I caught ramen noodles on fire.

That’s the main reason I’m back.

That and the crushing anxiety of ignoring this blog burning a hole in my soul.

I’ve been cooking. I’ve probably made five Food Lab Recipes in the time I’ve been away. I made pork meatballs. That post could have been 1000 words worth of easy ball jokes. I made pork tenderloin. Which could have been 1000 words worth of easy sex jokes. I made something with eggplant. That could have been a well-written analysis of how to properly cook a particularly tricky vegetable, but probably would have just been 1000 words worth of easy eggplant-emoji penis jokes.

Life and laziness get in the way of a lot of good things. You forget how much you love learning. You forget the proud feeling you have when you made something great. You forget the excitement of going to the keyboard and writing something that’s truly and completely your own. You lose sight of your goals. You lose sight of what you love.

Then an alarm goes off somewhere telling you to wake the fuck up.

Mine was a smoke alarm—set off by a blue plastic fireball.

Back to the noodle fire.

I was making oriental-flavored (or more accurately—salt-flavored) ramen noodles. These are the kind of ramen noodles that come in shrink-wrapped, blue-plastic bricks you can hurl like a Frisbee if you want to ruin the living room and make your mom mad. The first act in the exhaustive three-step process of making cholesterol in a bowl is boiling water.

If you remember (I sure didn’t), there are several rules to cooking on my electric stove, established through much pain and suffering and burning. Two of the most important are:

1. Never turn the stove on high.
2. Never leave the stove unattended.

There’s no reason to follow the first rule when it comes to boiling water—it just slows everything down more than a Kia Sorento at a green light. Rule two doesn’t seem that important when boiling water either. It’s just warming up water. What could go wrong? I filled my little ramen pot with water, threw it on the back burner, turned on the stovetop and left the room to go do something more constructive—drink beer and watch Law and Order reruns.

I returned several minutes later to the shriek of the smoke alarm, the smell of burning plastic and two-foot blue flames erupting from the front burner. The burner I had turned on. The burner that had an unopened blue package of ramen noodles sitting on it. The burner that tried to burn down my apartment.

I sprang into action pouring the water from the pot (sitting on top of the cold burner) over the flames. I then opened every window and turned on every fan in the house, feeling like a hero and a loser at the same time. I imagine Aquaman generally feels the same way.

When the smoke had settled, all I had left was a burnt-up noodle brick that looked like a grandma wig.

After a moment of reflection, I picked up some Jack in the Box tacos, and decided that the fire (and my indigestion after eating six 99-cent tacos) was a warning from the cooking gods. Whatever culinary muscle I’d built up working my way through The Food Lab had atrophied, and the cooking gods were teaching me some humility—in the form of a flaming noodle brick of shame.

The only way to appease them? Get back to work. Luckily for me, work usually tastes pretty good when it’s all said and done. Unless it’s on fire. Or I’m in pain. This week’s work looked like The Food Lab’s Classic Baked Ziti [Page 746].

All I know about ziti is that you can get a semi-edible rubber version as a side dish at a Sbarro, America’s finest food-court pizza establishment.

In an effort not to lose my mind or fingers, I broke the cooking process into two steps—starting with the sauce.

I’m pretty sure this is my second time making homemade sauce. All you really have to do is throw everything in a pot and warm it up. This seems simple, but remember I did set ramen noodles on fire within the past two weeks. You do get the pleasure of crushing whole tomatoes with your fists like they’re the skulls of your enemies—which is nice.

My sauce turned out a little runny. That’s the second time. In the future I’ll have to leave the sauce on longer, figure out a more effective (but probably less emotionally satisfying) way to smash the tomatoes or buy higher quality whole canned tomatoes altogether. For now, I’ll just have to live with the red tomato water. I can probably use it for a Bloody Mary if this all goes south anyway.

Now comes part two—the casseroling.

I learned some science while making this dish, one of the many benefits of The Food Lab. To make pasta turn from inedible little carb rocks into delicious little carb pillows, you need two things: water and heat. Sounds obvious. But, you can separate those two things. They don’t need to happen at the same time.

When you’re making a baked pasta dish, all you need to do is soak the noodles in warm water because they’ll be cooked later anyway. It takes slightly longer than the traditional pasta process, but it’s also less active, which frees me up to do all my other prep work. So I covered the noodles with warm tap water, salt assaulted (a-salted?) them and went on my merry way to work on what I’ve deemed the most important part of ziti—the goop.

The prepared sauce, basil, egg and other seasonings all got added to the pot. But those players are just the ensemble cast. The real stars of the show were coming up next.

You’ll notice that while this dish is criminally short on meat, it does have an abundance of the next best thing—cheese. Three types of cheese to be specific. That’s a $15-grilled-cheese-sandwich amount of cheese.

First is parmesan, the Paul Giamati of cheeses. In everything and never the star of the show, but damn does it play a great bit part.

Next is ricotta, the Willem Defoe of cheeses. Playing second fiddle, a weird-as-hell acquired taste that sometimes plays it a bit over-the-top.

And finally mozzarella, the Johnny Depp of cheeses. There’s no denying the greatness, but in most cases it’s over-exposed and under-delivering. Also, way too hyped on social media.

That’s a pretty solid cast for this production.

Not only are there three types of cheeses, there are atomic-fart-inducing amounts of each individual cheese. By the end of prep work, there was more cheese in my pot than a Packer fan’s coronary arteries.

After the noodles were done (but still raw) they got thrown in the pot and stirred along with everything until the goop turned a delightful shade of pink that I’m considering painting my apartment.

In the case of ziti, prep work is 95% of the battle. Once you’ve got everything ready to go, all you’ve got to do is line the pan with the noodles and goop, top with more marinara sauce and cheese, cover with tinfoil, put in the oven and then figure out a way to kill an hour. I chose beer and Law and Order reruns.

An hour later, the jury got it wrong and I gave birth to a beautiful little baked pasta baby.

The hardest part about cooking this dish was waiting ten minutes for it to cool. It looked pretty damn amazing. Once it had cooled down from surface-of-the-sun-hot to Helen-Mirren-at-60-bikini-picture-hot, I was finally able to dive in.

I’m not much for vegetarian dishes, but a shit-ton of cheese really covers a lot of that ground. The noodles have a nice bite to them, but aren’t overdone. The top layers of cheese melted to create a nice crust on the top of the pasta. The middle layers of goop combined to make a remarkable gooey center rivaled only by the juicy middle of the Gusher.

I’m proud of this dish, even if it was pretty simple. I’m excited to be back at it again, not only because I’m learning things and getting better at cooking, but mostly because I get to eat damn good food at the end of the day.

These noodles are fire. Next time it won’t take a real one for me to get off my ass and make some.

Recipe: 6/8
Did I Do The Dishes? Hell No.