Damnit Julia!

I love Julia Child. I think she was a very cool, very smart, very funny lady. And though I cannot eat nearly everything in her Mastering The Art of French Cooking, I respect the amount of work that went into the book and I'm sure her recipes are delicious (or at least Julie Powell, who wrote Julie and Julia, tells me so.)

So it disappoints me to see that she once said that she never serves pasta to guests because it shows that you don't know how to cook. Being a life-long pasta lover and always looking for the next perfect recipe, the idea that I cannot cook just because I occasionally serve pasta to guests is an alien one to me.

That's not to say that I haven't been served some perfectly horrible pasta, but I have also been served some amazing, wonderful, out-of-this-world pasta (Mario Batali's restaurant in Las Vegas, I'm looking at you.)

Though the base of a pasta dish, especially when you're a vegetarian, is often the same flour and egg noodles, there is always endless variety in the sauce. I have never been a fan of cream sauces personally, but many people dream of the perfect fettucine alfredo that they had in a restaurant long ago. I have tried many different types of tomato-based sauces, including the amazing and delicious Alla Crazy Bastard that I have written about here, and the V version of a Gordon Ramsay sauce that we've made several times over the course of our relationship when we have leftover vegetables and tomatoes. Again, the tomatoes are always the base of the sauce, but I'd be hard-pressed to think of too many other similarities.

I have also become a recent convert to olive oil and garlic-based sauces, mostly due to the euphoric experience of putting that first bite of Mario Batali pasta in my mouth on our mini honeymoon in August. Though I have not yet perfected it myself, Mr. V has become a master in it, especially when mixed with wild mushrooms. To die for, seriously.

Now that I've gone and made myself hungry, I submit my rebuttal to Mrs. Child. While the perfect delicious pasta sauce doesn't take as much effort as deboning a duck or roasting a chicken, the pursuit of it has led me to many happy hours trying, tasting and seasoning. The mark of a good meal is one that you enjoy, and so if you have satisfied your guests, you are a good cook.