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It was just spaghetti. But it was really, really good spaghetti. It really was!
I love to cook, but it's mostly my husband that cooks at our house. His schedule at work has changed, however, so it's been up to me to cook dinner for myself and the kids on the weekends. I'm completely okay with this, because it gives me a chance to get creative in the kitchen.
I have some challenges, though. First of all, I have an extremely picky son when it comes to the sorts of foods he'll allow to touch his apparently sensitive tongue. Secondly, I have a daughter who seems to have adopted her brother's pickiness.
I figured I couldn't go wrong with spaghetti. But I couldn't just do pasta and a jar of sauce. Oh, no. What fun is that? I mean, really. What fun is that? I threw in some ground meat, sauteed some green peppers and onions, and away we went. I don't really follow a recipe when I cook, but here's my "recipe":
Ingredients
A box of spaghetti.
A jar of plain spaghetti sauce. They call it "traditional", but you know.
A pound of some sort of ground meat. I used ground chicken. Frozen solid.
That leftover half of green pepper in the fridge.
That last onion in your pantry.
Some garlic salt.
Some sort of shredded or grated cheese.
Steps
1. Boil a big pot of water. You know why.
2. Brown the meat. If you're using ground chicken or turkey, you'll want to add a little oil to the pan. Put the solid frozen meat brick in the preheated pan. Put a lid over it for a second to steam off that piece of paper that gets frozen to it. Flip and scrape until it's all nice and cooked.
3. Halfway through browning your frozen block of meat, shout some sort of explative starting with "s" when you realize you forgot to chop the green pepper and the onion. Alternate between chopping up the green pepper and half of the onion into tiny pieces and browning the meat. Put both the pepper and onion together in a bowl and mix it up with your fingers. When you're finished, wash your hands. Go! Wash them! You don't want to smell onion later when you're trying to brush your teeth. Ew.
4. Realize you chopped up too much pepper and onion. Add half of the mixture to the browned, no longer frozen, meat. Put the other half in the fridge. It'll make a nice addition to the hash browns you probably won't make in the morning.
5. Let everything simmer, uncovered, for as long as long as it takes you to yell at your kids to stop fighting. It might take a minute, because they'll insist they weren't fighting, but you know they were.
6. Have you put the spaghetti in the pot yet? You forgot, didn't you? It's okay, so did I. Just put it in now, it'll all work out fine. Trust me. Add as much salt as you think it'll need, plus just a little bit more. This will infuse flavor into the pasta, and it will be the only time you'll be able to do that. Trust me!
7. Stir the meat mixture a few times. Add the jar of sauce and stir well, bringing it to a boil. Remember that garlic makes everything better and a little more sophisticated, but that you're out of the real stuff. Sprinkle some garlic salt into the sauce. Don't be shy. Then simmer on low for way longer than you would have. You're still waiting for the pasta to cook that you put in, like, way too late.
8. While the pasta is cooking, put on Yo Gabba Gabba on Netflix for your daughter. Do the Dancey Dance with her. This is important, and if you don't do it correctly, the pasta won't turn out right.
9. Check your pasta the Engholm way: pull a hot, steaming strand out of the pot, blow on it, and eat it. Forget those other fancy methods. This is really the only way to do it. Is it done? Great! Strain it!
10. Serve pasta on a plate and top with the sauce that's been simmering for quite some time. Garnish with the cheese of your choice and enjoy!
I think what made this especially delicious is that the meat mixture was left to sautee for quite some time and the sauce was left to simmer for an extended period of time. It was all an accident, and the result of me being home alone with the kids. I had to run interference a few times and it disrupted my flow. But, they say slow cooked food is better, and I think this is one of those instances.
Have you ever cooked a meal that was delicious on accident? It happens to me a lot. I tend to just make stuff up as I go along, using whatever is nearest to my hand at the moment. But let me tell you something, Marc ate most of it, which is really saying something. Charlotte ate all of hers. There were plenty for leftovers, but they didn't last long. I think I have a winner!
Funny stuff! This is pretty much my recipe for spaghetti. I like to make left over vegetable soup. I dump the leftover veggies into one container in the freezer after dinner each day.and every once in a while will thaw the whole bit out and make soup. Some times it is good. Some times, notsomuch.LMAO, so funny. You cook the way I do. Never with a reciepe, especially spaghetti. Ecept I use lots of onion and clerey will green peppers and mushrooms. And even at 16 Dale is still picky and won't eating red meat or mushrooms so I make his in a seperate pan. It pretty much all works out. And I check the doneness of the pasta the same way. I don't even time it like the box says. I just cook it until it looks about done and the pull out a piece, cool it and eat it. However with GF it takes longer to cook and isn't very good anyway so if it isn't done it taste worse. I really want to go back to just the regular kind.Yep. This is how spaghetti should be done! I have also been known to make my own sauce if we don't have a jar of it available, but have tomato sauce and/or crushed tomatoes in the pantry. It turns out decently! I've also tried the trick of adding a can of evaporated milk to the sauce and some cheese for a mock bolognese.
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