This is my quick dinner. When I cannot think of what I want to eat, or when I don’t feel craving for anything, then I will look into my fridge to see what I have left inside. Normally I can find a few ingredients that I can combine and make me a good dish of pasta. I think cooking pasta is very flexible, still of course there are some principles that we should understand about pasta so that we do not create a messy dish without a combination of ingredients and flavors.

I follow the recipe from my pasta bible book, "lexicon of pasta", the book that really opens my view and understanding about pasta. Following the recipe from this book, I have made my wonderful dinner, with a glass of red wine.

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I never knew someday I would love pasta so much. Back to about 10 years ago, pasta was still something very new at the supermarkets in Vietnam. Only those high-class people who could afford meals in Western restaurants or in luxurious hotels might know of proper pasta dishes. At that time, Vietnamese people just bought a pack of dried pasta (which they didn’t call it pasta but in another Vietnamese word) out of curiosity, bringing it home and cooking it in Vietnamese way, which was not properly cooked. I used to try cooking that way, and I didn’t like it at all. After that time, I never cooked it again.

When I came to Singapore, I tried the pasta at my university canteens, and I did not like that pasta either. So I thought, there was nothing special about the so-called pasta. Little did I know that the pasta I ate at school canteens or at Western food stall at any food court or hawker center was the worst of all due to its low quality. Serving for students, or for low-income people, how would you expect the pasta with full necessary ingredients as it must be.

Not until when I came to Milan, Italy on my exchange study program did I really taste the real pasta right on the Italian land. That was the first lasagna I had ever tried, and guess what, I had it at the university canteen. But I loved it immediately. After coming back to Singapore. I decided to learn more about pasta, searching for information on the Internet, buying books on pasta, spending my savings from part-time jobs to buy the key ingredients, and starting my exploration into the world of pasta.

Now I really love it. And I love this Arrabiata, so so much. However, I couldn’t buy pancetta in Singapore, so I replaced it with bacon, and the taste was still so lovely.

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