... and trine the MC, and in the hardware store on Tuesday morning, picking up yet another gallon of white oil-based paint, I see the bags of soft black licorice at what I believe is called the Point of Sale and eat the whole packet before I get home - so what if Pluto square Saturn is looming. If I want to squander $2.99 on myself while shelling out hundreds for home improvement I'm just going to go ahead and do it. I'm an Aries.
(I now segue clumsily, an oxymoron I know, into a seeming digression: one of my favorite things to eat is linguine with white clam sauce, but I hate boiling all the water for the pasta and then draining it with all the clouds of steam and having all those pots to clean up, so could never be bothered to go near making it at home.
One fateful day several years ago, I fell across a New York Times recipe for cooking spaghetti by breaking the strands into small pieces - thirds is good - putting it in a deepish heavy-bottomed pan, stirring and sauteing it briefly in olive oil, then slowly adding a bit of water, stirring, simmering, repeating, until the pasta is as al dente as you prefer it - no billowing steam to burn your hands on, no dirtying a colander to strain it through, using only one pot - the lazy person's spaghetti cooking dream.
With that and a little help from Progresso, linguine with white clam sauce became - not a staple - no need to get carried away with this cooking thing - but a once-every-three-months-or-so dinner when I absolutely had to have some carbohydrates. I even experimented a little; using clam juice instead of water, adding a can of clams, squeezing in a clove of fresh garlic, sometimes doing all three variations at once if the moon happened to be in Cancer ha ha. End seeming digression and back to Tuesday morning.)
After the hardware store came Walmart, and with Venus hovering over my shoulder, I was going up and down each aisle I frequent regularly as I had forgotten my list and thought if I did that I would remember what I needed if I saw it. A can of Progresso White Clam Sauce caught my eye. I remembered I already had a bottle of clam juice, a can of minced clams and some angel hair pasta in what passes for my pantry and knew immediately what was going to follow my bag of licorice.
I managed to hold off until about six, by which time Mars getting ready to trine Jupiter the next morning was making itself felt. I'd broken down the dozen or so cardboard boxes I'd taken from the storage shed to make them ready for the dump. I dragged the old broken trash can on wheels where I'd stored my winter clothes in plastic bags out of the storage shed (AKA the adobe) and lugged the better quality non-broken one that lived on the back patio up to the abode in its place. I put the pair of Timberland boots I wore once in 2002 that belonged to Paul, who died in 2001, with the flattened boxes to go to the dump. I asked the current handyman-in-residence if he had any interest in the four boxes of weirdly shaped saltillo tiles left over from redoing the living room floor in 2002. I put gloves on, closed my eyes, and swept into the cobwebs in each corner of the adobe - in short (too late) made a really good first pass at cleaning it out, something I've wanted to do for about five years.
I'd definitely earned my bowl o'carbs, and broke up the angel hair into thirds, forgot that it could be sauteed in olive oil, and put some water in the pot with it to start it boiling. Slowly added more water and clam juice, had it simmering away nicely. Remembered I had bought frozen spinach that morning and decided to cook some to go with the pasta. Did not want to dirty another pot. With Jupiter (optimism) telling me throwing (Mars - action) the bag of frozen spinach into the pot of boiling water and pasta would work out, I did just that, put the lid back on, turned the heat down a bit and left it alone for five minutes or so. Took the lid off, stirred it all up, added a can of Progresso White Clam Sauce and voila! my first astrologically influenced recipe. It was good.
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