Noodles! Noodles! Noodles!

When we were ten and nine years old, Chloe and I had decided our life's work would be bringing out the amazing flavors in common, easy-to-make foods, as worldly and famous chefs. This revelation came about after a purchased Italian cookbook had shown promise. Now, being only ten and nine and having parents that were borderline over-protective, we were reduced to using any ingredients that we could find readily in our own kitchen. As far a Italian cuisine went, we were hopelessly lost attempting to find anything the recipes required. However, being the optimistic and naieve children we were we decided to wing a pasta sauce. After all, how hard could it be to heat up a quart of tomato sauce and add some meat, plus a few "secret ingredients" for flavor? To understand the endevore, one must first understand how living in this house, is very much like living in a ready made sitcom, consisting of many diverse characters and probably without any real moral teaching.

We are a joint-family. Having exacly one male presense in the entire house and seven female ones. Twelve if you count the dogs and cats. The parents are early fourties, and their girls range from eight to twenty-three. The mother stays at home but has a hair salon set in the basement. The father works at Lockheed Martin. The older two daughters are out of the house, but frequently stop by for sunday dinners with their father, who is typically at work fifteen hours of the day and asleep the rest. The third is recently 16, a cheerleader, and a new employee at applebees . After that comes the artist, 11 at the time, whoes sense of fashion means that tie-dye goes with leopard print and it is okay to order spagetti and hot chocolate for the same meal at a high end restraunt. Chloe and I were the last. Born in the same month, but 337 days apart; we were forced to share a room. Chloe is a high maintainance, hair obsessed, lip gloss enthusiast who believes she is actually twenty-five; I always thought it was funny to mess up her hair right after she finished making it, and that tackle football was the best game anyone could ever invent. Ever. And that more girls should play. Needless to say, our parents had a handful. The kitchen was the only true common area.

However, on the day me and Chloe decided to make this pasta sauce, the kitchen became off-limits to anyone who was not an aspiring chef or was not named Chloe or Randi. Even the dogs, a constant present at the heels of anyone who has food or has the potential to drop food at any time, were driven out so that the master chefs could create mind blowing recipes in peace. We were both under five feet and weigh about eighty-five pounds each, yet somehow we managed to move a solid oak table and the rest of our kitchens firnishings to act as a baracade to the kitchen. NO ONE would be getting into our kitchen uninvited.
We then proceeded to debate on the ingredients that would have the best possible outcome;
"Maybe we should put wine in it, the real Italians put wine in everything!"
" How about some of this green stuff"
"Sure, that too. Which wine should we use?"
" DON'T TAKE ANY OF MY WINE!"
Mother emerged from the basement followed by a few clients to discover our baracade, and me rifling through a few bottles of wine on the counter. We pleaded that the wine was necissary for us to create authentic Italian cuisine for dinner that night, a dinner we made special for them. That would surely convince her that her wine was a small sacrafice for a greater reward. Alas, that fabulous bargaining meathod failed. Mother strutted out of the room with her wine bottles confident in her victory. Then Brittany, the artist, came down the stairs scavanging for a snack when the scent of the pasta sauce wafted towards her. Immediately, she turned her attention to our work in progress. Typically, this would never have been tolerated, but it was around the time that one needed to taste test our creation, and starving Brittany was the perfect canidate. She tried that first bow tie noodle with the sauce and was mesmerized. for something we pulled out of thin air we had done pretty well. However, with the taste test completed Brittany was removed from the kitchen until it was officially ready for the general public. This did not set well with her. It wasn't long before she had organized a protest, with a single bow-tie noodle on a fork as her picket sign and chanting "Noodles, Noodles, Noodles". How could anyone work under such conditions! Being well armed in the kitchen with small projectiles we began to toss harmless snacks and bags at her until she left. Luckily Brittany has no aim, so her attempts at throwing them back failed. We were finally able to finish in peace.
We set the table, and created a mood,(we tried to make it look as close to Olive Garden as we could, because obviously that was real Italian cuisine) then allowed everyone to sit at the table and shower us with praise over our creation, a pasta sauce that would never and could never be repeated again.