Shortly thereafter I committed a culinary catastrophe that made all my past disasters look like Julia Childs (or Joan Fontaine) triumphs: I'd had a busy day. I was ravenously hungry, but too tired to cook something from scratch, so I decided to make a little pasta topped with some leftover tomato sauce I had in the fridge. I boiled some linguini, warmed the sauce in the microwave, and poured it on the pasta.
Strange. It looked quite pink. But I thought that was because the lighting in my kitchen isn't very bright. Also, I figured that the thin, flat linguini didn't hold the sauce as well as the lined rigatoni I usually use. So I piled on some grated Romano and dug in. It tasted sweet. Strange. I never use sugar in my sauce. But, I really was starved, so I kept wolfing it down.
As I got to the bottom of the dish I remembered that I had put onions and a little red pepper in the sauce. This definitely had neither. Then I thought that possibly I had inadvertently used plain crushed tomatoes since when I don't use a whole can, I save the remainder in a bowl. But as I kept eating, I finally realized that it really didn't taste the least bit like tomatoes.
Then it hit me: A couple of nights before, I was looking for a container to take to my watercolor class. I remembered pouring something out of a half-filled jar in my refrigerator into a bowl so I could use the jar. What I had poured into the bowl was cranberry/apple sauce. Can you imagine that on pasta? With grated cheese yet? Some say it was probably better than my homemade tomato sauce.
I worry that they might be right.
Copyright: Rose Madeline Mula
Editor's Note: Rose Mula's most recent book, The Beautiful People and Other Aggravations, is now available at your favorite bookstore, through Amazon.com and other online bookstores, and through Pelican Publishing (800-843-1724), as is her previous book, If These Are Laugh Lines, I'm Having Way Too Much Fun.
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