"spaghetti" news and stories

It's April 1st and you know what that means: it's April Fool's Day! You'll probably be avoiding (or not) tricks all day. I bet nothing will top this one from the BBC.

A well respected news program called Panorama broadcast a story in 1957 about a great spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. The public fell for it hook, line, and sinker. The BBC fielded hundreds of calls from viewers asking how they, too, could grow a spaghetti tree, to which they answered "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

This is the first I had heard of this, but it is classic! The footage from the original story is quite nice, but I can't imagine anyone actually believing it. Ah well, I guess I come from a much more cynical and media savvy age, but it's neat to look back on a time when a hoax like this was possible.

Source

A lot of our food traditions and habits we learn from our parents at an early age. Take pasta sauce. I come from a large Italian family, so we had spaghetti every single week when I was growing up. My mom made her sauce (my dad's recipe, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was award-winning) and when we put it on the pasta, we put a lot. Not enough so it gets all watery and the pasta is swimming, but certainly enough to cover the pasta out to the edge (more than the photo above).

Now here comes Mark Bittman at The New York Times who agrees with this approach. While most cookbooks will tell you to make a lot of pasta and just add a couple of ladels of sauce in the middle of the plate, Bittman suggests you turn the amounts around and make twice as much sauce as pasta. Mario Batali, in a video from Serious Eats after the jump, disagrees.

How do you sauce your pasta?

I've been cutting down on carbs lately and looking for an excuse to have a big plate of spaghetti topped with sauce and grated parmesan cheese. Hello National Pasta Day!

I could spend the entire day just doing posts for pasta, it's such a versatile food, but I can't do that. Instead, here are several pasta recipes from various sites, including Epicurious, AllRecipes, RecipeZaar, Food Network, The Reluctant Gourmet and The National Pasta Association.

And don't forget the sauce! Here are several recipes from About.com and this one from MealsMatter.org for Southwestern Pasta Sauce.

I'm a big fan of pasta. I like the flexibility and options you have with it. I used to make this dish I liked to call "Rigatoni Sassone" (it's great when a food you love rhymes with your name). It was basically rigatoni mixed with various vegetables and then tossed with parmesan and cheddar cheese, served with rosemary and olive oil bread. It was cheap and easy, but I haven't had it in a while.

I thought of that after seeing this recipe on AOL Food (from allrecipes.com). I'm not a fan of vodka, though I guess it won't make that much of an impact, right?

• Eat your vegetables!
• Forget all those other sauces. Red, tomato-based sauces are the way to go.
• Pastrami gets all fancy.
• What does your city taste like?
• When I was in grade school, everyone was saying I had to learn the metric system because that's what we'd be using in the future. I didn't, and we don't.
• Karl's Sausage Kitchen is a legendary place around Boston. It was even mentioned in one of the Spenser novels.
• What is Katylyst Kombucha?
• This week's recipes: Winter Cake, Seattle Salmon Dip, Bratwurst in Beer, and Coq au vin.