Very early morning walk home from the Fed.

CREAM AND GARLIC PASTA

Towards the end of the summer I was working a lot and eventually found myself home one day hungry and with an almost completely empty fridge. The contents of the fridge included: cream, butter, parmesan cheese, two mini green bottles of san pellegrino, and polaroid film. The contents of my kitchen was not much better: dried pasta, a few bulbs of garlic, olive oil and the usual salt and pepper and spices. You can see where my meal was going.

The meal made of non-ingredients:

To be honest, my friend Abby told me that garlic cures an oncoming cold (even stress related ones) so in addition to eating five garlic pills with large gulps of red gatorade every few hours, I decided to roast the garlic I had and eat that too. At first I tried eating the roast garlic cloves alone, but decided that garlic worked much better as an enhancing flavor addition to some larger amount of starch.

First roast the garlic. You can make extra because it will keep for a few days in the fridge and also tastes amazing in mashed potatoes (I had no potatoes). Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Cut off the tops of the bulbs. Place the bulbs cut side up in a small glass dish and pour as much olive oil as will be absorbed into the bulbs. Generously salt and pepper. I used a salt that has herbs de provence in it. Cover tightly with foil and roast for about 20 minutes until the garlic is soft and browned but be careful not to burn! Let cool completely. Then carefully peel off cloves one by one and gently squeeze out the garlic so it stays all in one piece.

Get pasta going in boiling water that is salted and oiled.

Next make a cream and garlic sauce. Mash about 3-4 cloves of garlic with enough cream to bring to a thick paste about the consistency of elmers glue. Ideally fresh green herbs would be added at this point. If you do not have these, dried oregano and herbs de provence will do. Salt and pepper so it's a little saltier than you would want. Just a teeny tiny bit too salty!

Grate a generous amount of parm.

When the pasta is al dente, drain and put back in the pot with a knob of butter on very low heat. Stir until the butter is melted. Add the garlic cream sauce and most of the cheese and stir until the pasta is coated and looks wet (but is not actually wet, the sauce should be thick) and lovely. You can add more cream if you want at this point.

Heap onto a plate and sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top. I bet in a perfect world there would also be some very finely chopped parsley and chives for color.