Adventures in Gluttony, Part II

Angel hair = death.

Hello and welcome to the second part of my Confessions of a Disgusting Eater. Yesterday I shared memories of my burger/frozen-hot-chocolate trail of tears, and today I'll tell you about another time I ate like a death-row inmate who just learned that the governor doesn't give a crap about his two-week hunger strike.

TILL MORBID OBESITY DO US PART
About a year into my marriage, Mrs. The Anthony Show and her friend wanted to backpack through Europe. I was offered the opportunity to join them, but declined because

1. I generally hate to travel
2. We went to Greece (Mykonos and Athens and a couple of islands I don't remember) for my honeymoon, and that was enough European roughing it for me
3. I wouldn't have minded a little Anthony Time for a week

BRIEF DIGRESSION
Allow me to pause as one of those "I really took for granted my pre-parenting years" moments passes. Back in what we used to call The Day, I'd come home from work, eat something at a leisurely pace, and then have several hours to myself and/or with Mrs. The Anthony Show.

These days, on the way home from work I pick up my daughter from pre-K, where she gives me a hassle about leaving, even though she's dropped off in the morning, the girl clings to Mrs. The Anthony Show like we're sending her to have her head shaved and teeth pulled and upper arm pierced with a lifetime's worth of vaccinations. This happens every day, like Groundhog Day for Kids.

Then, I return home, hoping that the son isn't driving the wife insane. And that's just the beginning of my weeknight.

BACK TO THE GORGING

This thing is a friggin' LIAR!

So anyway, the wife went away for a week, and this was during the dark ages before even infants had their own smartphones. She and her friend stayed at hostels or cheap hotels they chose on the spot, so she could contact me only sporadically.

It was probably Day 3 when I was at the sweet spot where I was used to having no one around but also not missing the wife all that much. Instead of my usual dinner-for-one option, which was pizza or Taco Bell or both, I made pasta.

I love pasta. And, sometimes, pasta loves me. For years my pasta of choice was capellini because it's much thinner than spaghetti and "thin" spaghetti and therefore takes less time to cook.

Cooking for one is an easy task when you're serving yourself a food that by its nature comes in portions, like hamburgers or hot dogs or corn on the cob or Lobster Thermidor. When you have to deal with a quantity of something, like baked Alaska or creamed corn or, in my case, pasta, it's not easy to handle the portion control.

For our wedding, or for Mrs. The Anthony Show's shower (it's all a blur), we received a pasta measuring tool, one of those gadgets that seemed cute when we unwrapped it but after the wedding was banished to the Drawer of Seldom-Used Kitchen Tools, along with the lemon zester and cherry pitter.

The problem with the pasta tool is that the smallest size it offers is a quarter-pound of noodles. I was like, hell, I've eaten Quarter Pounders at McDonald's (note: this was before I concluded that I am incapable of properly digesting anything from the Golden Arches of Gastroenterological Torture), so I should be able to put away a mere four ounces of angel hair.

I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO HANDLE FOUR OUNCES OF ANGEL DUST, EITHER

THIS.

I forgot that pasta, like unpopped popcorn and dry oatmeal, is a lot smaller in volume before it's cooked and, like the dry oatmeal, increases in volume with the addition of hot water.

The results of my cooking resulted in a quantity of capellini that was larger than I'd expected, but again, I was like, it's only a quarter pound. I didn't pour a portion into a plate; I planned to eat right out of the bowl that contained the whole batch.

I added the sauce — I'll offend my ancestors by admitting that I use a jar, but I customize it by frying some garlic and onions in oil beforehand before adding some Italian spices — and the grated Locatelli Pecorino Romano, and if you show up at my house on pasta night with that Kraft paste in a can I will gut you with a fistfull of fusilli.

I sat down on the futon that served as our living room couch and guest bed, and started to watch an early-evening episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. At the time, I enjoyed this comedy, long before I realized that this so-called sitcom was really about the horrors of married life, in-laws, and children that are barely seen and rarely heard, along with the infantilization of the American husband.

Anyway, I started eating this glorious concoction of eggs, flour, tomatoes, and cheese, while staring at the television programming before me. I was in this zone where it was like I wasn't even eating...I had this steady flow of tasty goodness running down my throat, like the way you sit in one of those massage chairs at the mall and it's three minutes of heaven.

DO THEY MAKE PLUMBERS' SNAKES FOR THE GULLET?
But then, suddenly, I stopped eating. Not because I wanted to stop eating, but because I was literally unable to swallow any more food. I felt as if you could take an X-ray of my chest and you'd see nothing but pasta clogging all nine meters of my digestive tract, from my stomach up through my esophagus and finally protruding from my pharynx.

I put down my fork and just lay there as Ray Romano and Peter Boyle argued about something stupid. It took about an hour before I could rise from the futon, and when Mrs. The Anthony Show read the e-mail that described my evening, she said to her friend, "I don't think I should ever leave him alone for an extended period of time ever again."

And she was right. Because the other time that she went away for a couple of days, I got into some other trouble. But that's for another post. And now I'm in the mood for some angel hair.