I poked my head into the refrigerator and remembered the three small chicken breasts I had bought from Home Plus the day before. "We could have Chicken Parmesan," I suggested to my cat, "and I wouldn't even have to thaw the chicken!" Gingerly, I placed an onion--what was left of my fresh vegetables--onto the meat's plastic trough and carried the two toward the kitchen.
Just moments before, I had pulled out my package of long spaghetti noodles, along with my packet of Hunts mushroom spaghetti sauce, and had placed them on the lip of my range top, which served as my only counter space. Arriving with the chicken, I set the meat in its pan and took out my cutting board, chopping the onion in smallish squares. I then spiced the meat with a generous helping of pepper, garlic powder, and some all purpose seasoning.
"Wanna come over for dinner?" I asked Holly over Skype while the meat and onions sizzled.
"Haha," she laughed. "Right now? What's for dinner?"
By this time I had torn open the aluminum sac of sauce and had poured its reddish, viscous liquid over the onions, waiting for it to heat through so that I could transfer the herbed chicken to the saucepan to finish cooking. It was too smooth a texture for tomato sauce, I reasoned--and much too thick. It also looked darker than traditional tomato-based sauces. I dabbed a finger onto the still-wet sac and brought it to my lips.
I had already known from previous experience that Korean-brand spaghetti sauces were notoriously sweet. However, American syndicates should have been different. "Why is it sweet?" I wondered aloud.
"Chicken Parmesan," I typed back to my friend on Skype-- "without the Parmesan, and 'American' spaghetti sauce that's too sweet."
"Yum! That sounds great!" Holly offered. I returned to the kitchen to transfer the meat into the other pan.
With the chicken cooking in the saucepan, I now had room on my two-burner stove for the next step: the noodles. As I watched them cook, I kept the sauce going to ensure no pinkness remained in the chicken. Steam steadily rose from the mixture as, second by second, the sauce began to cook down and its water vapor drifted away.
Trying to cover the overpowering sweet taste of the Hunts sauce, I added pepper, cilantro, garlic, and rosemary to the pan--the makings of a fine mesquite barbecue flavor. Now that the onions had started to caramelize and the concoction to thicken, my dinner was slowly beginning to morph into sauce of a different kind.
"My spaghetti sauce looks a little too much like Texas bbq if you ask me," I wrote to Holly dismally.
"Haha--interesting," she replied. "I didn't know spaghetti could look like barbecue!"
"Well it's not supposed to!"
A little disheartened, I turned back to my dinner to finish preparations and--saucy spaghetti, peppery chicken, and cold garlic-y spinach in hand--deliberately sat down to enjoy it. My heart sank even further when I noticed that, by the light of my studio room, the sauce was even browner than in the kitchen.
One spoonful of pasta confirmed all of my dire predictions: Instantly, my taste buds were assaulted with sweet spice, soft onions, and spaghetti noodles. Together. It was a flavor-texture clash I just could not handle.
"Totally sounds like something I would do!" a friend commented the instant I posted my reaction to Facebook. "So... did you like it?"
The story came spilling out after that, the sweetness, the spice, the chicken-marinade. "I'd say it turned out to be decent barbecue," I told her. "Were it not for the fact that I was going for Chicken Parmesan."
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