Quick and Easy Dinners #2
Matt doesn’t care much for spaghetti. Tomato sauce puts him off. We had this dinner at someone else’s house and he really liked it. “It’s pretty much spaghetti,” I pointed out. “No it wasn’t,” he countered. So, now it’s one of my go-to easy dinners and I call it
Not-Spaghetti
1/2 lb. ground sausage
1/2 lb. lean ground beef
1 onion, chopped
Brown the above in a skillet. While it’s cooking, set a pot of water boiling for noodles.
Once the beef and sausage is done, add the following to the skillet:
1 can diced tomatoes
1 t. Italian seasonings (or use pre-seasoned diced tomatoes)
1/2 can olives, chopped (or one small can chopped olives)
Boil up enough noodles for the family, drain, and mix in with the tomato/sausage sauce.
Voila! Serve with a salad and you’re set.
I tried freezing this meal, but it doesn’t reconstitute well. However, it’s so simple that it might even be faster than thawing and reheating to simply freeze cooked sausage and beef — with onions! — in dinner-sized blocks. Then it would just be dumping and heating the ingredients while cooking noodles.
Clearly I’m right. Spaghetti has no olives!
Olives are the anti-spaghetti.
If it has spaghetti noodles in it…………….IT’S SPAGHETTI!….. Olives or no olives! That’s like putting a hat on a duck and saying, “See, it has a hat on, so it’s not a duck!” Matt, you should stick with, “I only like spaghetti that has olives in it.”
I suppose I did forget to specify; in keeping with my design of maintaining that this is not spaghetti, I use penne noodles. :)
My theory is not that it is the olives — and I generally DO add olives to spaghetti sauce when I make it — but that it has no tomato sauce, only diced tomatoes.
That’s like putting a hat on a duck and saying, “See, it has a hat on, so it’s not a duck!”
No. Olives in spaghetti is more like putting a third leg and second head on a duck, at which point only the people with twisted imaginations say that it is a duck. Everybody else says that it’s a mutant freak of avian genetic engineering. Or, “not-a-duck”.
The tomato sauce thing could be closer to the truth, however. Tomato sauce is evil. Tomato paste is evil squared.
In diner slang olives are known as “warts.” Perhaps you could call it warty pasta? Pasta with warts? Pasta that ought to see a podiatrist?