Everyone’s like “those Germans have a word for everything” but English has a word for tricking someone into watching the music video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.
Pasta is great. It’s like hey, let me take delicious things like butter,or meat, or tomatoes or basil and then let me just fuckin mix whatever the fuck i want in and combine it with some random ass noodles.
That’s basically pasta.
BUT, there’s a big difference between “basically pasta” and “holy shit food of the gods” pasta, and that is that the latter has some rules that must be followed.
10 PASTA COMMANDMENTS COMIN UP:
Always boil pasta in boiling SALTED water. Ever had a dish where you forgot to salt it before cooking it, and no matter how much seasoning you did post saute/sear, it still sort of tasted bland on the inside? Same goes for pasta. Your sauce could be fuckin on point, but if you don’t salt dat pasta water, ya fugged, bruh.
Always have your sauce ready BEFORE the pasta. Pestos, emulsified butter sauces, bolognese sauces, they should be in their respective sauce pans, heated and ready to go (unless we’re takin pesto or carbonarashit, as those go bad with heat). The worst thing you could do is fuck up and overcook your delicious pasta bc you were too busy making or finishing up your sauce.
Always TASTE your pasta. I don’t care if the package says it’s ready in 1 minute or an hour, taste your pasta from the boiling water at least 2 minutes in, and every 2 minutes after that. Al dente’s usually the way to go, but you’ll never know when to take it out if you’re not constantly tasting.
DO NOT strain your pasta, wasting your pasta water and allowing your pasta to cool. Use tongs to take pasta straight up form the boiling water (don’t dry it, nerds) and throw it in your sauce. A little pasta water gets in? no probs, and I’ll tell you why.
If your sauce is reducing too much, or it’s too tight, add pasta water. It’s salted and hot and ready to go, it won’t dilute the flavor at all, you’re golden duude. golden.
Finish your pasta in the sauce, allow it to become homogenous, let the sauce stick to the pasta, BECOME ONE WITH THE PASTA BRUH.
Add cheese last, because cheese get’s weird and fucked up in hot pans, so it’s best to throw that on right before you’re ready to eat that shit up.
4 oz is a normal serving size for pasta. If you don’t have a scale, that’s basically like the first pic above. If you hold the pasta like such, and the width of the bunch is a little smaller than an american quarter, then ur good 2 go bruh.
Dry pastas are not better/worse than fresh pasta. They’re legit just made with different flours using different procedures. One isn’t ‘fancier’ than the other u pretentious buttrockets.
PASTA IS NOT SCARY, IT’S DELICIOUS. These rules look tough, but honestly it’s not that bad bruh. I believe in u.
and now, onto the recipe I used for my pasta. It’s a restaurant favorite, we always make it on the line because it’s simple, delicious and super filling.
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Caciopepe Pasta serves: 1 (lol like id share this with ppl lolol)
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Ingredients-
salt water for boiling (just salt some water, don’t fuckin travel to the beach in hopes of created the most bomb pasta ever)
1 bunch of pasta
2 bay leaves
1 sprig thyme
cold butter (approximately 2/3 cups cut into small pads
parmesan cheese to taste
a shit ton of black pepper to taste
–
Procedure-
Throw some pasta into some boiling water and do that thing where you constantly taste test the pasta to see if it’s ready. In the meantime, make ur sauce u lazy bumbum.
Add a little boiling pasta water to a saute pan over low heat, and whisk/mix in the butter quickly till it’s creamy and emulsified. If it’s too thick, just whisk in a teeny bit of pasta water. Add 2 bay leaves and a sprig of thyme for aroma, remove when pasta’s ready.
Once the pasta’s ready to rock and roll, use tongs to scoop it up and place it in the sauce. Flip and mix using tongs. Add cheese and crack a lot of pepper. Add salt if it needs seasoning, add more pasta water if the sauce tightens.
and bam, ya ready to roll.
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I promise u if you use these pasta techniques, people will think ur literally a GOD. ur welcs.
Thumbs up!
Pasta done properly is great, and the difference between great and not is right here.
Especially that tasting / testing. If pasta is too hard it can cook a bit more, but pappy overdone pasta can’t be uncooked.
A simple dish like this has no elaborate sauce or fussy presentation to
conceal mistakes – but also nothing to distract from how well it works when
it’s just right.
Pasta cacio e pepe (pasta with cheese and pepper) at its most basic doesn’t even use herbs or butter – *freshly grated
cheese is either whisked into a little of the cooking water or just piled on top of the peppered hot pasta – so you can play with different cheeses like Parmesan, Gran Padano or Pecorino and actually taste their differences.
Adding butter just makes it easier and doesn’t spoil anything.
*Using pre-grated “Parmesan” from a jar might. Those sarcastic quotation marks are deliberate – here’s why.
Try dry-roasting the peppercorns before grinding them.
Simple herbs like the bayleaf and thyme in this recipe won’t argue either, but try a little tarragon. I’ve recently become very fond of tarragon.
Or saffron. Just a pinch of one or the other. Next time, try a pinch of both.
And whatever recipe you use, make enough for two.
Even if you’re alone… :->
Addendum to the pasta water part: you know how it gets kinda milky and opaque? That’s starch that’s come off the pasta, and it can be really useful in bringing your sauce together and helping it stick to the pasta. I always add at least a cup of pasta water to my spaghetti sauce (skimmed off right before I drain it), and it’s just the right finishing touch.
And while I’m talking about it – I always deglaze my spaghetti sauce with a hefty dose of red wine, because it cuts through the richness of the meat and tomatoes. You should also know that the quality of your canned tomatoes matters a lot in your red sauce. I exclusively use Cento products, because they come from Italy and have the texture of red velvet, yet even the 28 oz cans of crushed tomatoes are only around $3. (San Marzano tomatoes are supposed to be the best in the world, so those cans cost more like $6, but imo the regular Cento is just as good.)
It’s much better to use quality unseasoned tomato sauce than a jarred sauce with lots of herbs but shitty tomatoes. I cook it with chopped onion, lots of chopped garlic, and a palmful of oregano in addition to salt,pepper, and chili flakes.
Hey the common age of legal adulthood in the West is not an arbitrary “cultural” thing, it’s ideally 18 at a minimum because that is when the human brain has gotten past its most intense emotional and hormonal development hurdles.
The difference in judgment is staggering even between someone who just turned 16 vs. someone 16.5; we do a MASSIVE amount of mental growing and changing crammed into those first two decades at a pace unrivaled by any other species.
And then even after your psychological state has calmed the fuck down around 18, we now know the effects of adolescent development continue until about age 25. You got over the worst of it, but 25 is when the parts of your brain responsible for the bulk of your reasoning skills actually wrap up their growth process.
Some further maturation seems to continue between 25 and 40, but some countries now recognize 25 as the official end of “adolescence” as far as psychologists are concerned.
This is why someone 20 should not be dating someone 16 even where it’s legal, why a 14 year old boy shot by police should not be described as a “man,” why we should be raising the age of military and police enlistment by a couple of years, and people probably shouldn’t start driving cars until at least 18-20 either.
If you’re under 18 you actually are mentally and physically a child in the most objective possible sense. That’s not an insult to any of you 17 and under, just try to have a nice childhood while you still can and don’t sneak into bars and join the air force and shit, you’ve got like up to 80 years ahead of you for that.
…..so raise the age of majority to 25 lmao
this is….SO MUCH bullshit in one post.
the age of adulthood is a social construct. this is such a basic, well understood fact nowadays that it is the foundational concept of entire branches of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and other disciplines, as well as the whole interdisciplinary field of childhood studies (which I happen to have recently finished my PhD in).
adolescence itself is a product of culture at least as much as biology. the entire existence of it. the concept didn’t exist two hundred years ago. there was no such thing as a teenager. and it’s not because people who lived before the age of global industrial capitalism were stupid, it’s because social change over time (and specifically under that global industrial capitalist system) continually pushed back the age at which people were considered “adults”, as well as increasing the number and complexity of things they were expected to accomplish before being perceived as adults. this is still happening and is why we now see this push to conceptualize 18- to 25-year-olds as “not adults”. not because of revelations in psychology.
your brain changes in those years, sure. (it changes throughout the lifespan, but yeah, it changes more before you’re 25.) but two things: first, that change isn’t what you think it is. the brain is – physically – a product of experience. even if you could somehow quantify young people being shit at making decisions because the Decision-Making Brain Section is all weird in the MRIs (which you can’t, and every pop science article with the words “teen brain” in the title is at least somewhat lying to you), the cause of a great deal of that would be the way we treat young people – ie, not letting them ever make a single fucking decision for themselves, and reciting sciency-sounding crap about the prefrontal cortex at them whenever they start to think they might be proper humans.
second, the differences between young brains and older brains that do actually exist and are actually biologically determined are interpreted through such a beyond-bullshit cultural lens it’s all but impossible to see them for what they are. there’s this idea that judgment and reason are “impaired” during this time of life, but that’s a perception based on the ideology that middle-aged adults have the “good” brains, and that anything that deviates from them is “bad” instead of “different”. teens and young adults aren’t wired to be reckless idiots with no capacity for rational thought. how exactly would that have evolved? what fucking selection advantage would that have? what young people’s brains do tend to be wired for is tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty – which is necessary for young members of a highly social, highly adaptable species finding their place in the world! can it lead to bad decisions? sure! at the same time as it helps prevent choice paralysis and mitigates fear of change and enables divergent thinking and experimentation leading to personal growth!
(also, there are plenty of cognitive skills that peak before 25, but conveniently adults never seem to have to be worried about being told that makes them stupid and incompetent and untrustworthy.)
all of this is why the arguments of the “psychologists” you name – developmental psychologists, in the tradition of people like Piaget, whose credibility is not much higher than Freud’s – are meaningless. developmental psych is a discipline with huge systemic problems arising from an insulting, dehumanizing deficit model of the people they study, and from a major ignorance of sociocultural factors involved in their work. Piaget thought he’d discovered the universal formula for child development by talking to a dozen middle-class French families, for fuck’s sake, and his intellectual descendants are not much better. (note: there are people trying to change this and redeem the discipline, but it’s happening slowly, because once theoretical approaches reach the status of orthodoxy they’re hard to shift.)
to put it simply: there is nothing “objective” about whether or not someone is a child. like every other identity binary, the child/adult one is a socially constructed crapshoot where almost no one fully matches up to what any ideology says one or the other is supposed to look like.
now, this does NOT mean there’s no problem with a 16-year-old dating a 30-year-old. but the reason those people shouldn’t be dating isn’t because that young person is biologically programmed to be stupid and can’t be trusted to make decisions with their life and body. it’s because of the enormous, socially-constructed power dynamic between those two people. you can’t have an equal relationship with someone who belongs to a class of people considered above you in every sense. you just can’t. but you know what fuels that power imbalance? shit like this post. this is the exact rhetoric adults use to disempower and dehumanize youth. it’s the rhetoric that’s used to take the right of self-ownership away from young people, and it contributes to abuse. you cannot protect people by taking away their rights, especially on the basis of telling them they’re incapable of making decisions for themselves and they should leave that to the exact category of people most likely to abuse them – the only thing you can accomplish by doing that is to make them more vulnerable.
the problem with a 14-year-old boy being described as a “man” is likewise not that he’s biologically incapable of any form of responsibility, it’s that in a society that views adolescents basically as universally cognitively incompetent and adults as individually responsible for everything that happens to them (both of which are ludicrously wrong), choosing to define someone as a “man” implies that he had a level of responsibility and opportunity that is, in fact, systematically denied to a 14-year-old. this is someone living under all the bullshit systems described in the first half of this rant, and being portrayed as a member of a more privileged category who’s not being socially, economically, and psychologically affected by all that every day. that’s the issue.
as for driving, there’s no reason for the driving age to exist at all, let alone to be higher than it is now. skipping right over the part where teenagers have faster reaction times and better vision, on average, than older adults, we have a damn test to tell us if people are capable of driving safely. we have training for new drivers, and mandatory periods of supervised driving practice. (it’s not a perfect system, but we seem to be okay with the compromise of letting a certain number of incompetent adults through it.) the only reason to not allow people under a certain age to take that test or go through that training – to forbid them to even make the attempt to prove that they are capable or take steps to become more capable – is to keep driving as a privilege for adults. to enforce the binary, enforce young people’s lack of responsibility and competence. there’s this whole concept about how the display of knowledge or skill becomes a “status offense” (something that’s only “wrong” for certain categories of people) if the privileged class wants to believe only they could possibly possess that knowledge or skill. that’s what the driving age is.
From now on I will only accept love triangles if they end in:
Polyamory
The main character rejecting both love interests and staying single
The two love interests giving up on the main character because how hard is it to make a damn choice?
4. The two love interests realizing they love each other more than the main character and the main character getting together with someone that wasn’t even part of the triangle proper.
5. All three characters realizing they’re better as friends and going go kart racing
KayjsCage 
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