I’m starting to become even more nostalgic as I age. I watched Mr. Mom the other night with the wifey and ached for the old times of no cell phones where you could be middle class, own a house, and have three kids on one person’s salary. Unibrows, brown, boxy sedans, and bad teeth aside, the days before true globalization were a simpler time. Yes, a lot of bad things existed then, but sometimes it’s nice to see life through the lens of a John Hughes movie.

For me however, nostalgia has evolved and become less about an era I barely lived in and more about the time when I had no worries about what I put in my body. When you get a little older you end up yearning for the way your innards and bowels functioned before you became a broken down jalopy of your former self. Your mind slows a bit and guilt ramps up. Maybe its just decades of abusing my microbiome with alcohol, any hot sauce within reach, and truckloads of over the counter mayonnaise. I can go weeks eating “clean” (boring) but then go another week on a total tear. Yes, I do have some impulse control problems. I see a chocolate chip cookie and it must be dunked in milk. I can’t have just one. I’ve been known to crush a pint of Ben and Jerry’s in five minutes while breathing through my ears.

I can eat man. I can fucking pack it away. And after I do it I’m laid out like a dead, bloated fish washed onto shore, distended belly and all.

Gluten fucks me up now. Everything delicious has it. Pasta, cookies, cake, pizza, oh pizza! I’m not one of those full blown celiac disease people but when I hop aboard the old glute train express, I experience swollen joints, head fog, and some inflammation. Telling myself just not to eat it is bullshit because to me, life without bread, pizza, and pasta is not worth living. I’ve taken a serious left turn in the way I think about all of this. I don’t want to die a good looking corpse. I want to eat the stuff that makes me happy without an aftermath of anxiety…Albeit within some grotesque form existing below the moderation line.

I grew up on a diet of milk, gluten, and sugar. White bread, gooey fluffernutter sandwiches. Tuna casserole. Mom’s rigatoni, lasagna, and beef strogonoff. All the canned treats Chef Boyardee had to offer. Shit, the Hostess pies, my lord. Eggos slathered in Aunt Jemima. Pop Tarts! And of course, no child’s diet and cavities would be fully formed without the smorgasbord of sugary cereals available to kids, luring us in with false promises of vitamins, the brightly colored cardboard boxes strewn with dancing, poison peddling, soulless, smiling mascots. Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, Fruit Loops, Honey Smacks, Count Chocula…Anything with the first four ingredients being a mixture of wheat, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and modified corn starch.

The first thing I ever learned to cook myself was pasta. Right out of the box and into the water and then a jar of Prego sauce on top to finish. I remember one of my parents teaching me how to do it, realizing just how easy it was and thinking “This is it?” I could have been nine or ten, not sure.

Anyway, my favorite food has and will always be pasta. There’s just too many forms and shapes of it, too many sauces to ignore. It’s a food religion.

Throughout my culinary career I worked at two great and very different Italian places where I learned and learned two very different ways to do the damn thing. I’ve been to Italy twice. Italian women have been part of my repertoire for a long time. Pasta is ingrained within me.

There’s no better place to eat pasta than at La Vecchia Cucina on Main Street in Santa Monica. They have all the classics ready and waiting. Yes, the arrabbiata, bolognese, carbonara, amatriciana, puttanesca, many more, and my personal fave, Linguine Vongole. Yes, linguine and clams in the shell. White wine, parsley, a pat of butter and done. We took auntie out for her 40th birthday. This was her choice: Pasta. Let’s go! But we also had all the things that soothe my soul. Fried calamari, burrata, Caesar salad, meatballs.

And here I’ll remember to praise the drinks as well. A selection of two classics and one new classic. The first round was Tom Collins, Margarita, and a Paper Plane. All delicious and perfectly executed. A time to remember. Other Auntie with her massive tits out feeding her baby at the table, lots of laughs as I tried to coerce the waiter into asking her out. “She’s a good cook. Do you like kids?” A moment frozen in time where none of my thoughts led to inflation or work or how good or bad the world was. Just perfectly cooked food and family. Good vibes. That’s what a meal should be: a suspension of everything except what really matters.