, neither of which had been updated since the midsixties, and the aforementioned bedroom. The living and kitchen area received no natural light at all, as its large window overlooked an airshaft. To make matters worse, this window was protected by an accordion safety gate, making the space feel even more oppressive. The bedroom looked onto the backs of the apartment buildings on Seventy-Fifth Street, and although it received lots of lovely natural light, because of its proximity to the ground floor, it too had a safety gate. So basically, apartment 2D at 107 West Seventy-Sixth Street was like a large prison cell for the three of us in which we could barely afford to incarcerate ourselves.

Eventually our college friend moved out, and soon afterward my girlfriend and I split up and I was left there on my own. I rather liked living alone at that time, until I went through a long stint of unemployment and was unable to afford the rent one month, which had risen to over $750. I had been receiving unemployment checks of around $170 a week and painting apartments whenever I could for cash. But this particular month had been a bad one and I was strapped for dough. Refusing to ask anyone for money, I made my way to the Actors’ Equity offices and applied for money from the Actors Fund, which a colleague told me I had a right to do. It was not a loan. It was money available to union actors who were struggling to make ends meet. All you needed to prove was that you were a member in good standing and that you had participated in Equity productions fairly consistently. I was told to bring playbills of shows I had been in and reviews of performances as proof of my past employment. The whole idea made me sick to my stomach, but I was desperate. I was too prideful to ask my parents for money even though I know they would have given it to me happily. I knew that the next month I was to start a job and money would be coming in; however, this month I had no other option but to swallow my dignity and go begging, as it were.