Pasta

Review bywiff· 2026-11-06

★★★★★

Any time I am in a living situation where I have open and exclusive access to a kitchen, I will cook pasta every day. I think pasta is one of those foods that I could never tire of eating. There are so many different ways one can enjoy pasta and so many different ingredients you can combine to create a wonderful dish. Over the summer, I get chastised by my parents for only eating pasta every day for lunch. I often get comments about needing to diversify what I eat and needing to find more things to prepare for lunch that aren't pasta. I don't listen to them. They don't understand that for me pasta is something that is baked into my routine, and if I don't cook up pasta for lunch, I simply won't eat lunch. I can cook a few other things, like eggs, or fish, or hamburgers, but I simply like eating pasta for lunch. I usually eat pasta either with butter or with tomato sauce and meatballs. I usually prioritize cooking up pasta with tomato sauce (as it is healthier) but I run into a few pitfalls. For one, my mother cooks the tomato sauce, so I rely on her saving some for me to use for my own meals. Second, I sometimes find chunks in the sauce that I abhor. These are usually herbs and tomato bits that have survived being pureed and are now in my pasta bowl to ruin my day. I usually take my spoon and surgically extract any solid sauce chunks from the bowl, putting them off to the side on a napkin. My mother's tomato sauce tastes amazing though. The secret is that she lets the meatballs sit in the sauce for hours, so the sauce gets a very hearty taste. It is so good that it has ruined other tomato sauces for me. I hate store brand tomato sauce. I also hesitate to order pasta with tomato sauce when I go to an Italian restaurant, because I already know that they won't be as good as my mother's. This is a very common stereotype among Italian people, so I am told, and often people say that this isn't true. But this is true. My mother has the best cooking in the world. This is non-negotiable. Pasta can come in many different forms. They can be long, like Spaghetti or Fettuccine. They can be a little bit less long, like ziti or rigatoni. My favorite type of noodle is called ditalini. In Italian, ditalini translates to "small thimbles", and I think that explains why it is my favorite. The small size leads to a very distinct mouthfeel that is very comforting for me. It feels satisfying to cram a bunch in your mouth. I once laughed so hard that pasta came out of my nose. I was watching a video by IGN titled "Half-Life 2 Developers React to 50 Minute Speedrun", and I do not remember what was so funny that caused me to laugh, but it was something early on in the video. Something that they don't tell you is that when something solid goes through your nasal cavity it hurts a lot. Even worse was that I was eating pasta with tomato sauce, so the acidic tomato made it hurt even more. It hurt for about half an hour. My entire family was stunned. Only my brother saw the pasta actually fly out of my nose, so my parents were incredibly confused to what even happened in the first place. I still don't think they believe me when I told them pasta came out of my nose. I was eating ditalini that day.