Mamma mia!

Over the course of the past two days, the inhabitancy (is that a word?) of my house has swelled from about five to nine people. Agnese is back from working all her festivals, Natali is back from her travels, Pablo is back from doing his show in Edinburgh, and Karim's back from the States. (Jed, Rebecca, Carrie, myself, and our poor hapless Polish housemate who has no connection to LISPA whatsoever have always been here.) I love it, I love it, I love it. There are people everywhere, and it's a tight, joyful squeeze. It'll probably start getting on my nerves after a week or two, but right now it's bliss.

Last night was the first night with everyone home, and so what did we do? You'll never guess. We broke out a couple bottles of wine, added a couple of feet to the kitchen table, pulled it out to the centre of the room (allowing about 12in of squeeze-through room around the sides), cranked up the Justin Timberlake, rolled up our sleeves, and made pasta. Like, actually made pasta. From scratch. With eggs and flour and stuff. Agnese, being Italian, organised and generally oversaw the event, and Jed, being an absolutely phenomenal cook, spearheaded the actually making of the pasta, and showing the rest of us how. Angese made the most amazing sauce with fresh cherry tomatoes and olive oil and basil and garlic, and various people made various ravioli fillings (goat's cheese and ricotta, butternut squash with goat's cheese and cinnamon, goat's cheese and spinach, and "white trash filling," i.e. goat's cheese, cheddar cheese, and olives. [We had a lot of goat's cheese.]) We rolled dough until our arms were sore, and cut out all sorts of silly ravioli shapes (fish, pac-men, skulls, stars, etc), and stuffed the ravioli, and Agnese cooked the ravioli, and would bring in new plates of steaming fresh ravioli every five minutes or so, which everyone swooped on with forks and fingers while still making new ones. When the sauce ran out, we switched to olive oil with rosemary as dressing. And when the stuffing ran out, Jed made linguine.

This linguine was quite possibly the best thing I've ever eaten in my entire life.

The ravioli was good, but we didn't really get the effect of the fresh pasta until the linguine. This is why people go on and on about the merits of freshly made pasta. Because it really is that good. Depending on how ambitious I'm feeling over Christmas, maybe we'll have to have a pasta-making party. How great would that be?!

As you may be able to tell, I'm feeling a lot less sad, a lot more happy these days. Sure, I haven't been able to ride my bike all week because of Yet Another flat (this can't be normal, right? Three times in as many weeks? Back me up on this, biker buds), and sure, my shoulder's still a bit wacky, and sure, the clouds have rolled back in over the course of the past couple of days, but I'm good. I'm happy. I lead the good life in London.