Childhood Dishes: Spaghetti and Meatball

All the fancy eating lately got me hungry for the basics. These are often simple dishes from your childhood.

But when I think of what I ate growing up, they were mostly Chinese-style steamed chickens or fish and a lot of boiled green Chinese broccoli. This is what my mom made. Then there were times when my dad cooked. It wasn’t very often, but it would be dishes he learned as a bachelor. So things like meatloaf, turkey, stew or spaghetti.

I got a craving for spaghetti lately so I purchased—for the first time in a long while—a packet of Barilla thick spaghetti. Yeah, not just spaghetti, it was the thick spaghetti. I haven’t eaten this thick, long pasta for a long time because when I got older I discovered angel hair pasta or capellini and fell in love with that. That’s usually what I made with my basic tomato-meat sauce.

But there’s something about the thick, stringy spaghetti that just makes you think of being a kid. Maybe it’s because of the slurping you have to do to get it all in your mouth, or the mess it often makes because of it. Anywho, I used the same recipe I printed earlier for lamb meatballs and a basic tomato sauce here. The only change was I made the meatballs using a blend of lamb and buffalo meat. Yum.

You can follow the recipe, and the only thing you need to add is a pound of dried thick spaghetti. I dare you to eat it without slurping. Enjoy!