pasta and pastina

does anyone else out there like eating pastina in bulk - as in not just in soup? i'm sitting in my kitchen, eating a bowl of pastina with pasta sauce, and i find that it's an incredibly satisfying experience. pastina is one of those things i never had as a kid unless i was sick, which automatically put it on a pedestal; consequently, as an adult, eating a bowl of pastina is a guilty pleasure, as if it's your birthday and thus you can do what you like. it reminds me of how calvin "drinks" hot cocoa - a mug stuffed with marshmallows, with the hot chocolate very syrupy and poured into the cracks. eating pastina with pasta sauce is the same thing: pastina with a little bit of sauce. the absence of the soup takes away pastina's aura of wholesomeness; you know you shouldn't be eating the pastina with such density, but you can't help it because pastina's just so good.

i seem to be making up for cooking time lost to studio in the past few days: on friday, celina and i roasted a chicken; yesterday i went to carly's apartment, albeit circuitously, and helped her make dinner with lauren and dana; and today carrien and i are going to make dinner.

i very much enjoyed the chicken on friday, and i think i've settled upon a preferred method for roasting them - 15-20 minutes at 400, and about an hour or so at 350. i forgot to salt and sugar the skin, but it had a lovely golden-brown skin anyway. i had stuck a lot of tarragon-thyme-butter mixture underneath the skin, which i like to think kept it tender (which is was, happily). we stuffed the cavity with extra tarragon, lemon wedges, and onions. given a little more thought, i probably would have stuck an apple in there, too. we also made gravy to go with the chicken, although we didn't coordinate the timing quite right, so we made the gravy from the innards, rather than pan drippings, which i added at the very end. innards are a distinctly un-american thing to consume, but they're great for flavoring the gravy. i have always considered the neck of a chicken or turkey to be a special thing, just because my mother always cooked it and gave my sister and i pieces of it. it pretty much grosses other people out; i had the neck all to myself... anyway, the gravy was pretty standard : brown the innards, add onions and celery, then chicken stock, and let it simmer away for a long time. we added the pan drippings at the very end and that added a nice kick to it.

we also flouted the white-wine-with-chicken rule and had red wine with dinner because we both like it better. we just bought a bottle at harvest, without really knowing whether or not it was good - it was a shiraz, and the label, like almost every other red wine label, touted aromas of blackberries, plums, chocolate, etc. the wine, however, turned out to be quite good, especially with dinner (it was buckeley's shiraz, 2003, from south australia) - not too heavy, not too light, and actually very fruity. it was better than the cabernet sauvignon that we had several weeks ago (the markko reserve 2001), which likely needed a few more years of aging, because it was a little harsh. anyway, the wine would probably be good for celina's and my theoretical (embryonic?) chocolate party. i've been thinking of what would go well with chocolate, so that we don't overdo the chocolate aspect of the party, and red wine would be excellent. i think we might do the hot chocolate with spices and chile peppers that celina made - in the idea's inception the party was a vehicle for making really good hot chocolate. we're still not sure how the party will be structured; it will be something like our housewarming party, but it will be a chocolate party instead. we'd like to make truffles, but again, the whole thing is still in planning stages - it will depend on studio as to whether or not the party will actually happen. some other thoughts are a chocolate fondue, some sort of savory thing involving chocolate, some really complicated chocolate cake confection (i would like, at some point, to make a marjolaine....). perhaps we'll buy lots of random chocolate stuff and have people make chocolate sculptures too. hmm...