2025, Food, home, Uncategorized

Pasta

34 Comments

Being the efficient person that I am, I have been packing up any nonessentials as I have had time to do. Husband mentioned Tuesday that he wanted Fettucine Alfredo for supper. We had cream and everything else for it except fettuccine, since I had packed up all the dry pasta weeks ago. We settled for some nice fresh fettuccine from the grocery store.

I love to make my own fresh pasta and I look forward to being able to make it more often after we move. I have made tortellini, homemade lasagna, ravioli, and taggliatelle. Spaghetti is hard to make with our crank pasta maker. Grandson says that buttered noodles, which includes actual noodles as well as any kind of pasta, are his favorite things to eat. When I was his age it was a treat to have Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti. I don’t think I had spaghetti out of a box until I was in college.

I was lucky to have as a landlady in Winnipeg a woman who had immigrated to Canada from Calabria, and she helped me choose a crank pasta maker from the local Italian grocery store and taught me how to use and care for it. I remember her husband, also from Calabria, lamenting how awful the spaghetti was at a spaghetti dinner sponsored by their very English Catholic church (They had left the Italian Catholic church in Winnipeg due to a conflict with the priest). The spaghetti was really gluey and overcooked.

What are your earliest memories of spaghetti? What are your favorite pasta dishes?

34 thoughts on “Pasta”

  1. I remember eating SpaghettiOs as a child, but not often. Mom said it was junk food. I remember thinking it was wonderful, as I gazed at my little brother across the table with sauce all over his face. I store this image in my memories very clearly. It’s an old favorite.

    My favorite is spinach lasagna. I’ve had homemade pasta only once or twice. I don’t remember being overwhelmed by its superiority. I remember thinking it was doughy and filling. I do like pasta, but I don’t eat it often anymore. It’s too filling for me, and I no longer metabolize the extra carbs.

    On the road today! The buyers sign on my house today. I hope to pay off my mortgage this afternoon!

    Let’s see if WP lets me log in…
    Krista

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I remember spaghetti meals emerging sometime in the 1960s while I was a kid. I certainly remember singing “On Top of Spaghetti” posted by Wes above. By the time I was in high school the school lunch ladies were serving spaghetti meals that we liked. I did most of the cooking for our family and I was learning to make spaghetti sauce, etc. sometime during those years. My mother did not like any meals that made a mess of the stove. (This accounted for her grey, kind of boiled hamburgers that sucked–but no mess on the stove). Spaghetti sauce made quite a red spotted mess of things. I was constantly in trouble for the Mess On The Stove. I do not know what that sauce could have tasted like. There was only powdered garlic and not many other herbs or spices available at that time.

    While my mother was away at school the summer I was 13 years old, I was in co-charge, along with my dad. I cooked three meals a day. My brother’s friend, Carl, stayed for supper for which I had cooked spaghetti. They got into a food fight, making trebuchets out of forks and loads of spaghetti. Some of that landed on the wall, something that NEVER would have happened when Mom was around. I made them clean it up and threatened to tell Mom, which cooled down that activity.

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  6. creamettes was the only pasta i ever knew as a child. i think spaghetti was the only noodle. no mac and cheese kraft version was second it was not a favorite. i remember experiencing chef boyardee but likely not at my house. spaghetti sauce and kraft parmesan.
    i got some gnocci with pesto in san fransisco that opened my eyes to that favorite and my drummers college roommate taught me italian tricks that made sauce portion and mozerella, ricotta portion combine to make lasagne a favorite on the second day.

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  7. OT, but funny. I phoned MDU, the electric and gas utility to have our account stopped after next Thursday, our closing date. The customer service person said the names and SS numbers she had on file for our address didn’t match up and I had to find the cancelled cheque for the last payment to prove we lived here. She suddenly said that the new owners got to her first to have the account changed. Whew! Then I phoned our local city utility office to have the billing stopped, and the person I spoke with is a member of our church and was really upset we were not only moving but actually leaving town and wanted to know all the details of where we were moving to and how our kids were doing.

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    2. Then we went to the bank to change our mailing address and we got the same regrets that we were moving from the main receptionist, and then we went to the Internet provider to double check something before the wifi is turned off on Monday, and our account person was so regretful we were moving as she also goes to our church and doesn’t want us to move. This is getting difficult.

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  8. I remember canned spaghetti, but probably just after my mom started teaching. I also remember being in a Des Moines restaurant the first time I had un-canned spaghetti, with my best friend & family.

    I would make pasta more often if you could find the pasta already cooked – I hate that step – the time, water that gets thrown out, and the extra clean-up.

    I discovered jumbo shells at some point, and occasionally make Stuffed Shells, much like lasagna, just different form… I do love having home-made pasta.

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  10. We were a Franco-American household. I only had Chef Boyardee spaghetti when I ate at friend’s houses.

    My mother was a somewhat indifferent cook. I doubt she would describe herself that way but when she made spaghetti sauce she started with a packet of powder.

    We seldom went out for a meal. Occasionally we would get take-out chow mein and very occasionally we would go downtown to the Cafe DiNapoli on Hennepin. I liked the spaghetti but really looked forward to the spumoni ice cream. Cafe DiNapoli was downstairs, incidentally, of the Bottega Gallery, a place I wrote about on the Trail back in 2016. It’s completely OT, but it’s an interesting trip back to some voices we’ve lost:

    My Secret Life, part 1

    I would make pasta more often but Robin is wary of starches. My most frequent pasta dishes are Fusilli with Vodka Sauce, a meatball and sauce recipe wherein you cook the homemade meatballs in the tomato sauce, and Shrimp Scampi with Fettucini.

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  11. My dad wasn’t a fan of pasta’s, so we didn’t have it often at home. I remember mom buying the cans of Chef Boyardee, I liked the ravioli, and I’d eat it cold if I was feeling particularly lazy that day.
    I didn’t know you could make pasta at home. I was visiting someone and we did that. Blew. My. Mind.
    Haven’t gotten to that point at home.

    Daughter is gluten free. I don’t know if that makes home-made pasta harder or not… Not sure if I have a favorite either. I like making hamburger helper, which usually has some kind of noodles in it, and Walwart carries a GF brand. I like to make it with sausage. Kelly isn’t a fan of sausage…

    One of the first big meals Kelly made for me when we started dating was lasagna. That’s still a treat when she makes it.

    Usually it was chips and dip while on the couch. Ah, to be young… 🙂

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  12. My favorite tomato sauce is one from Marcella Hazan that is quite simple with pureed tomatoes and butter, with onion that is simply cooked whole in the sauce and removed. We call it red sauce. Our daughter somehow thought it was a recipe of my own devising. I never told her that, and I won’t ever forget the phone call I got from her accusing me of misleading her all these years after she saw the reciope in a Tacoma paper.

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  13. SpaghettiOs was actually a luxury at my house when I was growing up. I’m not even sure I heard the words “junk food” until I was in high school but the SpaghettiOs were too expensive to have on a regular basis. The only pasta that we ever had at my house growing up with spaghetti and meatballs with canned sauce. When I was visiting my mom after Christmas, I made pasta out of a box with a jar of sauce and she seemed to think that this was a miracle. I’m guessing she doesn’t do pasta or spaghetti at all these days.

    I have a crank machine, but it’s more work than I like and I’m perfectly happy with pasta out of a box or a bag if I can add my own sauce. My favorite pasta dish these days is the one that I make a lot at this time of year, my big skillet with pasta, onion, cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic, and a container of vegetable broth. Boil it all up, easy peasey.

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  14. I don’t remember the first time I had spaghetti, it was always part of my mom’s menu rotation. She grew up in a neighborhood in St. Paul that had a lot of Italian families. Her best friend was Italian and another friend married an Italian. I assume she learned making spaghetti and meatballs from them. There’s no written recipe, and I learned to make it by watching Mom. She never made the spaghetti noodles from scratch, but she occasionally made homemade noodles for chicken noodle soup.

    I still make spaghetti and meatballs often–it’s a favorite with my kids. We also have lasagne, fettuccine alfredo, pasta with lemon and garlic, mac and cheese. Husband makes tagliatelle with a meat sauce made with beef short ribs that is very tasty. In the summer we have a variety of pasta salads. As you can see, we like pasta.

    I have a hand-crank pasta maker but have only used it a couple of times. I have a small kitchen and it’s hard to find room to hang the pasta to dry.

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  16. When I was about five or six we would get the Chef BoyArDee spaghetti dinner in the box. The box contained the spaghetti, a can of sauce, and a wee little can of grated parmesan cheese. The powdery stuff. My mother made meatballs with ground beef, egg, and cracker crumbs I can still see the bowl the spaghetti came to the table in. I could eat spaghetti almost every day. Doesn’t have to be fancy.

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  17. we learned slurping our spaghetti up vacuum style off the fork. a high school friend introduced me to spinning the fork inside a soup spoon to wrap the noodles more thoroughly. life changer.

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