I have been feeling extra lazy this week and so we have had scrambled eggs for dinner for a few nights in a row. I had been feeling vaguely guilty about it and so when I thought about defrosting some ground meat last night for meatballs and spaghetti, I forced myself to get up off the couch and take some out of the freezer.
In the light of day, however, the prospect of standing there and making the sauce and rolling the meatballs was beyond me. Even getting a pot for the pasta seemed like a lot of work on this rainy day that had my bed calling my name.
But I needed to make dinner and I knew I couldn't try and pass off cream cheese sandwiches for dinner because, well mostly because that's what the kids had for lunch but also, I really don't like when my six-year-old rolls his eyes at me. It makes me narrow my eyes back at him and that's not a very nice thing to do.
Standing in the kitchen with the ground meat looking at me, I pulled out the big frying pan and made taco meat. You can check out taco night here. Tonight, though, will not be taco night because that involves cutting many vegetables and also having tacos in the house.
Tonight will be taco spaghetti night. Which brings me back to my original story - my kids don't love pasta. Two of them will eat elbows if there's really nothing else, one will eat spaghetti if there is cheese on it and the other won't touch it at all - except for angel hair pasta and only if it's covered in meatballs and sauce. I can usually get all of them to at least eat a few bites of angel hair pasta if it has meat sauce on it. Only problem is, angel hair pasta is a huge pain the neck. Huge. Because when angel hair pasta is poured into a colander and drained, it gets lost. Angel hair pasta is so thin, it slips right through the holes in the colander - and gets stuck. If it slipped right through, I'd be okay. I might lose a few pieces down the drain, but I would be okay with that. It's the pieces that slip through and then get stuck that really get me. They're impossible to get out no matter which way you turn the colander and no matter how many ways you try to push it through with a fork.
So I hesistated. I looked at the box of pasta for a while and then I thought, maybe I can line the colander with a paper towel and drain the pasta like that. So I did. And you know what? It worked. Not one piece of angel hair pasta escaped. I have beaten the pasta and I'm proud of it.
Just call me the lazy-person's problem solver.