Topic: A Memorable Meal

One memorable meal that comes to mind is one that I prepared myself.

Despite being raised working in a restaurant, by young adulthood I actually knew very little about cooking. I had learned to cook breakfast but that’s about all. When I got out on my own my diet consisted of a lot of bland processed frozen foods.

That all changed when I got my job in Saudi Arabia. I had a roommate who liked to cook, and he also liked spicy foods. He taught me how to make a few dishes and I started loving spicy foods as well.

Dating is forbidden in Saudi Arabia. It’s illegal to be out in public with a woman one isn’t related to. An exception is if you’re with a married couple - they’re considered adequate chaperones. I was lonely and I heard about cooking classes offered by an Indian lady, Aruna. She and her husband Arvin hosted weekly cooking lessons in their flat. Their flat was also a hotbed of dating activity. So I figured taking some of her classes would be an ideal way to safely meet women in Riyadh. I signed up for a course in Italian cooking.

Aruna was an excellent teacher, and soon I was confident in my ability to prepare a wide variety of delicious Italian dishes. While housesitting for one of my married friends, I decided to host a dinner party. I would ask one of the ladies I had met in the class to be my date. It would be safe to have it in mixed company because there was little risk that the dreaded muttawa (religious police) would raid the married folks’ compound. 

So I invited the lady and several of my friends for a feast. I prepared a wonderful minestrone soup, a salad, Italian green beans and an awesome pasta dish for the centerpiece. This was cannelloni with both béchamel and tomato-cream sauces. The cannelloni dish was particularly labor-intensive. I had to make the ricotta cheese filling from scratch, and I made my own pasta from scratch as well. Then I rolled the cheese into sheets of the pasta. The tomato-cream sauce took hours, and required putting the tomatoes through an extractor to end up with a silky smooth sauce.

Everyone showed up on time and the first courses went extremely well. Everyone was complimenting me on my prowess as a budding chef. Then things sort of went awry when we began eating the cannelloni. For some reason the pasta rolls seemed kind of chewy and almost cardboard-like.

Everyone was very polite and still complimented me when the meal was over, but I was crushed. I went back to Aruna’s for the next class and asked her what might have gone wrong. She tilted her head and asked me in her lovely, lilting accent, “For how long did you boil the pasta?”

Holy shit! I had totally forgotten to boil the pasta. So we had eaten homemade ricotta cheese wrapped in raw pasta, accompanied by two exquisite sauces. The worst part of the whole ordeal was explaining to my date what had happened. She said, “So you’re going to med school, huh?” 

I’ve never forgotten to boil the pasta since.