Point #11-Cooking is Crafty

I am making spaghetti sauce. It is sauce I will put spaghetti in…or more accurately bowtie pasta. I have taken the awesome and, for me, bizarre, step of making it almost entirely from scratch. I say almost because I did not start with fresh tomatoes because that would be foolhardy. I would have skin and peel and acidic grossness. I have started with peeled whole canned tomatoes and I am truly just fine with that.

I should start out by saying that I really am not a cook-I just goof around with ingredients much the same way I goof around with paint, which is to say smear stuff around till I get something good. That said, cooking from scratch is, well, kinda stupid. It’s the wedding dress all over again. It takes a long time, and really, jar sauce is just as good and some nice machine somewhere went to all the trouble of making it for me. Thanks, Saucemaster 5000!

I guess the draw is the same as it is with so many other things made by hand. It’s the texture, and the colours, and the sensory experience of stirring and tasting and smelling. And there the “ta-DA!” factor in serving something to your family, or guests, that you didn’t take a shortcut on. The whole house smells wonderful all day long, though I must confess I achieve this same “smellin’ yummy” effect with cookies by chucking in those break and bake prefab cookie dough chunks, because baking is…I’m just gonna say it-the Devil. You have to actually measure things and if ONE LITTLE THING in the whole process goes wrong, you have a hockey puck, or batter soup, or your oven explodes, or any number of pastry related disasters. Give me a nice big pot of some delicious mess of something I can dump whatever is left in my fridge into. Yes, that includes cat food. Come on over.