#failurepile

Heartbreak Smothered in Tomato Sauce, Vol. 1

Looks delicious, doesn’t it? 

Well it’s not. Words cannot express my devastation over the failure of this culinary frolic.

[trans. “This shit sucks. I’m going to cry into a half-empty box of expired Entenmann’s cheese danish now.”]

By all accounts, it should’ve been a game-changing meal, a way to cheat the system, a path to my beloved spaghetti without a massive gutbomb comprised of semolina flour slowly taking on the mass of dark matter in my stomach. IT’S CALLED SPAGHETTI SQUASH FOR CRISSAKE.

See, I love pasta. Let me rephrase that. I love dishes comprised of an ambulatory device for conveying delectable sauce into my slathering maw. That generally describes spaghetti pretty nicely, although said ambulatory conveyance for said sauce could be a piece of torn-off hot dog bun. But I digress. I prefer my conveyance in strand-form, or small and tubular, or, during flights of whimsy, shaped like the Doctor’s bow tie. I don’t really care what they’re made of, as long as they get the sauce right into my mouth at least 90% of the time.

So, spaghetti squash should work, right? In theory. If you halve and roast a spaghetti squash, you can drag a fork through it and make long strands. Long ambulatory strands for conveying sauce, containing zero percent semolina gutbomb. Finally! I beat the System!

But no. System: 1. Kandy: 0.

Maybe it was the sauce, which I painstakingly constructed using fresh minced garlic, fresh basil and tomatoes from my own garden MY OWN GARDEN I SAY, and chopped onion, all fried in butter. I then added plain tomato sauce to the mix and simmered. And simmered. And simmered. As I sat at my computer, looking up baby sloth videos as you do, waiting for the sauce's aroma to tickle my nostril hairs, I noticed that my nostril hairs remained decidedly un-tickled. I went into the kitchen, lifted the lid to the pot, and took a big whiff.

Nothing.

Well, something. It smelled like tomatoes and basil, maybe a hint of garlic, but mostly, it smelled like nothing, so I went in for a taste.

Not nothing, but not much.

Particularly, it was missing the onion-y sting that tomato sauce desperately needs. Then, I smelled my hands. No onion. I started to question my sanity. I did just chop an onion, right? Oh look there's the other half still sitting on the counter I'll just sniff it...

My onion smelled like nothing. It was a broken onion.

Nevertheless, I soldiered on, forked my squash, poured on the sauce, and took a bite. I don't even know if it's possible for spaghetti squash to be too al dente, but if so, that's what I got. Slightly crunchy squash with some slimy, mushy strands mixed in, smothered in a completely flavorless sauce, made over the course of an hour of my life I'll never get back.