How to Make Chicken Spaghetti

Your grandchildren look forward to your chicken spaghetti when they visit. They won’t be there until evening, but you’ll serve dinner at 2:00 as usual. Your husband will come home then, and at least one of your sons, and who knew who else might drop by, hungry. You are used to making enough for the neighborhood.

Use the large black roasting pan and a package of chicken parts, even though you can break down a whole chicken. You can, in fact, dress a chicken. After the war, when you lived in Washington, DC and drove a surplus Army jeep, your new husband brought a freshly slaughtered chicken home from the market. You told him that the next time he bought a chicken like that, he was cleaning it himself.

Add celery, poultry seasoning, salt, and pepper and water. Simmer, covered, until the chicken is tender.

While the chicken is cooking, squeeze lemons for lemonade and mix it in the stainless pitcher. Pour some into a small Dixie cup from the dispenser by the sink and taste it. Add more sugar.

The author’s grandmother, culinary maven and connoisseur of sweet lemonade.

Remove the chicken and celery and cook the spaghetti in the broth. Shred the chicken and add it, diced green pepper and onion, a can of diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, and chili powder. Decades from now, your granddaughter will ask you to write down the recipe. Cook it with her instead. She’ll get a small Dixie cup to taste the lemonade, and add more sugar.

-Jacqueline Bryant Campbell

How To Manage Your Tattoos And Food

Your first tattoo is gateway ink. Think about the theme you want to begin with this one; it’s going to matter. Your first tattoo is the Wonder Bread spots, on your calf. As soon as it heals, begin planning the next tattoo.

Make all your friends become vegetarians. Be a good cook, and take the time to show them the basics: pasta, eggs, salad with nuts. Garlic. Lentils are fast food. Always have lentils in the cupboard.

Your favorite food is Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. When you decide that your next tattoo will be the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese box on your bicep, you will discover that they changed the packaging. It now has ridiculous cartoon characters on it.

The author with her friend, Mark in 1990

Write to Kraft and ask if they have a box of Macaroni & Cheese with the old design because you need it for your tattoo.

Potatoes are your second-favorite. They should be eaten at every meal. Go to the Potato Museum in Bruges. Drink vodka.

Kraft will write back and decline your request, but they will enclose coupons for free Macaroni & Cheese. These coupons display the old design.

Stay close to all your vegetarian friends. When you are dying, they will help you keep weight on. Pizza. Red wine. High-fat yogurt, if you can find it.

Wear sleeveless shirts to show off your Kraft Macaroni & Cheese tattoo. Warning: people will love you for your tattoo and not for yourself.

- Betsy Brown is author of Year of Morphines, a National Poetry Series winner. She is a poet and writer based in Minneapolis. Everything she ever learned about food was from Mark.

How to Make Spaghetti

You don’t like spaghetti Neo what style anymore? Neopolitan? You been eating it Neopolitan style. You ate it Neopolitan style before you went off to Yale. I don’t care if they served 3 kinds of pasta with 3 different kinds of sauces to choose from.

Image by jeffreyw/Flickr

Boil the spaghetti. Add some salt. Also add oil so it doesn’t stick together. Brown some ground beef seasoned with Lawry’s. Use some paper towels to drain the oil from the beef. Heat some jars of Ragu in a pot. Season it; you know Ragu doesn’t have any flavor. Chop up some bell pepper and onions. Drain the cooked spaghetti. Pour it back into the pot you boiled it in. Add the warm sauce, meat, bell peppers, and onions. Stir it up.

Sauce to pasta ratio? Girl, you can eat this spaghetti or starve.

- Deesha Philyaw is the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Deesha's writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, FullGrownPeople.com, and elsewhere. At The Rumpus, Deesha inaugurated an interview column called VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color. 

Macaroni and Tomato

“It’s so simple. Just cook some macaroni and pour in some tomatoes.”

Mama’s verbal instructions were simple. But there were so many variations.

Method 1: Combine cooked macaroni noodles with a jar of home-canned tomatoes. Talk to your little girl about when we all drove up to Aunt Char’s farm, and picked and canned them. Sit down at the table to eat with her. Tell her a story, or sing her a song when you’re done.

Method 2: Combine noodles and home-canned tomatoes as above. Call for your daughter to come to the kitchen and eat. She stays so busy now. Be gracious and understanding when she rushes off after eating to go spend time with her friends.

Method 3: Heat up a bowl of the macaroni and tomato you made the previous night in anticipation of your daughter coming home for the weekend. Listen while she tells you everything about college. Smile and keep it to yourself that you know she isn’t telling you everything.

Method 4: Use a store bought can of tomatoes because it has been many years since you could pick and can your own. Hold your new granddaughter in your arms while her mother eats a bowl of the best food in the world.

Method 5: Hold your daughter’s hand while she reminisces with you about how she always loved your macaroni and tomato. Laugh about what a simple thing that was. Smile and squeeze her hand a little tighter when she sheds a tear and tells you it is her favorite food in the world.

photo by the author

- Nena Gravil is a writer and an artist who works a daytime gig as an Information Systems Security Engineer to pay the bills. She shares a home in Nashville with two snakes, two cats, and one dog. Nena has one daughter, one girlfriend, and one best friend, and she understands exactly how fortunate she is. Sometimes she sings way too loudly in the shower and it's ridiculous. 

Aglio e Olio (Con Cipolla)

He often cooked shirtless and I would pay attention to the muscles in his back tensing and rippling as he worked. 

He poured olive oil into a saucepan—not a frying pan as I would have done—and let it heat up while he chopped garlic cloves and then diced an onion into tiny perfect cubes. He filled another pot with water and salted it generously. 

The kitchen filled with the smell of garlic and onion sautéing in olive oil, which is in all the world the most enticing aroma when it is late and you are hungry. Sometimes I’d come and stand behind him for a moment, my arms reaching around him to touch fingertips at his belly, my cheek against his shoulder, absorbing the reverberations of his movements.

He drained the spaghetti and poured it into the saucepan with the translucent garlic and onions. Salt, pepper, grated Parmiggiano. There: a meal.

I make that simple dish of his from time to time, but I can't ever do it with my shirt off. On my arm, as I type, I can see the dark pink and brown mark, where, yesterday when I dropped a sole into the frying pan for my children’s dinner, the butter splashed out and scalded me. He was much more methodical, though, practically undistractable, even with my cheek against his back. He cooked and I observed and he never got burned.

 "I knew when I drew this twenty-something years ago—inexpertly, but it doesn’t matter—that there would be only a handful of moments like this in the future, and I wanted to remember this perspective."

- Laurence Dumortier writes fiction and essays, and is at work on a PhD in English. You can find her at https://twitter.com/ElleDeeTweets