The thing about pasta is this. You make your pasta, you toss it with your stuff—your sauce, your sautéed mushrooms, your roasted red pepper, your black olives, your shredded parmesan, your toasted pine nuts, whatever—and then you sit down to eat. But the thing is. The thing is. The thing is this: it’s hard to balance all that good stuff in every bite, right? You start eating, you have too much stuff, not enough pasta. For a while you’ll get the ratio about right, and then the balance of power will shift, and you’ll be left with mouthfuls of pasta plus just an occasional mushroom or stray shred of cheese. For example.

My life? It is a bowl of pasta, I tell you. And right now it’s too much stuff, all the time. (Partly this is because Dane was off work last week and we drove around trying to cram a year’s worth of field trips into one week, and now there’s a lot of catching up to do at home. And partly it’s because December is never long enough for how much holiday prep there is to do. But it’s only partly because of those things.) I know it sometimes happens—and will happen again!—that we’ll have too much time and hardly anything to do with it. All pasta, no exciting bits. Right?

Because that’s the theory of pasta.

And because I need it to be true. So we’re going to pretend like it is and see what happens. It’s a strategy, anyway.