How to cook pasta

I might be a horrible cook when it comes to most foods but I can make really good spaghetti with minced meat and I believe everyone should know how to cook spaghetti because it's the best food ever so it's my duty to iluminate those that can't, this is a ridiculously simple recipe because like I said before I'm a horrible cook but trust me, it tastes amazing

Ingredients

• 1 pot
• 1 pan
• 1 strainer
• 1 pack of storebought tomato sauce
• 1 small spoon (for the salt)
• 2 serving spoons (one for the meat and one for the pasta, you could also use the same one for both)
• Cooking oil
• Water
• Pasta
• Meat

Step 1

Fill the pot with tap water, put it on the stove and leave it to boil in either medium or high heat for a couple minutes until the water starts to bubble

Step 2

While you wait for the water to boil start cooking the meat on the pan, to do this you first put oil on the pan so the food doesn't stick, then you put the raw meat on the pan, add a small spoonful of salt and finally you use your spoon to grind it into small pieces

Step 3

Once you start noticing bubbles on the water drop your prefered pasta in the pot, I'm using fusilli but the process is exactly the same for all other shapes

Step 4

Drop a spoonful of salt in the water and stir it

Step 5

Once the meat is cooked you drop your tomato sauce in the pan, something I like to do in this step is to strain the sauce before mixing it with the meat because I hate those little pieces of tomato they put in the sauce, I want my sauce to be 100% liquid

Step 6

Strain the pasta and put it in the same pan as the meat & sauce while keeping the fire on a low level, mix it and after a few minutes turn the fire off

Step 7

Nom nom nom

Small web potluck 2026

One of my favorite things about the indie web are the ocasional events people plan where tons of people use their creativity to make something unique based on a prompt, I love participating, it helps me feel motivated to improve my skills and makes me feel like I'm part of the community and I love seeing everyone else's hard work and finding all the cool ways the same idea has been interpreted by other artists and admiring their creations so imagine my surprise when I found out about the small web potluck being hosted this year fiving me the chance to yap about my favorite meal of all time since it coincidentally fits into the theme of yellow foods and I already have a page explaining the recipe so might as well update it

I'm not gonna bother explaining the recipe here because you already read it so instead I would like to talk about why I love pasta so much and my relationship with it! I've always been a super picky eater, most foods gross me out and I often have a hard time feeding myself because nothing seems appetizing to me so a good plate of pasta is always a life saver, seriously I could eat pasta every day and never get tired of it, it's easy to make, relatively cheap and pretty well balanced in flavor, it's been my favorite food ever since I was really young and I would always get super excited whenever my mom told me we were having spaghetti for dinner which wasn't really often so it was often a food we saved for special ocassions so that made it feel extra special for me

I'm gonna get pretty emotional here so if talking about dead moms makes you uncomfortable then do yourself a favor and DON'T read this part

I've lived my entire life being spoiled and coddled and many things most learn when they're children were never taught to me since my parents thought they would always be there to help me with them so when my mom got disgnosed with liver cancer it fucked up our family dynamic and my mother tried to speedrun teaching me how to be independant while fighting against her own decaying body and trying to make it look like everything was fine so I wouldn't worry all with varying degrees of sucess and even to this day I still struggle with so many things I should already know how to do and my home hasn't really been able to adapt but one lesson that will always stick with me was the last thing my mom taught me before her disease got worse, long story short I told her I was craving pasta for dinner and she told me she would make me some tomorrow, then the next day came and I was excited for some fusilli but when I came home there was no pasta and instead my dad had made chicken milanese (which was also really tasty but not what I was expecting) so when I asked my mom why we weren't eating pasta she said she was too tired to make it and that was the moment I finally realized how bad her healt was getting (since my parents never told me she had cancer until a couple of days before she died and whenever I asked they would just say some vague stuff about her being sick but never specified what kind of sick and I'm dumb so it took me a really long to connect the docts because I didn't want to consider the possibility of my mom dying), but I was too stubborn to give up on eating pasta that evening so she agreed to teach me how to cook bolognese pasta, i was doing all the hard work while she sat back and told me what to do and in hindsight I treasure that memory a lot, there are a lot of things I wish I could have done with my mom before she died but I don't want to waste time thinking about that and getting depressed over what could have been and I'd much rather focus on the things we did together, I'm just really grateful that I got the chance to learn my favorite recipe from her and in a pathetic way pasta now brings me so much nostalgia and makes me feel a bit more like a normal functional adult

With my sob story out of the way I think we should redirect our attention to the main course, the actual physical plate of pasta and I'm gonna be honest, I'm not a big fan of how it turned out :( I don't know how or when I messed up but it didn't taste as well as it normally does, maybe I overcooked the pasta, maybe I forgot the salt, I forgot to check the expiration date on the sauce but I'm praying that was not the problem because if it is then I'm absolutely screwed, I guess since the recipe is so easy I've grown used to doing it carelessly without paying much attention to what I'm actually doing so I probably messed up and didn't even notice, I should really give this another shot next week because I refuse to not let my culinary expertise (in this specific dish and no other ones) shine to it's fullest potential