I failed to prepare for spaghetti day…it sounded easy. It wasn’t. Here is the tale of spaghetti day…
This Saturday didn’t get off to a good start, I unexpectedly slept until 4pm. I guess I needed the sleep but when I woke up I’d missed all the sun and was completely out of sync for the rest of the day. I ate lunch and figured I’d make spaghetti for dinner later on but because I’d eaten lunch so late I didn’t think about food again until about 10. It was then that I discovered that I had spaghetti and quorn meatballs but what I had thought was a packet of tomato sauce was in fact chickpeas, the horror.
It was too late to head out to buy anything sauce related and dry spaghetti sounded gross so I improvised. (By this point it was 11PM and I was running out of Spaghetti Day time so I paniced.) I briefly considered just cooking the pasta and shoving it in the fridge for another day, so I would have at least cooked spaghetti on the right day. That seemed like cheating though so I decided to cobble something together.
I had half a pepper and went to see what was lurking in the back of the cupboard that I could add to it. All we had was 9 tins of chickpeas, I don’t even particularly like chickpeas. I guess that’s why we still have them. At the very back I did find a long abandoned and yet miraculously in date pack of Tomato and Vegetable Cup o’ Soup mix. Tomato soup is just runny tomato sauce right? Right? Now I vaugely had something I could work with and got to it, apparently though while I had been leaning into the cupboard my forearm had been in a golden syrup leak I had failed to notice so when I pulled back I managed to wax myself :/
Eme’s Spaghetti Panic Recipe
Time: 20 mins
Feeds: A lot (no one wanted seconds)
Sift 2 packets of Tomato and Vegetables Cup a Soup to harvest that delicious soup powder and get rid of coutons and misc. lumps.
Take that power and mix it with some boiling water and stir until it looks kinda like tomato sauce.
Cook spaghetti in a saucepan that is too small so you slightly burn the strands that are left exposed against the metal lip.
Fry meatballs and half a red pepper.
Add ‘sauce’ and throw in bay leaves because we fancy.
Add ketchup and tomato puree until it doesn’t taste like soup any more.
Keep adding more water while it cooks as the soup appears to have some kind of coagulant in it.
At the last minute panic and add lots of vegetable stock and oregano to mask lingering soup taste,
Reheat the spaghetti in the microwave that was done too far in advance and has now gone cold.
Once that’s hot again plate up and add sauce and a lot of cheese so mask ever present soup taste.
The verdict:
“It was perfectly palatable but I wouldn’t want to eat it again”
Spaghetti…8/10 (I hadn’t cooked spaghetti in ages I think I will cook it properly with the right ingredients in the future)
My spaghetti…4/10