Newlywed Knowledge

I have seen all sorts of movies and television shows about newlyweds and how it takes some time to get to know one another and what things one's partner likes.  Probably the most oft contested jumping off places are the old jokes about the new bride learning to cook the foods her husband likes.  Well, let me tell you that it doesn't matter how old the bride is - that learning curve is still the same. 

Mike really, really, really likes spaghetti.  Seems great, huh?  A simple dish of pasta, sauce with a little meat sauce should be easy - how can one go wrong?  Well, let me tell you - there are lots of ways.  First, the sauce cannot have chunks of tomatoes - even if those tomatoes came from the garden tilled and tended by yourself - even if those tomatoes were carefully canned by yourself.  (Why would he grow something that he doesn't really like to eat?)  Secondly, there shouldn't be much more in the sauce besides ground beef, onions, tomato sauce, and a wee bit of spices.  Then, there are the noodles.  Oh my goodness!  The noodles are the hardest part. 

I've never really paid that much attention to spaghetti in my life!  I'd simply look for a package that said spaghetti and see which was the cheapest, grab it off the grocery shelf and all was good.  Then, I read where I should look for whole-grain and pasta which was not enriched with a bunch of stuff.  So, I settled on eating the whole grain and didn't pay much attention to spaghetti - just bought the cheapest.  No longer will that work.  Today, while standing in the pasta aisle at my local grocery store, I have never felt more intimidated.  I knew that Mike likes 'white' noodles - not whole grain.  I also knew that he wanted them to be "the big round kind."  Eventually I settled on simple inexpensive plain old spaghetti noodles. 

When I started getting dinner together, in he walks to inspect the ingredients.  Since the box didn't say "red cross" on it, immediately he decided that I had the wrong product.  So, I listened to him mouth off about it for a bit.  Then, I walked out onto the deck and got into the truck and drove up to his mother's house and sweetly asked her if she had a box of noodles.  Boy was I surprised when she handed me a box of THIN spaghetti noodles!  You should have seen the confused look on her face when I asked her if this was the kind she had always bought.  Hesitantly she responded that it was - at times she had simply bought the cheap store-brand, but this type is what she had always bought - even when Mike was a kid growing up.  So, I took the box of noodles and zipped back to my own home.  After I showed and compared what I had bought to what his mother had bought, he started chuckling.  Then, several times he apologized - several times.

The entire time we were eating, he was bragging about just how perfect this spaghetti was and how he loved me.