It’s pasta night at our place. For us it usually occurs sometime midweek or when it’s been really hot and my enthusiasm for ‘cooking’ is at a low point.
A big batch of home-made pasta sauce which has been made, lovingly, by hubby prior to tonight and frozen into batches comes in really handy. Boil the water, add the pasta, defrost the sauce, whack some garlic bread in the oven and, voilà, dinner is served.
The eating part is pretty easy and fun to watch the kids do too. There’s never normally any complaints at the dinner table on pasta night. There’s lots of slurping, not much talking and Dolmio Grins all round at the end.
If only the clean-up were as easy or fun. Bits of slurped sauce seem to stretch for miles. There’s stringy bits of pasta everywhere that have started to congeal. If you miss one during the clean up and find it x days later it’s set like concrete. Crumbs from the garlic bread are all over the seats. And, please, let’s not even discuss dirty hands. The hands have been used in place of a fork to get those last ends of pasta into the mouth when they can’t slurp it in any further. If one of the kids manages to escape the table without having been wiped down first I’ll find those pasta prints on the sides of the chairs from when they’ve climbed down. That’s before the table and kitchen even get a look in.
So there’s a price to pay for my slack cooking. The clean-up is a drag. I do love watching the kids suck that fettuccine on pasta night. It makes it worth the lack of effort. Feel free to share your throw together meals that your kids love.
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