12 things to do with leftover spaghetti
Do you make your own compost? You should. Compost is like a magic circle. Things go in, they mix and mingle, and in time the elements that went in come out refreshed and ready for another season.
So, early January, Saturday, moderately cold, dark before dinner, and you cook spaghetti. As usual, you prepare enough to feed Holiday Island. Someday you’ll figure out how to cook the appropriate amount, but this time you anoint some of it with olive oil, add your own canned tomatoes from last year with dried basil and garlic – all from your garden. Tasty, and, of course, there will be leftovers for three more meals. By Tuesday, that’s enough spaghetti for now, so it’s a good thing you have compost.
On Valentine’s Day, you come in from turning your compost, take off your mukluks, and start the water aboil for spaghetti which, this time, is made from organic peas from Uganda financed in part by USAID. While pasta boils, you remember the Warriors are on TV, so you jaunt to another room to find the game just in time to see Curry zip a pass to the slashing Kuminga who slams it home. Better watch the replay over and over, and wafting through is the famous aroma of forgotten pasta long since overcooked and stuck to your favorite boiler. Scrape it into a little pile for the compost.
By mid-March, lambs-quarters, dock and their kind are sprouting in earnest, and some of it goes to the compost. Just stir it in with the bowlful of leftover spaghetti that sat in the refrigerator a week.
April is a busy time. Especially busy are the black soldier fly larvae at work breaking down things in your compost. They do us a big favor and cause no harm. I wonder if all that leftover spaghetti is bad for their cholesterol.
We get wildflowers by May, as well as edible natives such as plantain and dock. I wish I had nettles growing here. I’ve tried but the seeds are difficult to sprout. I once ate spaghetti made from nettles, and there were no leftovers for their compost. Crafty folks can make flour from dried-out lambs-quarters leaves, so you could make your own lambs-quarters spaghetti.
The jungle vibe is strong in the garden by mid-June. You can freshen up your spaghetti with the earliest basil leaves and cherry tomatoes. However, this is the time native plants instinctively turn from grade schoolers to out-of-control teenagers overnight. Who doesn’t love a jungle, but, regardless, piles of uprooted interlopers appear, and it’s a good thing you have a compost. That’s where I put leftover spaghetti.
July is when you watch every day for squash bugs because, once they move in, they might win. It’s a noble challenge to battle them with neem oil and chanting, but they might win anyway. I mention this because you can make spaghetti from zucchini, and your compost would appreciate a dose of leftover locally grown zucchini noodles.
You’re sitting in the shade of a hickory tree sipping fresh beet juice on ice. It’s August. Your second beet crop has been blasted by sweltering heat, and the sad, yellowish leaves going into the compost almost match the color of the leftover chickpea spaghetti. I’m glad folks make spaghetti out of chickpeas. Leftovers work well in the compost.
Bean vines come down as summer fades, and they provide nitrogen to the compost pile thereby hastening decomposition, and that’s a good thing in this world gone sideways. Cut them into strings and, in the compost, they resemble the leftover lentil spaghetti.
For Thanksgiving, you tried to get Ugandan pea spaghetti, but it was nowhere to be found. Does Uganda have any USAID supplies left? For Christmas, it was angel hair pasta, aka skinny spaghetti. The cook still prepares too much spaghetti which is never a problem if you make your own compost.