Now that The Pony is out of the Mansion, I have to adapt my "recipes" for Farmer H. You may recall that Farmer H does not much care for fluid in his food. Like when he dips himself a towering bowl of vegetable beef soup...he does not like the "juice," as he calls it. I just call it soup.
Anyhoo...the three guys all loved spaghetti. Genius was a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. He'd eat it any way I made it. No Goldilocksing for him. Everything was just right.
The Pony preferred elbow macaroni noodles in his "spaghetti." That's because they hold the sauce in their hollow elbows, and The Pony is all about the sauce. Oh, he'll eat noodles bare, and noodles with only butter. But he really likes sauce. He'd drink it out of a cup, I imagine. And perhaps dip a scrap of bready pizza crust in it every now and then, or dunk a noodle. So when I made spaghetti sauce with The Pony at home, I had to tilt the dipper and get his with no meat or mushrooms in it. Pure sauce. A lot if it, with about 1/3 bowl of noodles swimming in it.
Farmer H wants nothing to do with "juicy" sauce. I have to also tilt the dipper for his, making sure the saucy part of the sauce runs out, and he gets red-colored hamburger meat and mushrooms. The good thing about Farmer H is that he loves his spaghetti more the second and third day! So I get three meals out of one preparation. That's because the noodles soak up the sauce in the container in FRIG II, leaving Farmer H with red-colored noodles, hamburger, and mushrooms.
Oh, yeah. It's not like I make my sauce from scratch. It's a can of Hunt's Spaghetti With Meat Sauce. Not that there's any meat inside. I think it just has the flavor. Allegedly. To that canned sauce, I add a couple individual packets of NutriSweet for Farmer H's diabetic sweet tooth, squeeze in some minced garlic, grind some black pepper, and add the browned ground beef and some canned mushroom pieces.
I'm shocked that I don't have my own cooking show: The Hillbilly Gourmet.
NutriSweet? You add sweetener to spaghetti sauce? The canned stuff which probably already has some?
ReplyDeleteSpaghetti sauce isn't supposed to be sweet.
I make mine from a jar beginning too, adding extra onion, carrot, garlic, zucchini and mushrooms, which all get cooked a bit first, then the jar of sauce is tipped in the pot along with extra tomato paste and a good sized amount of parsley. No meat. Because I freeze it in single serve containers and don't always want meat, so it's easier to add a bit to a single serve on any day that I want meat in it.
River,
ReplyDeleteYes, that's how they like it. It takes the tart acidic edge off the sauce.
Hick does not sound like a hard man to cook for!!
ReplyDeleteI meant Farmer H!!
ReplyDeletefishducky,
ReplyDeleteI knew who you meant! Farmer H is a man of many faces. Well...a man of two faces.
He's okay to cook for, as long as you don't give him juicy soup.
Non-juicy soup is called stew :)
ReplyDeleteRiver,
ReplyDeleteOr, as Genius said, "Not so much soup, as a bowl of assorted vegetables."
This made me laugh living as I do with a "meat and two veg" kind of a guy. He cooks once in a blue moon and has only two dishes in his repertoire - fish in batter (makes the batter himself an' all!) with peas and salad or spaghetti bolognese which is generally non-juicy-ish. Came to your blog via River and really loving it!
ReplyDeleteAround My Kitchen Table
Table,
ReplyDeleteCongrats on having a guy who cooks! Batter is nothing to sneeze at. Farmer H is good at grilling, but that's about it. He used to cook eggs, but put so much garlic powder in them that you could tell who ate his breakfast by his breath the rest of the day.
Welcome to the blog! River is a loyal reader here, and of my other "cat" blog.