Americans, Canadians, please skip this portion. I'm talking to everybody else right now.
In the place where I live in addition to small local grocery stores there are also larger grocery stores that serve families usually living in individual houses on their individual properties just outside the major cities and smaller cities too. These suburban areas often become cities themselves so the result is a large city with satellite towns and minor cities surrounding it. In a few areas of the country these clusters connect. My area is a city with suburban towns that nearly connect with two other significant cities. When that develops it becomes logistically reasonable to distribute to customers directly from a warehouse but only if the quantities are large enough to make it economically worthwhile. Membership clubs arose to test that idea and it does work profitably.
The people buy directly from these warehouses or big box stores for a variety of good reasons. There are discounts on many other non food items as well. Generally, the people who buy regularly from these membership warehouses, club warehouses and the like for their family's groceries live quite large. By large, I mean, LARGE.
That's not it, by large, I mean LARGE.
You will see a great big gigantic parking lot at these places that are filled with gigantic vehicles from which emerge gigantic people with gigantic families of gigantic children. They walk through gigantic doors and take up gigantic metal baskets with wheels, carts, to hold their many gigantic boxes of produce and products. But even there sometimes a gigantic metal rolling shopping basket isn't big enough so the stores also offer flatbed trucks which are like wooden rafts with wheels and a handle and you might be surprised by the number of people there buying their groceries piled up on one of those flatbed trucks.
I encountered a woman pulling such a flatbed truck loaded up with gallons of milk among other things, obviously for a restaurant or a family reunion, or a Boy Scout Jamboree or some such so I stopped and mentioned I was impressed with her guns.
Her guns. Her arms. Her arms needed to pull such a heavy cart. See, I'm great at just grabbing the first thing by way of icebreaker. She told me, no, all those gallons of milk were for her teenage boys and all that would only last a few days.
So you probably don't have a problem with milk going sour, do you.
No, we do not.
This box would be about a decade's worth of angel hair pasta for a regular bloke like myself so I give away half of it and still come out ahead. Odd, I know. Here, have a pound of angel hair pasta, but it does win friends, or at least it hasn't created any enemies that I know of.
So you have a little bit of angel hair pasta, an ounce or so, not enough for a pasta meal, a piece of broccoli, an onion, and a piece of cheese, and you think you can do something with that.
Burn it.
Or at least sear it.
That broccoli is going to need a lot help to adjust all that chlorophyl and to cloak the trace of sulfur, and few things are more bland than noodles from wheat flour and water, paste, the definition of bland innit.
This ↑ or that ↓ but not both.
Observe:
>>>> singe <<<<
garlic
Marsala
chicken stock
bend
bend
bend
bend like Beckham
How in the world do you know when angel hair pasta is al dente? Do you have a minute? You stand there and test it until it bends like Beckham.
It is the butter and wine that does it. This is really good.
No, the Parmigiano is what does it.
No wait wait wait, it's the chicken broth, that's it, the butter and wine and chicken broth that is what does it. That and the cheese.
You know when you burned the broccoli and the onions up there, before you added the garlic and then steamed and fogged up the place by deglazing the pan which stopped the burning? Remember that? Well, look at it.
Look, I said!
That is what gives this whole thing its real flavor. That and the few other agents of flavor thrown in.
