Spaghetti

I fixed shrimp-basil spaghetti for dinner last night. I totally winged the recipe but it turned out pretty darn good if I say so myself. If you want to try it, I put the recipe (such that it is) on Google here. The recipe requires a certain amount of “winging” on the part of anyone who follows it. But it’s one of those recipes that is almost impossible to mess up.

Today I decided to fix spaghetti with meat sauce, and so I put a pound of ground beef into my slow cooker. I have one of those 6 inch by 10 inch rectangular-shaped cookers. I’ve had it for years and I no longer have the user guide. It has 5 heat settings, none of which are “Off”. I assume the settings are Low, Medium, High, Super-High, and Burn-Baby-Burn.

My intent was to brown the meat then add store-bought pasta sauce and simmer it for a while. Using a spatula, I cut the lump of ground beef into small pieces and spread them out over the bottom of the cooker. It takes the cooker a while to get going, as one might surmise from it’s name: slow cooker. So I walked to the computer and sat down and almost immediately got distracted, and I kind of forgot about the ground beef in the slow cooker. After a while – a good while – I remembered the slow-cooking meat, and went to the kitchen and looked into the cooker. I saw that I now had a 6 inch by 10 inch hamburger patty. I spent the next 5 or 10 minutes cutting it up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until I had converted the large patty into what could pass for browned ground beef if you didn’t examine it too closely. (I admit I did consider dividing the large patty into small square patties and pretend I was eating at Wendy’s, but in the end the original plan prevailed.)

I poured pasta sauce into the cooker and stirred the sauce and meat to blend them, and put the lid on the cooker. When it gets to boiling I’ll turn the heat down to medium and let it simmer for an hour. I don’t really know why I’m letting it simmer for an hour. Like many things in life, it just seems like the right thing to do.