After running errands and taking care of church financial business most of the day Saturday, that evening I decided to stay home instead of going out. Actually, I did end up going out, but it was just to the grocery store. But not just any grocery store - I drove to the very interesting grocery store where the people talk to themselves. They were having a sale and we needed a few things, and I had nothing else to do so what the heck. I had my items in the shopping cart and was in the back of the store by the meat section getting ready to head up to the front of the store to check out, when all of a sudden a young Asian woman stopped me and asked me a question. She had 3 good sized packages of ground pork in her shopping cart and pointed first to them and said "This?" Then she pointed at the ground beef and asked "Or this?" I said "For what?" She said "Spaghetti." I told her that the ground beef would have less fat than the pork. That having been said, it dawned on me that she weighed probably all of 100 pounds and could have not cared less about lean or fatty meat. She said "Fat makes no difference; I want taste." Then she went on to ask me to show her what to buy to make spaghetti. I figured this young woman had just moved to Louisville, because pretty much everyone in the city knows that I don't cook.
She said that she had watched the Food Network all day long, but they didn't have any recipes for spaghetti. "Paula Deen cooked ribs," she told me. So for the next few minutes we went through the grocery store and I picked out the ingredients for her spaghetti sauce. First of all, when I saw the 3 large packages of ground pork, I asked her how many she was cooking for. She said "Three." I told her to put back two of the packages unless they wanted to eat it for a week or two. I had her pick up a small package of the ground beef so she could mix it with the sausage for the sauce. She asked about making meatballs. I shook my head and told her "That takes too long. Make meat sauce. If you want meatballs, buy the frozen ones. They taste just as good and are way quicker." Our next stop was the canned goods aisle. She said she wanted Prego sauce because she saw it on TV. I told her Prego was fine, and to get a couple cans of mushrooms to doctor it up. We then picked out a box of Creamette thin spaghetti (my family's favorite brand). She asked if she needed to cook the whole box or not. With a definite language barrier, I wasn't going to try to explain the way that my family measures portions of spaghetti (we make an "OK" sign using our index finger and thumb, and however many pieces of the spaghetti you can fit in the circle of your fingers is about one portion) so I told her to use the whole box. I figured they could heat it up later if they had too much.
Our next stop was the produce aisle. I asked her if she had any onions at home; she said no. So we picked up a small bag of onions, and then one big bell pepper. I told her to dice 2 or 3 of the small onions and the pepper and add that to the meat when she was browning it, and then to add in the sauce and mushrooms. I explained to her that once the meat was cooked, she didn't have a lot left to do - the sauce was already cooked and just needed to be heated up. I had her go over what to do one more time, and then I wished her well with her spaghetti. She thanked me again and again, and I told her that I hope it turned out ok. She said "Good, bad - my husband will eat it." She sounds like my kinda person.
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