Something Knitty

Inspired by a recent NPR story about the installation of Julia Child's battery de cuisine at the Smithsonian, we decided to build our own.  Julia's is bigger.  And blue.  And she has more knives than I do.  But I still think mine's pretty cool.  

We went with orange. 

Installing hooksThis is serious businessVery serious businessNext, we will install the armaments.  

More freaky food fun this week. 

I first saw this Spaghetti Dog creation over at Plum Pudding, but have since found it elsewhere.  Many of the pics around the net seem to come from this Russian blog.  

First, cut up your favorite dog (tofu dogs, hot dogs, sausage dogs, whatever).  I cut each of our dogs into four pieces.  Then jam uncooked spaghetti into every dog bit.  This is a little tedious.  Give yourself 15-20 minutes to do a standard eight-dog package.  Dextrous children should be enlisted to help in this step, unless they are easily frustrated by the breaking of spaghetti.  Yes, expect much breakage until you get the hang of the jabbing.  But save the broken bits and toss them into the pot with everything else.  

Spaghetti jabbed into hot dog segments, before cooking

This is my regular spaghetti pot (why yes, it does have only one handle, adds to the cooking excitement), but it might have been easier to get them all in the pan at once if I'd used my bigger pot.  I would not expect to reach al dente perfection in this recipe.  If I tried this again, I'd cut the hot dogs into smaller pieces so that the pasta embedded in the dog could cook better.  We had chewy pasta inside our dogs.  

Trying to pile the dogs into the boiling water

We tossed in extra noodles for those in the family who are not partial to eating dogs.  

The cooked spaghetti dogs, draining

We did have fun with our space-creature-looking dinner.  A more sausage-y dog, paired with a hearty sauce was quite tasty.  A more basic hot dog with the pasta sounds a lot less appetizing to me.  

A single spaghetti dog on a plate, prior to sauceWith sauce, these dogs are a teensy bit awkward to eat.  Expect the children to want to twirl the dogs around, thus splattering sauce around the room.  Also expect extra splatters while you figure out how to get the dogs and noodles into your mouth.  Be sure to embiggen the photos to get all the gory detail.