With almost 200,000 Instagram followers, a global video audience and a new cookbook, "Pasta, Pretty Please," this Eastside chef has built an empire out of flour, water, fresh eggs and creative obsession.
Handmade pasta holds challenges and rewards for everyone, but they’re different from most for Linda Miller Nicholson.
The Eastside cook makes her doughs from scratch, colors them in vibrant vegetal hues, then noodles them into startlingly creative compositions. She’s created celebrity portraits in spaghetti, patterned sheets of cannelloni as gaily as a Marimekko fabric swatch, recreated Old Master paintings in fettuccine and sketched pasta stick figures in linguine outfits like a designer’s edible Fashion Week.
Cooking isn’t just an art for her, it’s actual art. And it tastes as good as it looks.
A lot of people say “It’s so beautiful, how can you eat it?” Nicholson said during a conversation at her property near Issaquah, where she teaches pasta-making classes, raises a flock of chickens and builds an empire out of flour, water, fresh eggs and creative obsession. (The trim on the light-filled home is painted in her favorite shade of chartreuse, which she matches in pasta dough by adding fresh turmeric root to parsley.)
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In her new book, “Pasta, Pretty Please” (William Morrow Cookbooks, $28.50), Nicholson compares her painstaking projects to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of creating patterned sand mandalas and then destroying them after their ceremonial purpose is fulfilled.
“The point of art is to be ephemeral and to create. The point of it isn’t to hoard,” she said, demonstrating how to form rainbow-colored cavatellis with the quick roll of a dough scraper against a grooved walnut board.
“Just the fact that you’re eating that thing doesn’t preclude you from being able to make something new tomorrow. Part of the magic of it is knowing you’re not ever going to make something the same way twice.”
Trendmakers are fond of calling Nicholson the Lady Gaga of food, whether from her saucy forays into sexy pasta clothing or her willingness to mix whimsical delight with personality and politics. (One of her most remarkable installations was — no, not the time Katy Perry’s people hired her for a pasta portrait — a stop-motion farfalle film involving a rainbow Pride flag.) Nearly 200,000 people follow her “Salty Seattle” Instagram feed, and she’s got a global video audience with millions of views.
“From the time I was 4 years old, I’ve always had, I guess, opinions. And I find people’s reactions to me generally is … they either like me or hate me. And I’m OK with that. Because I’m not a compartmentalizer, it’s all there,” she said.
It’s fun, usually, but not frivolous.
Nicholson’s a hard-core cook who has written for Serious Eats and explored both high-end and down-home cooking, spending a month researching the perfect hamburger and 2-plus years on biscuits and gravy.
Pasta had been a part of her life since she was preschool-aged, spending summers with grandparents who taught her to roll out noodles by hand. At 11, after her parents divorced, she remembers cooking her mom dinners from “Romantic Italian Cooking,” one of the several published works she thanks in her own cookbook’s acknowledgments. (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is another.)
More practice came from traveling in Italy, fueled by “dreams and odd jobs along the way,” and living in Turin for three years with her boyfriend, now her husband, where she finished a graduate degree and taught English.
“I did not even realize until I was probably in my 30s just how much pasta I made compared to anyone else in my reality,” she said.
For all her deep dives into subjects that interested her, she hadn’t found her true passion. If anything, she’d found the opposite, earning her real-estate license once she and her husband moved back to Seattle.
“There are people who excel at that and who find their Zen in real estate, and I am not one of those people. It was though someone had poured my soul back into the bottle of wine through a funnel and put a cork in it and threw it into a cellar.”
The pasta breakthrough came thanks to their son, Bentley (now age 10), and his adamant refusal to eat vegetables. The challenge brought all the ingredients from Nicholson’s past together, including her own stubborn and mischievous nature. She thought about traditional Italian green pastas dyed with nettles, then took the idea full-spectrum. Her pastas began spanning the rainbow, infused by natural ingredients from beets to blueberries to buckwheat, then on to activated charcoal and butterfly pea flowers.
She presented the colored doughs to her son as “edible play dough.” Family meals became a hit. Then she experimented with new shapes and patterns, using secondary sheets of pasta like a canvas backing, repurposing cake-decorating tools like piping tips and fondant cutters.
Somewhere in there — somewhere between the children’s activity and the pasta-Ellen-DeGeneres-portrait dyed with cacao, beet, harissa, activated charcoal, dragon fruit and tofu — it became something more than just dinner.
“(Pasta) is like a textile. You can really manipulate it and feel it beneath your hands and understand it texturally,” Nicholson said. Even her sauces are like cloaks for the noodles, matched to shapes as if she’s accessorizing a dress. She insists that she wouldn’t have the same talents if she tried such complex projects using paints or other artistic outlets. Pasta is the medium her fingers understand.
“I love … the way you can convey emotions through it, the way you can bring joy. I think that’s what I’ve always loved about clothes and dressing up.”
It’s still food, of course, and even the most toughened, heavily manipulated artworks get eaten. (Those less-appetizing scraps go to the chickens, who she thinks deserve something for all the eggs they contribute.)
In the book, Nicholson shares her recipes and procedures, convincing readers that handmade noodles are easier than they think, and that ravioli emojis and avocado gnocchi — or whatever fuels their own pasta dreams — are within their grasp and worth the effort.
“A lot of students want the hard-and-fast rules. I try to convey to them that there are no hard-and-fast rules …
“Don’t learn the way I do it. Learn the way you do it.”
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Information on Nicholson’s pasta workshops is on her website at saltyseattle.com. Upcoming book events for “Pasta, Pretty Please” include a launch-party dinner on Friday, Nov. 9, at Caruccio’s on Mercer Island ($45); a talk at the Book Larder on Tuesday, Nov. 13, waitlist only available for 6:30 p.m. talk, book-signing line open to all at 7:45 p.m.; and a five-course pasta dinner with Nicholson and Mike Easton on Saturday, Nov. 17, at Il Corvo Pasta ($138, including food, wine and book).