Baked Spaghetti

This recipe may lead you to exclaim that I need to get out more. Who posts a recipe for baked spaghetti? Doesn't everyone know this? Well, I didn't. A couple years ago we went to someone's house for dinner, and she very kindly made it for the vegetarians, while everyone else had some kind of meat dish. I loved it. I'd never had it before, and indeed had never even heard of it. It is quite a different taste from regular boiled spaghetti topped with sauce. And it tastes different from a baked pasta like macaroni or rigatoni. In case there are one or two of you who have never had this simplest of meals, here's what you do.

Boil about half a package of vermicelli. I chose it because it cooks fast. 

Grease a baking dish - I used an 8x8.

Add half the cooked spaghetti.

Top with sauce.

Add another layer of spaghetti.

Top with more sauce.

Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top.

Of course if you eat cheese, which I don't, you will put some grated cheese between the layers and on top before, or instead of, the breadcrumbs.

Bake a few minutes in a preheated 350º F. oven.

That's it. Easy peasy. And delicious.

Before cooking

After cooking

Quote du jour/Gladys Taber

May is a month for dreaming. The rich fulfillment of summer is not yet come, and the stern reality of winter is one with all time past. Winter, I think, has the frosty visage of a Puritan, and has no traffic with light-mindedness. And summer is like a Greek goddess, templed in green and robed in moon-silver, but she carries in her hand the dark secret seed of sorrow, for she forecasts beauty that must die.

But May is enchantment without shadow. May is the sweetness of love and the mystery of blossoming. …

It is good for us, I think, to keep as much joy in life as we can. We busy ourselves with so many things that are not of the heart and spirit. We worry about money, we agonize over the terrible state of the world, we fret at household duties or business minutiae, we work, we argue, we squander our strength in a million ways.

And all the time the wonder of life is around us, the ecstasy of breathing air ravished by apple blossoms, of walking on fern-cool driftways, of listening to young leaves moving in the moonlight, and of seeing the twilight stars in the violet bowl of the sky. There is joy enough in one spring day to furnish forth the world, if we but knew it.

Gladys Taber 

Stillmeadow Seasons 1950

Glady's Stillmeadow

Nebby the donkey

The recent years have brought too many animal deaths to Windy Poplars Farm. Since 2006, we've lost three dogs, one cat, two donkeys, one goat, and one sheep. The remaining barn animals are all quite elderly. Since Daisy died, we've felt the lack of an equine presence. Last week, the state market bulletin had an ad for a donkey. I called the person immediately, and everything he said sounded great. Nebby is around 11 years old, a small standard donkey, and has lived with cattle for a few years. The price was good. We know a guy who transports horses so we hired him to travel the couple hours to pick her up. (He has gotten a lot of leverage from his 'hauling ass' joke.) And today she arrived! Margaret and Matt came up to visit, and she was calm and friendly to all of us. We've put her in a stall for a bit so she and the sheep and goat can get used to each other. So far, she's had grain, hay, and apples. We are all so happy. A perfect spring tonic!

A Wednesday evening at the movies - Quartet

Oh, how I loved Quartet. It was wonderful - the acting, the story, the music, the setting - a perfect movie. It was uplifting, yet realistic about aging. The actors were excellent. Tom Courtenay may have the kindest face I've ever seen. The gleam in Billy Connolly's eye hasn't diminished a bit. Pauline Collins still has a kewpie doll look and seems untouched by time. And Maggie Smith. Well, what can one say. She goes from strength to strength. All the talk about there being no roles for older actors seems to be going by the wayside. As the boomer generation ages, I think we'll see more and more films tailored to their sensibilities, though I know I would have loved Quartet in my twenties just as I do now. The movie is set at the fictional Beecham House for Retired Musicians. The real location was Hedsor House.

The movie is peopled with real musicians and singers as well as actors. In a marvelous touch, the credits show photos of the people in the movie and how they looked when younger in one of their acting or musician jobs. Quartet is directed by Dustin Hoffman. Along with the aforementioned actors, we see Trevor Peacock who actually made an appearance on the blog in his role as Jim Trott in The Vicar of Dibley; Andrew Sachs, 'our Manuel' from Fawlty Towers; and Michael Gambon who played such a good Maigret, and was famously in Gosford Park. 

The young people in the film are not portrayed as patronizing the older ones. There's a good scene where the Tom Courtenay character is teaching a class about opera to teens. You can see that he is really getting through to them, and that he is listening and learning from them. He tells his students that opera used to be for people like them, regular, casually dressed people, but then the rich took it over. At the end, the doctor at Beecham House, played so well by Sheridan Smith, says how the residents give younger people hope for their futures.

As always, I don't want to say too much, except see it! In my little theatre, where Tom sells the tickets and runs the projector on Wednesdays, we all clapped at the end. 

The official movie site is here. I thought of posting the trailer, but honestly, it comes off as a bit silly. The film itself is so much more. 

Up and down the road - May 7

Here are a few of the spring delights I saw as I walked down to Margaret and Matt's (see The Making of a Home under Letter Topics) house, and then back up the hill again.

A new crop of violets has popped up alongside the road, where the plow and grader have stirred up the soil. As they say, 'nature abhors a vacuum.' The minute a tree or bush is cut down, something begins growing in its place.

Serviceberry or shad blossoms softening the sign. Tom did a little post about this plant five years ago - here. 

One of Tom's first retirement jobs is to cut down the fir and pine beside the stone walls which line the road. This will open up pasture views, and allow for some deciduous trees to grow up.

Along with goutweed, this d*&% highly invasive Japanese barberry is the bane of my gardening existence. 

The sugar maple is so beautiful as it leafs out.

Plum, plum, crabapple, sugar maple. Ah spring!

The plum blossom is the sweetest fragrance I've ever smelled.

Today's picture/The winner!

Joel Rosario on Orb, the winner of the 2013 Kentucky Derby.

Today's poem by Wendell Berry

The Future

For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.

Wendell Berry