Guys guys, seriously! Yesterday I made jar pasta sauce from scratch (kinda). As in the jars of sauce you buy in a supermarket. I made that!
Food in my family is a thing. We’re ethnic and ethnic food guilt is real- you cannot leave here hungry. I have never seen anyone walk into this house without my grandmother offering them something to eat. I do the same thing, being hospitable is a reflex. When I lived with one of my bfs he would always have his awful friends in the house drinking and playing xbox and I’d still be standing in the kitchen asking if anyone wanted a fucking sandwich. It got to a point where he had to pull me aside and tell me that his hood rat friends grew up with barely any food in the house let alone enough food to be offering it to guests so could I please stop with the sandwiches cause it fucking freaked people out. Growing up hungry. I couldn’t even imagine. It made my ethnic food guilt worse so I just started ordering them in pizza. It probably seemed like I was the best gf ever. Tricked you! Nup. I screamed the house down murder just not in front of company. Jesus, who raised you?
Throughout the whole losing my mind process and coming here the only thing that my family asks me is “are you hungry?” maybe because I look too fragile to answer any question beyond immediate survival. There have been a lot of events of late in my familia. And the first thing I notice is we show love through food. Suddenly I make so much more sense. Is something really awful happening to you? Here, I bought you a pie! Congratulations on creating human life! Pie!
For my cousin’s birthday yesterday and also his mortorio (which is the 9 day vigil) my uncle made ‘spaghetti’. Here you celebrate all big occasions by making kilos of traditional Filipino noodles. The spaghetti technically counts as noodles but kids prefer it cause it’s western and loaded with sugar, more deets to come. Keep reading!
I like to watch the cooking process here. It reminds me of being a kid, my grandparents always threw huge parties and you got a job proportionate to your talent. Beans- mine was always cutting green beans. Lack of culinary talent. Fair call.
My uncle makes the best spaghetti, he boasts! He likes to use both pork and beef mince. If you want to know the family secret to any dish. It’s pork fat. So the meat he does the traditional way, cooking it with spices- they’re all a family secret too. Then to my horror cause he usually makes everything from scratch he pours in the tomato sauce ‘italian style’. It comes in large sachets. Not even jars. It’s really awful. Like something I would make and have to shame eat. Cause what is my cooking but jar food?
The sauce is a very acidic, salty tomato soup devoid of any kind of Italian influence or style as promised on sachet. To balance out the artificial flavor and high salt content he pours in white sugar. We don’t measure. He asks me to taste it. “Too acidic?” I don’t know! I can’t tell if it’s good. This isn’t how I do it in Australia. I don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like. I am shaming him with my inability to taste pasta sauce. We move on. My next job is to cut the cheese. This is fucking amazing. Like every Italian I know might have collectively died. Definitely the hot Italian waiters at Pelligrinis wouldn’t be DTF with this.
The cheese is ‘melting cheese’. That’s what it says on box. Water, coconut oil, milk solids- in that order, I don’t read further. It’s the expensive kind. I am reassured. It’s basically a giant Kraft single stick but in a rectangle. We use two huge blocks. Cut in fourths. Chuck it in. Let it melt. Stir occasionally. The sauce goes from an alarming food colouring red to a relaxed, creamy, soft orange. Oh. It looks familiar now…like something I can recognize as western. I takes me a minute but I pick it!!! It’s the same colour as the jars of Dolmio my friend chose when he made me a pasta bake cause white people food is amazing. The same jars that I noted at the time were neither red like tomatoes or white like fake cheese. Shout out to your flavor palette you ‘blue eyed monsters’ (my grandma referencing my ex bf), you manage to Anglicize all ethnicities down to the same comforting homogenous jars.
Confession- I secretly can’t stop eating the spaghetti. It’s salty, it’s sweet, and it’s intriguing. It’s full of the best kind of additives. What can I say? That melting cheese really brought it together. I can taste the quality. What I learned? Things that are orange and pretending to be Italian aren’t scary and I can now totally make Dolmio pasta bake from more of an authentic place. Come over!
XX SJ