Basta pasta

I knew pasta forms the base of the food pyramid in the Italian cuisine, but apparently my knowledge was not complete. If you leave out pizza and the rice dish risotto which do make it for a couple of entries in the menu card, the rest is all - with no exaggeration - some kind of pasta or the other. Take out your favorite text book on geometry and pick out all the regular shapes - tubes, cones, helices, toroids, thin sphagetti shaped objects (he he .. I like this description of the shape), flat sheets; and all that you imagine all have room in the generous world of pasta. And then the raviolis and the tortellinis with stuffing in them. I did not know that the flat sheets that make the lasagna are also called pasta, which is a quite a generic word. Anyways, the trouble about the accounting was slightly easy with the help of wikipedia which says there are 350 types of pasta. I wonder if the Italians have to be content with risotto/pizza for the remaining two weeks of the year !! Although I find the long sphagetti unmanageable, I have a new found interest and respect for it, thanks to the interesting commercials with spaghetti like the one below !!


I went on a holiday to Rome a few weeks ago. Its an 8 hour drive from Lugano to Rome, passing through several regions of Italy - Lombardy, Tuscany, Abruzzo among others. Stopped for a meal in the restaurants or sometimes went a bit fancy with the wish to experience the local touch by going for one of the trattorias, which is home-made food served in a small restaurant. Each of these places advertises a 'regional speciality'. Given my dietary preferences for a vegetarian meal, I innocently asked them 'do you have any vegetarian regional specialities?' "Yeah, sure we would get one for you" and after 20 minutes of delicious wait for the food, they come out with a 'pasta pomodori', which is essentially pasta with tomato. Being completely unaware of Italian cuisine, I would wonder what's so regional about this food that I eat at every stop. But it took me a while to figure out, with guidance obviously, that the speciality is in one of the intricate shapes of the pasta. With the long helices from one region, the shorter ones from another. The long sphagetti, the Italian counterpart of the Chinese rice noodles, with square cross section from the North of the countr
, and the oval, ciruclar cross sections from the others (now honestly I do not even remember which is from where, but you get the idea).

Two days into the trip, with the 'regional speciality' of pasta with tomato everywhere, I was ready to yell out "basta (enough) pasta". But then I was in a trattoria in one of these villages just after a long 12 km tunnel to Rome. They had the amazing dish 'pasta con funghi e tartufo (with mushroom and tartufo)'. It is probably the most delicious pasta that I ever had. This tartufo is supposed to be more expensive than gold and is one of the very special treats to the tongue ! So, if you find yourself with an offer to have pasta with tartufo, relish it !!! It's worth a shot, although you might later realize that it's an acquired taste !!!