Fried Tagliatelle With Chickpeas and Smoky Tomatoes

My exploration of pastas with chickpeas continued last night with "Fried Tagliatelle With Chickpeas and Smoky Tomatoes" (NYT Cooking; subscription required). We liked it, but I have several thoughts on ingredients.

First, this is how my tagliatelle came out of the box - broken into bits, and not in nice "nests." I think fresh tagliatelle would be so much nicer here. Also, note that the box was 9oz of pasta, which was a good amount - the recipe only states, vaguely, "eight nests."

Because of all the broken bits, it was really hard to evenly toast the noodles, but I did my best and it was fine.

The toasted noodles weren't all covered with liquid when I "nestled" them into the pan with chickpeas. I worried they wouldn't cook on top, but they did; it was fine.

You could certainly use less oil for the sauce. I would try 1/3 cup next time. And go ahead and use more than 8oz of tomatoes. I had 10 oz.; I bet a whole pound would be wonderful. Also note that I didn't have chipotle flakes (and they'd have been too much for my spice-averse diners anyway) so I used about 1/4 teaspoon of chipotle powder and that was perfect - just a tiny bit of smoky heat. The dried chickpeas (I soaked them about 10 hours) were really perfect in this - much more of a bite than canned ones.

Final thought before we get to the standard rambling about my life: my tagliatelle contained egg. Find an eggless version, and your dish will be not just vegetarian, but also vegan - an extra win for the environment!

And now for the rambling. My passport is approaching its expiration date, so I got a new photo. Unfortunately, it makes me look like someone who has been living through a pandemic for the past year. And this was the better of two attempts!

Renewing my passport feels surreal because even as more people are starting to get vaccinated, it's still hard to imagine getting on a plane. I ache to visit my mom, in England, but that country is still in lockdown, travelers must quarantine for 10 days on arrival, and my mom's care home hasn't allowed visitors in months.

We are now at the one-year anniversary of when most of were starting to realize that we were all facing something unfathomably horrible.

On March 11, two friends and I started a text chain that has brought comfort and sanity to me ever since; rarely a day has passed without some update or amusement from at least one of us. I recently scrolled back through some of the early texts. By the end of April, we'd posted a collective 40 photos of what we were drinking, and those were just the drinks we photographed. We shared the challenges of procuring food, and laughed about the toilet paper shortage. We agonized over the collapse of our kids' education, and what that did to our careers. We made jokes about everything, but also confessed our anxiety and grief and rage. There was plenty of swearing. 

We're not where we were last spring, thank heavens, even though we're still struggling in various ways. But things are changing. With the vaccine rollout, and with the emergence of COVID-19 variants, will things be better or worse in, say, six months? My head spins endlessly around so many possibilities. Will we approach herd immunity? Will a new variant - perhaps arising in a place where vaccines aren't widely available - evade vaccines and make everything awful again? Have scientists and public health professionals and policymakers learned enough from the experience of the past year that they could nip a new variant more or less in the bud? What if it turns out that kids, whom we think aren't widely affected by the virus, will actually have long-term health problems if they get it? What if we learn that while the vaccines prevent serious illness, they don't prevent transmission? What if trials for kids' vaccines aren't successful?

Do I spend time considering camps for my back-up dancer for summer? Does it make sense to plan a vacation of some sort? What does vacation look like these days?

And thus endeth today's rambling, with no answers to so many questions.