Spaghetti

How do you like your spaghetti? How do you eat it? When I was about 10 I learned from a TV show that the preferred way to eat spaghetti is to twill it around your fork. The next time my mother served spaghetti i tried it. It worked beautifully. I was a natural. Then when I moved on to college and tried it with the spaghetti at the dorm, I couldn't do twirling very well at all. I'd pretty much blocked out a step in the way my mother made spaghetti. She always broke it in half as she put it in the pot. With full length spaghetti I found twirling made me extremely clumsy. i felt like I was getting sauce everywhere or at least was about to. Felt like I needed a bib. So to this day I cut other peoples' spaghetti into bite sizes chucks with the side of my fork, and follow my mother's lead and break the spaghetti in half when I make it. Then I can twirl or not as the mood strikes me. Since I always have left overs the shorter strands makes dishing out portions to reheat a lot easier. I've tried making it with full strands, but have trouble even serving it up fresh. My sister had a spaghetti scoop, but the thing didn't work for me at all with the long strands. My mother had spaghetti tongs which work far better. But I don't have a pair, and considering the trouble I have eating long spaghetti I'm not going to get one. Then, too, I only have a four-quart/liter pot, and full strands of dry spaghetti fit better in a six-quart pot.

To sauce or not to sauce? Personally I don't like plain spaghetti with no sauce. I'm not a fan of separate sauce. A couple of nights ago I made spaghetti as usual: half a box of spaghetti, a jar of decent spaghetti sauce and a half pound of Italian sausage. After draining the pasta into a collender I dump it back in the hot pan, then quickly add the heated sauce and the fried and well-drained sausage, and stir it all up. I think the jar of sauce is actually supposed to be for a full box of spaghetti, but hey, I like sauce! Half a box to the jar works better for left overs, too. The sauce gets absorbed into the pasta and looses it's intensity in the fridge.