I like to cook.  About the only thing I don’t like about cooking sometimes is the prep work of cutting up veggies and what have you.  I had a very good prep cook for a number of years, but we broke up so now it all falls to me {bring up sad violin music}.  Because the prep work is not my thing, sometimes I do get lazy and take big shortcuts when I cook.  Not every meal can be a gourmet masterpiece.  The other night was a shortcut night for spaghetti dinner.  Box pasta, jar sauce, sauté some ground beef and voilà!  Dinner!  Crack a bottle of wine and you’re good to go.

When I was in seventh grade, I had to take Home Ec.  This is where I was to learn valuable life skills like making pillows and cooking.  Today, I couldn’t make a pillow if my life depended on it, but by golly I can cook.  Now, this is probably more from watching my mother than anything I was shown at school, but never mind that, because last night I unintentionally made Seventh Grade Spaghetti.

It’s funny, the stuff you remember.  I remember in eighth grade a friend and I were moved to laughter approaching crying when we looked out the window during math class to see a bird alight on a tree just outside the window and immediately poop.  To this day I don’t know exactly why seeing a bird poop was so damn funny, but funny it still is to me.  I can barely type because I’m shaking so hard with stifled laughter now.

The one thing I recall from seventh grade cooking class was the time we made spaghetti.  I don’t recall much about it, but I guess we were charged with making our own sauce from a tomato base.  We were all diligently measuring various spices to round out a delicious sauce.  Someone, I have no idea who (other than not me), was assigned the salt.  Whoever this was must have put something on the order of a cup of salt in where it called for a teaspoon or something, because the spaghetti we eventually consumed was the saltiest thing I have ever eaten—until last night.

As I said, this was shortcut spaghetti.  It was a long day at work, I was tired, and just wanted an easy meal.  So I went about sautéing the meat, adding some garlic powder for flavor, and then I thought I’d toss some seasoned salt in, just to give it a general oomph without expending any actual effort.  Well, I uncapped the container and went to shake some, when to my horror {cue scary music} I realized that the shaker top had come off in the cap and I had the gaping maw of a seasoned salt canister ready to dump!  No mere mortal could have staunched the flow in time.

I ended up with a pile of seasoned salt in the sauté pan, along with the already browning meat.  To the best of my abilities, I scooped each little chunk of meat from its grainy trap and set it aside.  Then I rinsed the pan and dumped the meat back in to continue cooking.  What I should have done in retrospect was rinse the meat, because what I ended up with was still so salty, it was incredible.  Because I was alone, I ate it anyway.  No way would I have served that to anyone else.  Oh, I probably took a couple of months off the end of my life that someday I’ll want back.  But I got a fun trip down memory lane out of it, so perhaps it wasn’t all bad.