When I lived by myself, I didn't do much cooking. (Now that I live with three other women, I do even less. This is true.) On the occasions when I did bother to put more than ten minutes of preparation into a dish, it had to be something I was willing to eat for a week. Fortunately, I have simple tastes, much like one your less-picky dogs, and am quite happy to eat the same thing for both lunch and dinner, five days in a row. Ground beef, grated cheese, and jars of sundry tomato sauces were my friends. So was pasta.
Enter the Unintentionally Crunchy Mexican Pasta Casserole (wherein I used salsa instead of marinara, and cheddar instead of mozzarella -- am I brilliant or what?). This little gem came about because it's hard to predict how much the water in a sauce will cook the pasta when you throw them in a baking pan together and let them sit in an oven for a while. Answer: It'll cook just fine, in the places where these ingredients make contact with each other. If there's no sauce-pasta connection, remarkably, there will be no water transfer.
On this day, there turned out to be several unsauced areas of pasta. I started eating it, and had the following conversation with myself:
"Huh. This is crunchy."
"Do I care?"
"Not really."
"All right then."
Thus, because I was 1)hungry, and 2)lazy, I made the choice to embrace the crunchiness as though I had done it on purpose. This little bit of self-psychology actually worked on me, which means I either have great self-control or am incredibly stupid.
But hey, who says those two things have to be mutually exclusive?
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