Spaghetti

When I was growing up, spaghetti was kind of our family’s “we’re getting to the end of the groceries” meal. We always made it with ground beef, which was cheap in Ecuador. But by the time I left home, I wasn’t that fond of spaghetti anymore. And I NEVER understood people who would go out to an Italian restaurant and order it.

For awhile after we got married, I just used Prego straight from the jar.

Now that we live in Spain, I have perfected spaghetti that my family and I both like (it’s actually one of Meaghan’s favorites). Instead of ground beef I use hunks of sausage, lots of onion and garlic, and mushrooms. I also never use actual spaghetti noodles, so I suppose I should have called this post just “pasta” but oh well. For a long time I used tri-color vegetable rotini noodles, and lately I switched to whole wheat veggie rotini which not only tastes great but is healthier as well.

Sometimes when I am trying to get more veggies in the kids, I will throw zuchinni and carrots in the blender, grind them up and sauté them with the mushrooms etc. It makes the sauce nice and thick as well.

There is one problem: I can no longer cook spaghetti in the States because I don’t know what ingredients to buy! Last time we were on furlough I made lunch for our hosts and it was seriously the worst spaghetti I have EVER made.

Heather makes the best spaghetti sauce I’ve ever had. There is little else to say. She has shown me how to make it, but I forget just now. One of these days I need to get her to write the recipe down, because if she ever dies I want her life to be survived by her recipes. I know, I know…I’m a hopeless romantic.

Rarely do we actually use spaghetti noodles as a pastal base for her sauce, however. “Pastal” is an adjective meaning “of or pertaining to pasta”. It’s a real word…in, uh, my world.

I have never had “spaghetti and meatballs”. Instead, we use bits of sausage chopped up into lop-sided pieces. I’ve always wanted to have spaghetti and meatballs, however, so that I can sing the song that goes to the tune of “On Top of Old Smoky”. Here are the lyrics:

On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball
When somebody sneezed.

It rolled off the table
And onto the floor
And then my poor meatball
Rolled right out the door.

I like the song because it’s so realistic. I often sneeze with such force that it can blow meatballs right off my plate onto the floor and out the door.

Has anyone out there ever sneezed while masticating on a glob of spaghetti? I think that would be neat. It’d be interesting to see what it looks like when spaghetti noodles come out your nose.