The Ozersky household isn’t too unlike your own this time of year. I eat too much, feel bad about it, and get fatter. How can you not? You’re not working, you’re not walking around outside, and everyone you meet is trying to give you pudding and cookies all the time. For me, it’s even worse, because my friends are all weird food fetishists, chefs, and ostentatious gluttons who spend every minute planning elaborate meals. So as a result, I am on a cleanse this weekend. I am not going to eat any food at all today or tomorrow. But I’m still going to cook for Danit.

Living with a woman makes it both easier and harder to diet. On the one hand, she’s there to encourage you and inspire you. On the other hand, the fact of your having a woman to begin with removes the primary motivation for losing weight. Still, no woman is ever completely in the bag. No matter how committed to you she is, you have to figure she’ll be tempted to walk if you morph into a butterball. Even if this isn’t true, it might as well be. So I am being very good to Danit out of gratitude, and even am cooking for her even though I am on a fast. How about that? Am I a great guy or what? What’s more, I’m making her one of my best and most opulent recipes. It’s an Ozersky shut-in standby I call Spaghetti Con Due Grassi, or “spaghetti with two fats.”Read this recipe, and reckon what it must feel like to cook it without eating it. I will be eating this for breakfast Monday though, so don’t feel too bad for me. Maybe you can have some too!

Spaghetti con Due Grassi

This recipe is the quintessence of what my friend Scott Conant calls “fat bastard” food. It’s incredibly luxurious, unctuous, and nourishing, and can be made when there’s almost nothing in the house. (If you do have meat meat fat lying around, add it in place of the olive oil, finishing the dish with the latter to make it spaghetti con tre grassi.)

A bunch of spaghetti as thick as a magic marker (say 3 oz.)

¼ cup of nutty olive oil, such as Fairway’s Trevi-Umbria

2 tbsp of salted butter.

Coarse kosher salt

Coarse black pepper

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Rep pepper flakes

Aged peccorino

A Love of food

1. Cook the spaghetti in 8 cups of water, or just enough to cover it well once it‘s softened; the instructions on the box to use eight gallons or whatever is plainly idiotic. Less is more with water, because you want it become starchy, and act as an emulsifer. Also, pasta starch tastes good and you want it as concentrated as possible.  Naturally you want it plenty salty too. It should taste like sea water.

2. Get everything out, including a colander ready in the sink. Cook the spaghetti for eight or nine minutes. Reserve a little pasta water in a cup. Dump it all in the colander. FOR THE NAME OF GOD DON’T RINSE IT FOR ANY REASON, NOW OR EVER. Transfer it to a large, deep serving bowl.

3. Put a chunk of butter in, and work it around. It will get absorbed into the thirsty, dry, parched pasta, which is gasping for fluid after being taken out of its salt bath. Butter will plug its holes and coat it with sticky molecules.  Now the olive oil. Work it good. Then the rest of the butter. This should all happen in two minutes. That’s why you got everything ready before. Once the spaghetti cools, it doesn’t matter what you do.

4. If the oil / butter mixture looks greasy rather that being absorbed, put a tablespoon or two of the pasta water in and work it some more. It shouldn’t look shiny. (If you have put in animal fat in place of the olive oil to make tre grassi, add the olive oil at these stage.)

5. Add a shower of freshly grated peccorino (aka “romano”), a little bit of red pepper flake, and a few grinds of black pepper. Toss. Add a liberal sprinkling of coarse salt. Toss again.

6. Eat it unremorsefully.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Friends, Fun things to do with kids, Yum-o! tips for healthy eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.