Dinner tonight was makeshift again—leftovers, but not just cold things from the fridge. My wife's home again (huzzah!) so she was out picking up kids and stopped to get some fresh bread; and let me say, decent fresh bread can make almost any meal taste better. Especially a loaf of French bread is great on a Friday or Thursday evening because it's really only good that day, but then the crusty bits can be used for French toast Sunday morning—nice.

At home I started the water boiling, which you might as well do in advance, because it's not like it's going to go bad. Make a big pot of water and use more salt than you think you should. Anthony Sedlak at a Lepp Farms cooking night (my birthday present) said that pasta water should be as salty as sea-water! That's a lot more than I was used to, but it does give the pasta more flavour. A lid also makes a huge difference in the speed of boiling water (um, at least I think it does...I sense a mythbusters post coming on—maybe I'll test that sometime). I usually use cold water because it's fresher than tanked hot water, but certainly hot water will boil faster if you're in a pinch.

So spaghetti is the pasta option for the evening and I always used to be unsure how much pasta to use. My rule now for the whole family is as much as I can hold in one hand with my middle finger touching my thumb. Now, that depends on the size of your family (not to mention your hands, Leland Klassen), but it's a helpful guide. If you're really worried about the sauce:pasta ratio, maybe keep the sauce and pasta separate until you serve it up (that debate, by the way, is a perennial one in our house with me being a "mixer" and my wife being a "separator"). A bit of vegetable oil in the water helps keep the pasta from sticking together, but I still think fanning the pasta out from the centre when it first goes in the boiling water (like pick-up sticks!) helps a lot too. Fettuccini/linguini however, almost never works perfectly for me and I always end up burning my fingers trying to separate stuck together strands—suggestions?

The sauce for this was a real hodge-podge. I had half of jar of some Costco spaghetti sauce—not enough for everyone. I also had a small can of tomato paste (always good to have on hand), which I added to the sauce, but which made the sauce too thick. I could thin it with water, or a real tomato, NOT ketchup, or cream and, in the end I used all of those as well as an old jar of pesto that I found at the back of the fridge. We also had some cooked chicken that I browned in a bit in olive oil with a chopped onion and eventually added to the sauce. The chicken is, well, chicken, but I always like adding fried, chopped onion for its toothsome texture (and is there a better food word than "toothsome"). Finally I threw in a half bulb of garlic that I had roasted in the morning (while my dad helped me fix our fireplace—thanks!) that I originally thought I would use for a soup that never happened in the end.

Maybe tomorrow for Faspa.