Spaghetti Dinner for One: Best Meal of the Week
Had a full dinner tonight.
Spaghetti remains a favorite meal
for me. Of course there isn’t a lot of food I know how to cook. The issue I
have with anything that needs to be cooked after work, is the lag time between
preparation and eating. I’m hungry when I begin the prep. That leads to
snacking, a lot. If the meal takes 30 minutes, I’m half full on whatever I munched
on during the wait phase. It’s a problem of self control. I could force myself
to wait for the food to cook and count the minutes before the water boiled.
Then dig out the noodles to see if they’re soft enough to drain. And finally,
wait for both noodles, sausage and sauce to simmer together for 5 minutes. I
haven’t mastered patience yet.
The weekends are a little different however, I can cook
before I’m really hungry and not have to fill up on crackers or potato chips.
But whether I’m making spaghetti on a work night or on an Sunday
afternoon, most it will get polished off during the leftover phase. And yes,
leftovers are just as good as a meal straight from the pan. I don’t make the
garlic bread anymore unless I’m serving a handful of people. Not because of
some no bread diet or anything, I just don’t crave it like I used to. Anyway,
the consistency of reheated garlic bread is similar to a dishwashing glove--rubbery, chewy, tasteless. It’s completely unlike the noodles and sauce which warms up nicely and doesn’t
surrender taste. Where does my love for spaghetti come from? It’s not like we
used to eat a lot of it as kids. But then, I don’t know what a lot would be.
Certainly not once a week, like with pizza.
Wherever my fondness for the classic Italian dish comes from, it hasn’t wore off yet. I’m as committed to having it once a week as am to getting in my miles when jogging. The carb heavy meal actually works well for work outs too. Carbohydrates are quick sources of energy because they turn into glucose quicker than do fats or proteins. The glucose is stored as glycogen for an efficient fuel source during a run. I didn’t need to hear that something I already enjoy is good for energy, but it certainly helped. Right about the time I found out about carb loading is about the time I started doing a spaghetti meal every week. Before that I had laid off making it quite so often.
I’d burned out a little. Running brought me back.
Obviously I love homemade food but don’t have enough time to
cook a lot of different meals. Tuesday through Friday are packed with events,
men’s groups and training in the evenings. Mondays are typically free. On the
weekends I like to relax. I realize I could cook more often on Saturday
afternoons or Sunday evenings, but I like to lay around a little too. Plus,
we’re in football season and I’ll always try to watch a few games on TV. I
don’t watch it all day, but I’ll catch at least one NFL game and maybe a
Saturday night one as well. I tend to doze off though. It’s a wonderful feeling
to snooze for an hour or so just because you’re tired enough to do so.
For now at least I’ll keep my meals simple.
I should probably mention the biggest drawback to cooking,
I’m not good at it. Even spaghetti is only “cooking” in the most basic sense. I
doubt cooks would call it that. It’s closer to warming food up. It’s not like
I’m making my own sauce or anything. I brown the sausage and add it to an
already simmer pot of marinara (or meat sauce) from a jar. In recent years I’ve
switched to the Rao’s brand. It’s more expensive but tastes better than the
Prego I used to buy. I like the Johnsonville mild sausage instead of the ground
chuck from the grocery store. Here I’m also not sure when this changed, but I
prefer sausage. It also doesn’t render into a greasy pool in the frying pan
like fatty beef either. Once the water boils I dump in the noodles. This part
is tricky. Sometimes I put too many noodles in and have to save them for the
next meal. It’s not easy to tell how much I’ll need though. Is a handful or two
handfuls? Well, at least they’re cheap.
I probably cook my noodles slightly beyond the ‘Al dente’
standard because I can’t abide even a hint of crunch. And I always use the
spaghetti noodles and not pasta penne or bowties or any other variety. Once
it’s sticky it’s ready. Then comes the low heat marinade process. By then I’ve
usually eaten handfuls of cashew pieces to take off the hunger urge. Once the
pan cools, I sit down to eat.
Cooking? Maybe not,
but it’s close enough for now.
