Spaghetti Dilemma

One thing that I definitely have to get right is spaghetti. I love spaghetti. We love spaghetti. We eat a lot of spaghetti. We have it at least 2-3 times a week (including leftovers for lunch). So, I have to get this one right. Sauce is not a problem. My favorite brand is gluten-free and the stuff I add to it (ground beef, mushrooms, and onions) are not a problem. So I wasn't too worried about that. It was the noodles that had me worried. (In all honesty, if the sauce is thick and hearty, I can skip the noodles but I don't think I could skip them the rest of my life). I bought a couple different kinds and was given a couple different kinds....so I started my experimentation the other night.

Let's just say....back to the drawing board. I used rice noodles (Vietnamese rice noodles, to be exact). The flavor was fine...eating them dry was just like eating the regular ones I used to scarf as a kid (and then my mom would be upset when half her noodles were missing the next time she went to make spaghetti!). The texture was really interesting. I cooked them for the recommended 2-3 minutes and they were still stiff. It ended up being over 10 minutes before they were "twirlable" around a fork. Once I was eating them, it was the weirdest thing (and hard to put into words). If I cut them with my fork, it was easy. If I bit them off with my "biting" teeth, they were soft. If I tried to chew them with my molars....well, they were like shoelaces. It was the strangest thing....almost squishy and chewy. Really weird. Again, taste was not bad....just really hard to eat. Next time I will try the noodles that are a blend of flours. I learned a few other hardships while making the spaghetti. First, my daughter is a meatball girl. I could care less about meatballs if there is meat in the sauce. But meatballs are great for a preschooler to stick a fork in. I just buy frozen ones and throw them in the sauce....except they have wheat-based fillers. Yikes. So we ended up with separate sauces. This will not be our new norm. I will either find some gluten-free meatballs or just make my own.

The other thing was the noodle situation. I chose to cook separate noodles for my daughter because she eats spaghetti about 2-3 times as much as I do and gluten-free noodles are not cheap. Cooking a separate pot of noodles would not be a big inconvenience (or so I thought!). There is a lot of talk about cross-contamination. So I was very careful about which fork was going into which pot of boiling water. I knew that I would have to strain my noodles first so as not to contaminate the strainer with her noodles. Unfortunately, my noodles took a lot longer to cook than it says so M's were beyond al dente by the time I got them strained....luckily, she didn't notice!

Then there is the saving of leftovers....two sets of sauces, two sets of noodles. I'm going through rubbermaid like crazy and filling up my fridge. And can we talk about water bills? I usually run the dishwasher 2-3 times a week. We've run it 3 out of 4 nights this week. But I know all this will settle down. I will find alternatives so we will not be having separate food and I will also learn more things to cook and freeze (how I usually operate). Just got to find my groove.