Kill your noodles

I like to think of myself as a competent amateur home economist, never wasting and always saving. I make it my business to know what to do with leftovers. But surplus pasta is nasty and nothing can save it. Unless it was really undercooked the first time around it's not likely to be al dente the second. You can refresh it with a quick dunk in simmering water and it comes back to life but it's nowhere near as good as fried rice or home fries, two starch dishes that improve with age, so to speak. I always save the leftovers hoping at least to feed them to the little man, who loves noodles. But he also prefers his food fresh and tasty. He doesn't care for crap any more than we do.

The real problem is my tendency to boil more pasta than necessary, which has its source in my vegetarian/student past when a plate of noodles was a whole meal. In those days I ate dinner after dinner of spaghetti with jarred tomato sauce, chile flakes, and Kraft Parmesan. My first year of graduate school I had no car and few friends and for my provisions I relied entirely on a corner convenience store that sold mediocre "homemade" brownies and turnovers, of which I ate a great many. I had spaghetti with tomato sauce four or five nights a week then. I never kept fresh fruits or vegetables at home, never made a salad or a pot of soup. I cooked on a narrow electric range with a flimsy aluminum pot that became increasingly warped and blackened with use. The cabinet contained no more than three dishes and exactly one bowl but we had a ton of silverware, stolen from the student union where my roommate was a manager. On a night when I wasn't going to have spaghetti, I ate out or--rarely, as the options were thin--ordered in. I never saved leftover pasta then because I never had to; I just kept eating until it was done. For breakfast I ate frozen bagels and sometimes fried eggs and for lunch I picked up a sandwich or a takeout container of pad Thai, misirwot, or lo mein from the food carts on Library Mall. If I had kept a blog then (blogs didn't exist then but let's just say) I have no idea what I would have written in it but it would scarcely have resembled this one.

Now I dress my noodles with more than just tomato sauce, I make a salad to accompany the pasta, I cook for three instead of one. Occasionally I take the scale down and weigh the noodles before cooking them, but even this doesn't help. If I budget 1/4 lb per person that can still be too much or too little depending on the kid's appetite and a dozen other factors. More often I just grab a thick fistful and figure, hey, pasta is cheap.