BrickFair is coming up soon, and this year we're leaving early in order to go out to the Outer Banks and the Delmarva Peninsula. As per our usual trip routine, our job in the days before departure is to eat every perishable item in the house.

So today, I looked and saw that we had a few spaghetti noodles as well as the ingredients for a quick jalapeño cream sauce. The meal came together quickly, but after tasting it, something was missing. After a few bites, I realized that it was cheese, as I've only ever had the sauce with that pasta. We'd eaten the last of the ravioli yesterday, but there was still some ricotta cheese left, unused in the veggie lasagna we ate other week. I dumped the cheese onto my plate.

It ended up being too much cheese, but a) it needed to be eaten, and b) my mom urged me to get it out of the fridge. It was okay, but still didn't taste right. For one thing, the warmth of the pasta and the chill of the cheese settled on a lukewarm equilibrium, which is an unfit temperature for ... well, any food, really, but especially for what I was eating. I thought I was clever when I mixed the cheese into the sauce and stuck it in the microwave for half a minute.

The resulting mixture was a horrid abomination, tasting faintly of cheese but mostly of regret and failure.

The moral of the story: never microwave ricotta.