This is, without any reservations, the greatest contribution I made to humankind during my time as a PhD student. It came to me through some kind of epicurean epiphany... The story is looong, so I leave the details as an exercise for the diligent reader. For the indigent reader we have bigger fish to fry; so let us not waste any time, let us make haste, let us move onward, let us journey forth, to my epic recipe:
Ingredients (Serves 1)
Linguine *one fistful*
Trader Joe's Crunchy Chili Onion *1 heaping tablespoon, NO OTHER BRANDS WILL DO!*
Fish Sauce *a modest tablespoon*
Canned Clams *the amt like, totally depends on your umami quotient (UQ). mine's really high, I got tested at 8 and scored over 200*
Steps (10 min)
First let us boil some water in a grand saucepan. There is really no need for salt at this point, but if you must, you may empty yesterday's jar of tears into the grand saucepan. Once the water is boiling, add the linguine in as the Italians do. Let boil for a minute shy of whatever duration your package suggests, because is pasta that's not al dente really pasta? Is it even food? Bear with me. Drain the pasta (in prime al dente condition) through a sieve and relocate it straight back into the grand saucepan, for we are trying to minimise the time spent on dishwashing subject to life's many constraints. There is a duality theorem to be found here: if you minimise the time spent on dishwashing subject to life's many constraints, you are equivalently maximising the time spent not washing dishes subject to the clean-dishes constraint. Bear with me. Let T⊆ℝ3 be the jar of Trader Joe's Crunchy Chili Onion and scoop a heaping tablespoon H⊆int(T) into the grand saucepan and onto the linguine. (!Warning! Be sure to use the standard topology here, or you run the risk of getting glass in your food.) Bear with me, please. Stir vigorously to maximise the entropy of the H-distribution over the the bed of linguine, for that is where all things in life are headed. Okay. Now put the pasta back onto the heat and add a swish of fish sauce onto a spot of bare metal (inside the grand saucepan, of course). Let vapourise until the pungency has sufficiently dissipated, so that you can enjoy future consumption without the gagging; there's a divine complementarity between Trader Joe's Crunchy Chili Onion and the non-volatile component of fish sauce... Mix again, aiming to get a uniform coating of the fish sauce reduction around each strand of pasta. (By the way, if you had had the sang-froid to add some pasta water to the reduction you can now condescendingly tell all your friends it's actually called a velouté.) Finally, adorn the dish with as many clams as your UQ and your budget can handle (the lower constraint has to be binding), allowing the residual heat to bring them up to temperature. Bon Appetit!