Spaghetti Sunday!
8:35:00 PM
Once bitten, twice shy. At least I didn’t burn down the house~
This blog is rightfully named Bay Area Menu Files,
so there should be more menus and restaurants on here than cooking, but the
acronym is also BAMF, and well… I feel as though it wouldn’t be right of
me to run this blog if I don’t have some
cooking skills up my sleeve. Though I’ll
say I have years of experience under
my belt if you include all the cooking and food related shows I watched over the
years.
I just lack the field experience.
Now, I’m no Gordon Ramsay, Alton Brown, Rachael Ray
and definitely… not Paula Deen, but I can whip up simple recipes. There aren’t many opportunities for me
to whip out my cooking after graduating from college, but yesterday night WAS
the night!
I channeled my inner domestic goddess and made
spaghetti last night for my parents and I.
It was a very simple dish. I bought a jar of pasta
sauce from the store, two red bell peppers (parents insisted on having some
sort of vegetable in the mix) along with half a red onion (I prefer white, but
we had red in the fridge) and a box of mushrooms. There was half a bag of
leftover meatballs in the freezer and I just grabbed a box of spaghetti from
the pantry.
My dad, having not witnessed me cook anything beyond
a fried egg was rather uneasy, to put
it lightly. I put a pot of water on the stove and waited for it to boil while I
worked on my mise en place. I pop the
onion in the fridge and let my fridge do its work (TIP: It works to prevent
your eyes from watering) while I sliced up the bell peppers and mushrooms.
When the water boiled, I salted the water (how salty
does it need to be? As salty as the ocean) and added the pasta. I like my pasta
al dente, but my parents prefer it softer so I adapted it to their preference.
Once the pasta was done and drained, I reused the pasta pot to make the sauce.
First of all, I added the onions, cooked them until
they were translucent and then added the bell peppers and finally the mushroom.
After cooking them off, I transferred half of it into a shallow pan where I
would mix my spaghetti. I poured half of the jar of sauce into the pasta pot,
added the meatballs and poured the remainder in the shallow pan where I mixed
in the still warm spaghetti.
Why, two pans you ask? Dad: More Sauce. Mom:
Less Sauce. So this way I can accommodate both of them.
The spaghetti turned out pretty well. It was tasty
and my parents enjoyed it. However, next time, I may want to put less sauce on
mine. I used Classico’s four cheese sauce and the meatballs were well seasoned,
so I might either use less sauce next time or switch the sauce out with
something else.
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