That Noodle Life: Soulful, Savory, Spicy, Slurpy

"This is also a really fun, quirky book. I actually talked to them for an article on pasta shapes I wrote earlier this year. And these people are so into noodles—almost to the point where you think it’s gone a little bit too far, but they’re so smart about it. And they’re so passionate about it. That really comes through in this book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter At the beginning of the book, they have a visual guide to noodles, and descriptions are in haiku form. It’s so funny. You could easily read over it and not realize it, or miss where they say it’s a haiku. And it’s like, wow, you’re writing poetry for noodles. The front of the book has lots of great tips on buying noodles, cooking noodles, and how you should drain and sauce them. That’s a good intro. They tackle a lot of classic dishes from both Italian and Asian traditions because noodles play prominent roles in many cuisines, but especially those two. So they have Cacio e Pepe , and they teach you how to make homemade pasta, then they have a ton of Asian dishes, you know—soup dishes or chow—fun stuff like that. The recipes also encourage lots of suggestions on how to riff on things, things that noodle dishes take especially well to—toppings or sauce, even the shapes of pasta that you use. They’re really creative. There’s a recipe in here for ‘French Onion Mac and Cheese’: it’s macaroni and cheese but with caramelized onions—damn, how have I not had that before? There’s another for ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Noodles,’ which are with green onion oil and chow mein. So you can tell they have a lot of fun with it. They have one pasta with kale that they call ‘Kaling Me Softly’… It doesn’t take itself too seriously. Sometimes pasta people put their work on a pedestal. It has to be very pure. You know, the classic dishes. But, while they pay a lot of homage to that, they just free you to have fun and get creative. They also set aside a couple of pages where they do deep dives on more specific topics—like all the different brands of instant noodles you might find when you go to the store, or how to build a noodle bowl. There are a lot of recipes that you can throw together on a weeknight, and there are ones you can do that take longer. If you like noodles, I think you’re gonna want to get this one for sure."