Spaghetti story

When I was in college, I would sometimes take special classes during times when the school was officially shut down. Being officially shut down just meant that they could charge you again for staying in your dorm room and could charge for using the cafeteria because your meal plan was no longer in effect. Since I needed to live somewhere and housing was in short supply, I'd pay for the dorm room but I'd try to eat cheaply by cooking for myself or sharing the cooking with others. Since I was a novice cook, I was delighted during one of these extra classes that my best friend, Nick, and his girl friend, Andrea, (they married after graduating) offered to share cooking with me. What this meant was that Andrea would be teaching me to cook.

One of the easy things I learned to cook was spaghetti. We just used bottled sauce so all I had to worry about was dumping the spaghetti into a pot of water, adding a bit of salt and heating the pot to boiling. Then, of course, I had to keep my eye on the pot and test the noodles once in a while to see if they were done. When they weren't too hard or too soft, I drained the spaghetti in a colander until it was dry enough. We heated the sauce separately in another pot and poured it on the spaghetti once it was on the plates. Easy as pie. My friends were very nice to me and made a big fuss over the results making me feel like a great chef. But as you can see from my description, I did nothing fancy. But it made me feel good and helped me get the confidence to move on to more ambitious meals - like pancakes!

Well, during one of these times, we were all going to see Nick's parents. We were going for a couple of days and they would be feeding us. During one of the evening meals, my Andrea was telling Nick's mother about how we'd been sharing the cooking at school. Nick's mother chuckled, "So, that probably means you've been doing all the cooking, right Andrea?" "No," she said, "The boys do quite a bit of the cooking." "As a matter of fact," she said, "Jim (that's me) is quite a cook. You should taste his spaghetti. He does such a great job!" As I blushed, I realized she was just being nice. She went on a little longer making it sound like I made the best spaghetti in the world. Nick's mother's tone changed a little, though. While she said, "Oh, isn't that good," she didn't sound like her usual jovial self.


As you've probably guessed, when the time came to eat and we asked what we were having, Nick's mom said, "We're having spaghetti. I hope it's up to Jim's standards." I felt so bad and I could see Andrea squirming. How could she make Nick's mother feel comfortable while not going back on her praise for me? I could see she didn't want to make me feel bad. So, she made some comments about how she was sure it would be a fine meal etc. When we did sit down to dinner, though, it was obvious there was no comparison in the two spaghetti "masters" cooking. Nick's mother was a terrific cook and the sauce was her own recipe. It was delicious and my my spaghetti was only a small step above canned spaghetti in comparison.

I learned a great cooking lesson that night, too. Even an easy-to-make dish can be made to taste wonderful. I also learned a lesson about praise. Don't take it too much to heart. Sometimes someone is just trying to make you feel good.