The mysteries of lemon-cream pasta remain mysterious

I had intended to make the Creamy Lemon Pasta from the Moosewood Simple Suppers book. I had the lemon, the cup of cream, the fettucine, the butter, the Parmesan. I was going to put peas and sage in it. I was going to follow the recipe exactly. I was going to be a good little cook.

I put the pasta water on to boil. I zested and juiced the lemon. I chopped the fresh sage leaves. I melted the butter. I opened the cream.

The cream had separated. It's been in my fridge a while; I haven't been feeling well, so haven't been cooking as often as I meant to when I bought the groceries. The date on the carton was several days prior. I don't often cook with cream - no, make that never - so I have no instinct for it. It didn't smell funny, but my husband is always mocking me for my inferior sense of smell. I dunno. I decided to chuck it.

And then I didn't know what to do next. I am aware that milk is a poor substitute for cream, so I went looking in my freezer for ice cream; it's done well for my coffee before. There was butter pecan, peanut butter swirl, both relatively freshly purchased but not really appropriate for a pasta. There were two half-eaten tubs of vanilla, both of which looked pretty unpalatable upon opening. I chucked those too.

That left me with only milk, after all. Oh, well. So I added the milk to the melted butter, heated it up, and moved on to the next step. Lemon juice.

I gotta say, I don't understand how lemon-cream sauce works. Is there something special about the cream, that makes it not curdle when you add the lemon juice? Does all the extra fat buffer it? Because let me tell you, the milk curdled instantly. I stirred it for a minute, trying to tell myself this wouldn't be so bad, before I admitted that was an egregious lie, and there was no saving this mess. Goodbye, mess.

The pasta was, by now, boiling. Yet again, I was going to be done with the pasta before the sauce.

So I had in front of me the following: fettucine, boiling. A cup of frozen peas I'd already cooked in the microwave. A cup of grated Parmesan. A freshly washed pan. A mouthful of swear words and a wooden spoon itching to smack somebody. Probably me; I hate when I do this to myself.

I pulled a new stick of butter out of the fridge, put it into the pan to melt, and marched back out to the herb garden for new sage, because I like sage.

Also, look at this monster sage plant in my herb garden. It clearly wants to share.

So: a stick of butter, four sage leaves cut into thin strips. I had a hankering for caramelized onions. Why the hell not? It takes forever, but I already screwed up the pasta/sauce timing. So I chopped up an onion and tossed that in too. I should've done a second one. That onion was good.

When the onions were brown, I threw the peas in, too. Then I added the pasta (which had been done and drained quite some time ago, and was beginning to stick to itself), discovered that the whole pound of pasta the lemony recipe had called for was way too much for what I'd actually made, and pulled half of it out again. Half a box, next time.

I tossed the pasta and sauce together, and then added the cup of grated Parm and tossed it some more. It was not so easy to toss the second time, when the cheese melted and made all the pasta stick together, but I persevered, and divided it up into a couple of bowls.

And actually, it tasted fabulous.