reddit is dying twitter is dying tumblr is next as people move over here in response and the corporate side of the company starts drooling at the prospect of EVEN MORE MONEY so they make staff change the website to be shittier and more like the dying websites. whats next? fireside gathering at my house where we pass the posting stick around that indicates youre allowed to make a post with words that come out of your mouth
I definitely make spaghetti sauce extremely wrong but I’m not going to stop
Chop 1 onion and put it in a pot.
Add 1 or 2 cans of diced tomatoes. Whatever makes the ratio of onion look right.
Add a ridiculous amount of frozen peas. Peas should make up a notable portion of this sauce.
Add frozen corn also if you wanna be real fancy. If I have bacon, I’ll add that too, but I very rarely have bacon.
Cook on HIGH.
While sauce is cooking, grab the nearest bottle of mixed spices that isn’t obviously for desserts. Add some. How much? I dunno, enough that you feel like you’ve added seasoning so it’s technically cooking. (For me this is most often a mix called Moroccan, but it could be anything. I’ve reorganised my kitchen recently so tonight it was something called Pizza Topping.)
If you happen to have green herbs lying around, add those too. Whatever you have on hand that’s green.
Let the sauce boil on HIGH until all the water is gone. Stir occasionally so the saucepan will be easier to clean later. Serve on cooked spaghetti noodles with no cheese.
Today I added a new step called “while the sauce is cooking, duck out for 15 seconds to post about spaghetti sauce on Tumblr, then get distracted and forget you are cooking.” This adds a novel Extremely Burnt edge to the flavour profile.
I am not Italian, or of Italian descent by *any* stretch of the imagination.
I am also not one of those “cooking purists”, who believes that everything must be done in a specific/ traditional way (unless you are making a cooking video with the title “how to make x” in which case if you don’t specify mid video that your way is not traditional god help you).
I am a firm believer in “If it tastes good, then it is correct for you”.
Except in this case.
This hurts every cooking bone in my body. The latent ancestors in my soul. The judgmental elf in my brain just bit a cyanide capsule.
Why? The spices. Using a different spice mix every time, based on what is ready at hand just … hurts.
Absolurl I deranged, Derin. Food crimes.
I don’t know what sweating the onions means
It means. It means you cook em a little in a pan with a bit of oil first.
A pan? How many dishes do you want me to have to wash here?
I mean you can also do it in the same pot you’re making the spaghetti sauce in! The important thing is the onions get a little cooked before the wet stuff goes in, so they’re not so wet and limp and boiled….
Honestly this depends entirely on whether I remember to chop an onion first or I find the can opener for the tomatoes first. The ingredients go in in whatever order they go in.
Derin who hurt you
A pack of wild chefs herded my mother off a cliff
Theres probably a hit out on you for this
What kind of stupid idiot would waste money assassinating someone who’s so clearly going to accidentally poison themself for free at some point
You’ve never met me but I want you to know that you have described exactly how I make pasta sauce
We shall have a summer wedding
We won’t pass down our pasta sauce recipe to our children. They will just know
Fuck all you guys, if there was an old Italian recipe for “seasonal farm sauce” that was iconic in being defined by what greens and add-ins were available, you’d be talking about how shitty overly processed and regimented sauces were “inhuman” and “cooking is defined by human experimentation and freedom” and you’d be sharing pictures of a little Italian nonna making the best with what was available, and talking about how elitist those “four hour recipes” were and how “actually, the use of the raw onions in the sauce adds a piquant je ne se quois” but because this person is doing their best but doesn’t have the trappings of traditionalism, you’re shitting on their attempts. Well I for one LOVE cooking, and I LOVE experimentation and sometimes I do just throw shit in a pot and make something nice and I think a lot of this commentary is fucking elitist. You do you, OP, you have my vote (AND MY AXE)
Being raised by areligious jews with 0 exposure to christianity outside pop culture is so fun. One time I asked my ex-catholic friend why a picture of jesus had a bristle crown and she looked at me like I was insane. One time I heard someone mention the “lance of longinus” and responded, word for word, “Like from Evangelion?” One time during a history lesson my professor described an important monk and scholar as “Dominican” and I spent the rest of class super confused and hung up on it because I was very sure that the Dominican Republic didn’t meaningfully exist as an entity back then, maybe she meant he was a native Taino or something but that’s a weird way to say that and I’m pretty sure this was pre- European contact? Really fucks people up when they realize I genuinely have no idea.
This but it’s my partner taking an art history class in college and the professor looking at them like they grew a second head when they answered “What came out of Jesus’ wound when he was stabbed on the cross” with “…Blood?”
Additions that prove my point by mystifying me because what on earth would come out of a nail wound besides blood. Are you telling me it was something besides blood. What was jesus full of that wasn’t blood. You guys are scaring me
Apparently it was water?? I guess he was also stabbed on top of being crucified (which feels like overkill imo) and water came out, which was a huge deal in medieval symbolism and also to my medieval poetry professor, who was genuinely shocked and upset that I didn’t know. This man fully docked me points because I, a whole ass Jew, hadn’t somehow heard about the secret waterballoon Jesus lore that I guess everyone is supposed to like… intuit
On the plus side, it does lead to some absolutely wild medieval Jesus art of angels tapping him like a fucking keg
sometimes i think about the span of human existence and how if you spread your arms out in a long line and said my body is acting as a poem of all the universe’s birthdays, the smallest sliver of your furthest nail would be our entire history as humans. and you, doing this, feeling your sternum crack into place because you’re-getting-old and all of your bones crunch these days: you are the universe, measuring its own timeline. you’re the memory of a starburst saying i gave birth to humans at the tip of my finger.
and i think about how crocodiles have been around for way longer than that fingernail and how sharks have been here forever too and how there are sea cucumbers that understand time like an angel would; their ages so astronomically long that i get dizzy looking down into them. i think about my dog, and how i am so fantastically ancient to him (an impossible number, staggering) and how, at the same time, i can order my life in eras of pets-i-have-loved and how my childhood died when my cat did.
and i wonder if the earth does the same thing, if nature keeps time in epochs. if the tree in the house where i grew up said oh a new family and got upset when one by one we all left for college and left behind our climbing and screaming and birdhouses. that same tree collapsed during a bad storm this winter; heartbroken. the whole inside was a hull, shivering and empty. it missed our roof by a whisper, almost like it held itself together so it couldn’t pass a hole into the house it’s been looking into for years now. the people who took it away clicked their teeth. it was a hundred years old, at least.
there are things that went extinct in my lifetime. there are memories that don’t extend to the tip of the finger. four years ago, for the first time: i saw a bald eagle in the wild. ever since they’ve been sprouting strangely in my life, their origami frames hunched in a racket of brown feathers. something in the motion of wild animals braced against the new england weather - like we all (all of nature, all of the fingertip) have the same shared hate whenit’s cold sorrow. like in years and years and years of history we never really evolved a better method than to close your eyes and brace yourself against it.
i saw a butterfly today, staggering drunkenly in the early spring air. it’s too early for her other friends. i want to tuck her back into bed and say it’s not your time yet! her life like a pinprick in my own. in butterfly school they’d have to stretch out their scales and say - at the end of your furthest wing is where you are in the life of a human. she is in my life, isn’t she. something about how my heart seized at the sight of her, so brave and lonely and unfair; and how it snowed yesterday (and will snow again, probably), and how, in spite of that, she was out there and flying.
something about waking up this morning and thinking - i’m too old for this. how my hips and knees and back all make new noises. how the other day at a grocery store i picked up the gloves an older woman had dropped, how she’d laughed and thanked me - i can’t bend down like you young folks anymore.
something about the theory that there’s been no visible life on other planets because we are too early. that we are the first butterfly of spring. all this bravery. we know it is probably hopeless, and still we go. breathless, the same tactic - we brace against the cold.
