I’ve been promising a lot of people for a long time that I’d cook them an Italian meal if they could just find me the right ingredients and a kitchen with a few burners. I told my friends Lindsey and Alex in Beijing I’d make them some meat sauce, and I promised a girl in Dalian I’d cook for her sometime after she gave me a tour of the city my first weekend here.

Somebody finally cashed in.

My friends at Pippa’s Cafe, where I’ve spent much of the past two weeks enjoying their wireless connection (I’m there now), provided both the kitchen and the essentials. Their cook even helped me out a bit, although he doesn’t speak English and we had to play a bit of charades while I stirred the sauce and tried to get him to find me another pan.

The food took longer than I expected, as it almost always does. The tomatoes weren’t ripe enough, so I stewed them for a few minutes in a bowl with a pinch of salt to bring out the flavor, then cooked them slower than I usually would until the sauce was darker and more homogenous. We even had fresh basil that Molly, one of the owners, found at a 5-star hotel in town. For the main course, I fried up some steaks in a bit of the tomato sauce.

Italian food (especially home cooked) is one of those things I’ve been pining for over the past month, whispering, “What I wouldn’t give for…”

It turned out to be just what I needed. Homemade sauce over fusilli (spiral pasta) with steak, followed by a nice espresso. At our table were three Chinese, one Japanese and an American. We enjoyed the food and listened to the cold wind howling outside, thankful not to be in it.

Life ain’t bad.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 9:08 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.