Potato chips. If they’re not kettle cooked chips, I’m not interested
I’m the one that started this spaghetti war. My grandparents were born in Calabria, Italy which is in the south (the toe of the boot). They came to the US in the 19-teens as kids. My grandma never made homemade pasta when I was a kid. We always had the dry, bought in the box pasta. It could have been that she saw it as a great convenience. A new-fangled, American convenience. IDK. That will be added to the long list of questions I never thought of asking her when she was alive.
Here’s another thing that may cause some of you heart palpitations. Our family meatballs are never fried or baked. They are cooked by just plopping them in the sauce as it simmers on the stove. It makes for very tender meatballs. AND they are not round meatballs, they are egg-shaped. We always have spaghetti AND meatballs, which are half ground beef and half ground pork. We also throw in pork ribs or another cut of pork with a bone. It adds amazing flavor to the sauce and is so tasty.
Their red bronze line is the only one I like, but now that I know this, I’m happy to avoid Barilla at all costs.
Dried pasta goes back to 12th century Sicily at least. (And I’d bet much farther back if you include cultures east of there.) Not sure when they started putting it in boxes, but it’s not really an American concept.
Sounds great. I will brown them first and then put them in the sauce. My wife does not like meat balls though, and prefers meat sauce. We go with ground hot Italian sausage, browned and drained and put it in the sauce. 
Yeah, when it gets close, I start plucking strands out to test it. I do rinse it. This stops the cooking process once you have it off the stove. Otherwise the hot drained spaghetti will continue to cook for a bit.
My wife doesn’t seem to care if it’s al dente, I do though.
I pull it short of al dente and finish in the sauce with a bit of the pasta water.
Here’s an Italian transplant’s take on “Italian” food at Whole Foods (the whole channel, Pasta Grammar, is fairly hilarious as an Italian wife tries to navigate American food (she hates pineapple on pizza but she loves street tacos!) and learn how to make do in the kitchen with what’s available here. (at 6:44, she answers the question “Do you have Barilla in Italy?”)
Hmmm. We sauce ours right before serving. I like less sauce than my wife, and can eat it just fine with a bit of pepper and a little olive oil actually.
I do that too when I’m using a brand or kind of pasta I never made before, you can’t always trust the instructions on the box. Though I don’t rinse them. My mother used to rinse pasta no matter what after cooking, but that’s a deadly sin, just like she used to put a little bit of oil in the cooking water. Both are refuted myths about cooking pasta.
Yeah, for some pasta dishes I do the same, for instance when making Pasta Alfredo, which I usually make with tagliatelle.
Yeah, I don’t use oil in the water. And rinsing for me is mostly to stop the cooking process. I work from home so I will cook before my wife gets home, timing is a little difficult.
I don’t dunk it in a gallon of sauce. Just a reasonable amount. You don’t need a lot of sauce for your pasta, and Italian-American places are typically wayyyy too saucy for my liking.
Something like this is what I like for most pasta dishes:
But they serve Italian bread with the meal!
I’m also weird because I hate stuffing myself on bread before or during a meal. Shakshuka excepted, but that’s because it doesn’t already have a starch.
Yeah - if your feet are at all oddly shaped (narrow heel / wide front, it sounds like), regular shoes are nearly impossible. Sports sandals might work for you but they are not terribly useful in the winter.
When I was in college, there was a shop where they would custom make a basic sandal - You would literally stand on the leather, and the shoemaker would trace around your foot. He would cut that shape out, then attach straps, then a sole (rubber or leather, your choice). I LOVED those. And this was a somewhat warmer climate, so I could wear them a good 6 months of the year.
Reminds me of Jerry Jeff Walker’s friend Charlie Dunn.
That’s common enough that some companies used to make combination last shoes to fit such feet. They seemed to stop doing so maybe twenty or thirty years ago. Apparently while 40 thousand (number rectally derived) fractionally different styles are worth making, and multiple widths are worth making in many of them, making combination last is just too much hassle/expense to be worth any company’s doing so, even though it was for most of the previous century. And I can’t afford custom made.
Some do work for me; but not only are they not useful in the winter, they’re not useful for field work as they don’t protect my toes. I have a pair of sandals that fit (adjustable heel/ankle strap which I can tighten enough, ball-of-foot strap that fits on its widest position, entirely open toe) but I mostly only wear them if I’m in or right around the house in warm weather.
Snob for simple single pan cooking with big flavors.
Simply gorgeous, like you! 
THAT is a great Life Plan!
I’d rather have one really good coffee/beer/burger/BBQ/breakfast than a bunch of the cheap stuff.
Friends and I discovered we were beer snobs when our local bartender said “Hey, we got light beers for $2 tonight…” We each ordered a different one, but every single one was like water! I thought back, and I’d been drinking nothing but local microbrews for years.
I now only buy Smartwool socks. Even on a hot summer day, my feet are cooler because the wool is so good at wicking moisture.
(But I can’t wear socks with sandals… I’m not “fashionable” at all, but I guess I do have some minimum standards of dorkiness.)
What if (just supposing) a person drank one or two high quality beers, then, once the taste buds were fulfilled, the rest of the night went to chugging the cheap stuff? That was a hack we did back in college.
Huh. Me too, for several years now. Cost a pretty penny when they need replacing, but I think there are other areas where I’d economize first if it ever became an issue.