Basically, make spaghetti like you normally would; just add canned sardines. But if you don’t know how to make spaghetti (weirdo), here’s how, step by step.
Ingredients
2 cans of sardines in oil (3 cans if you prefer)
1 16 oz box of spaghetti pasta
1 24 oz jar of pasta sauce
Water
Italian seasoning
Garlic salt
Regular salt
Lemon Pepper
Cooking instructions
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes
1. Fill a pot with water and add a dash of salt. Cook on the stove until boiling.
2. Put in the spaghetti noodles*. Cook until soft and then drain in a colander in the sink.
*I like to crack my noodles in half before cooking them. I understand that some find this blasphemous. I do not care. I like being able to completely submerge my spaghetti to cook thoroughly, rather than waiting for half of it to cook while the other half sticks up out of the water.
3. Once drained, put the noodles back into the pan. Pour 1 jar of pasta sauce of your choice. Stir. Add Italian seasoning to the desired amount. (Pasta sauce is never seasoned enough for me, so I add extra seasoning.)
4. Dump them canned sardines in there! You can drain the oil beforehand, but I like to keep it for added fishy flavor. Sprinkle garlic salt and lemon pepper on sardines. Then mix sardines and seasoning into the spaghetti.
Done! Your sardine sketti is ready to serve. I like to sprinkle mine with parmesan cheese. Goes great with a fresh green salad with a light dressing.
Sardine Spaghetti Storytime
So, I love spaghetti. I could easily eat it every day and never tire of it. I’m like that with pretty much any kind of pasta dish - lasagna, chicken parmesan, even pasta puttanesca. (Which, I guess if you think about it, this recipe is kind of a simpler version of that. Or if you don’t like anchovies, this may be a good alternative pasta dish.) As such, I could eat sardine spaghetti every day and love it just as much. Writing this now is already making me hungry for it.
I didn’t start adding sardines to my spaghetti until I was in my mid-twenties, living alone in a trailer park with just my cat to accompany me. I was working three part-time jobs while going back to school, and I needed an easy way to add protein to the dish and at the time, sardines were more affordable than beef and even chicken. I did it once just to try it and was in love. I dubbed it “sardine sketti” and went on to not starve another day. It’s, in fact, one of the first recipes with sardines I ever made (aside from sardines on toast).
I (fortunately) married a man who loves fish, so when I made him sardine sketti for the first time in our early dating days, he ate every bite and asked for more. He was also in college and not working at that time, so there just wasn’t that much money between us. But we could afford some spaghetti noodles, pasta sauce, and a few cans of sardines. So it became a staple in our low-income diet.
Even though we’re no longer low-income, we still make sardine sketti a couple of times a month, simply because it’s such an easy dish to make and there’s minimal cleanup. Also, it’s nice to eat something we bonded over and served as a comfort during a challenging time.
To me, that’s what sardine sketti is: comfort. So after a long week of work and raising my family, there’s nothing like having a bowl of warm sardine sketti with parmesan to fill my grumbling belly and comfort my tired soul. Hopefully, it will be the same for you.
ความคิดเห็น