Lou Hughesele

NoodiMag Volume 11

Welcome to NoodiMag, the container for all my noodling on noodles, pastas, and all related topics.

Pasta Shapes Consumed: Chifferi rigati; Ditalini; Orzo; Spaghetti; Cavatappi; Elbow rigate; Racing Wheels: Racing Edition: Official Partner of Formula 1

Total Pasta Shapes To Date: 39

My friends and loyal readers, I come to you with my hat in hand, hoping you will accept my humble offerings and forgive my dallying. I took an unannounced summer hiatus because I wanted to. I was going to do a whole thing about it, but I just realized it was because I kind of didn’t feel like it for a while. I was busy! There’s a lot going on! You get it! Tell me you didn’t let one or two of the balls you’re juggling fall at some point in the last three months and I’ll call you a liar. 

Anyways, there’s a lot of personal pasta news from this noodle correspondent!! 

At last writing, I left you all on a cliff hanger about the sheer number of pasta salads I was about to eat. I did spend a whole week just alternating each meal between three pasta salads I’d made in bulk on July 4, a day when my workplace was closed for some reason. The three pasta salads are as follows:

My favorite Greek-style pasta salad that I adapted from a girlie on Instagram

A dill pickle pasta salad, also adapted from an Instagram girlie (sorry to these girlies, I watched your videos and remembered the idea and then scrolled on)

Carolina Gelen’s Hot Dog Pasta Salad, made with vegetarian hot dogs

Fucking delicious. I gotta say, the dill pickle pasta salad reminded me that mayonnaise on pasta is very wonderful. I don’t know, there’s all these jokes about mayonnaise and boring white suburban people or whatever. I have to say, though: mayonnaise is, in fact, an instrument. I’ve had a basic pasta salad with mayo, mustard, carrot, and either broccoli or zucchini in heavy rotation this summer. I’m not ashamed. 

I’ve also continued to make a pasta caprese at least every two weeks. It gets better every time. Except for the time I didn’t have any fresh basil because I was scared of leafy green things grown on massive farms. Fear not, I acquired locally grown basil and our upward trajectory continued. 

I made one pasta salad recipe that I didn’t care for and didn’t finish eating (???!!!) that taught me that I’m one of the people who should wear gloves while chopping jalapenos. I will not be linking it because it was bad. 

At one point, I was away from home for an entire week. No pasta salads for me! I had my first cavatappi of the year, which is sort of wild to have so late because cavatappi is one of my favorite pasta shapes. In a shocking turn of events, this cavatappi dish was one of the worst pastas I’ve ever had. Part of my displeasure might be the fact that I was visiting an institution I figured would remember that vegetarians and vegans exist, and they served up only beef, pork, greens, and mac and cheese. Not much going for a vegetarian like myself!! I was also mad because someone I thought was smart had just said that AI can “give you reasonably accurate information” which ISN’T FUCKING TRUE. I was feeling pretty PEEVED but this mac and cheese was genuinely so bad. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I took it as my opportunity to get some Marian’s piAZZA, which is the best pizza in the world, and share it with my friends. 

The second most exciting pasta shape experience I had was the Racing Wheels: Racing Edition from Barilla’s being an Official Partner of Formula 1. Pretty good. Very complex shape, which created a nice bite. They had a fascinating tendency to stack on top of each other, like molecules that really want to become crystalline. I need to share this one with LS, who you will all recall is a huge fan of “choo-choo wheels.” Lucie, this is me telling you that I’m going to give you the rest of this box of pasta soon so you can try it, too, for your goal. 

I couldn’t help but think, though, as I ate the racecar wheel pasta, of what it might be like to have some beautiful nun make us a whole plate of hand-shaped wheels. They could have real hollow tube tires probably!! Maybe I can be my own beautiful nun and use all the pasta making tools I have to do this? I don’t have the practice, but maybe by the last noodle I’d get really good at it. 

My next cliffhanger for you all is that by next writing I will have enjoyed my first bucatini of the year and will have tried a new-to-me shape, Fusilli Bucati Corti. It’s fucking SHORT BUCATINI IN A SPIRAL. I’m so excited!!!

In other news, I’ve also been having a Second Summer of Soft Serve. Very long time readers will recall the First Summer of Soft Serve, wherein I set out to determine the best soft serve ice cream in Northeast Ohio and instead found out that people love to talk about soft serve ice cream. The thing about the Second Summer of Soft Serve is that I haven’t ended up having much soft serve. I started out really strong, and made some really beautiful spreadsheets. I discovered something I’m calling Ice Cream Cone Lip. It’s when you eat a lot of ice cream cones in a short period of time and the cones rub against your upper lip while you eat them and make it hurt a little bit. It’s in there with Pringles Lip and Cap’n Crunch Mouth. You know what I’m talking about.

I’ve found myself eating a lot of hard serve this summer, though, and learning a lot about how ice cream is made instead of just housing soft serve cones. 

I found out that, I’m fairly certain, what we call frozen custard is actually just French-style ice cream, and what we call ice cream is usually Philadelphia-style ice cream. French-style uses egg as a stabilizer, which is what frozen custard does, too, so they are the same thing, n’est pas? I don’t know why we have to make these things so confusing. Philadelphia-style is often without a stabilizer when served fresh, and grocery store versions have things like guar gum and xanthan gum as stabilizers. Sometimes they put in amaretto coloring to trick you into thinking it has egg in it!!! 

Okay, but more exciting than all of that, I had another kind of ice cream. I had dondurma, a Turkish variety of ice cream that is stabilized with salep (ground up early purple orchid tuber), and mastic (plant resin). It’s thick, stretchy, kind of chewy, and melts slowly. The mouthfeel is something like soft serve, but it scoops like hard serve. It was delicious, and I need to figure out how to get it again. 

I also want to try booza, a variation served throughout Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. The way it’s churned makes it so thick it can be shaped into rolls, and it’s often flavored with rose or orange flower water. 

Going down a rabbit hole of ice cream varieties developed across West and South Asia sent me looking for ‘falooda near me’ again. Falooda has origins in Persia, but spread to what is now India via the Mughal Empire. It’s rose syrup, sweet basil seeds, and vermicelli in milk. A perfect combination for my dual taste-test-based goals. Turns out I could try making it myself, thanks to Laiji and her Creative Corner. (I love people and their blogs.)

Sometimes it’s served with kulfi, an Indian frozen dairy dessert also developed during the era of Mughal rule. It’s not churned at all! It ends up thick, and dense, and melts even more slowly. (The closer you get to the equator, the more slowly the local frozen dairy dessert melts. That’s human ingenuity, baby.) It might be flavored with almond, pistachio, mango, saffron, or cardamom. I would love to be able to try this, as well. 

Unfortunately, my rabbit holes have not yet brought me to anyone who makes these frozen treats. Hopefully I will happen upon them, the way I did the dondurma. I just have to keep getting out there. But I am feeling more and more of an emotion well-documented in the unsnackables newsletter. 

My domain name will be up for renewal in a little over a week, and I think I will be staying on here, but I’ve also considered moving it somewhere else. Stay tuned, I guess! 

Thanks for reading! Maybe next time will be better. And sooner.