Jan. 4 might be National Spaghetti Day, but at our house, it makes many appearances during the year. Sometimes it’s covered in oil and cheese, other times with melted Earth Balance or with veggie meatballs and marinara sauce.

When the boys were younger, sometimes they pretended they were birds sucking up long “worms” into their mouth, but now they try swirling it around their forks, which is a better technique when eating in public.

Our song of the day is, course, “On Top of Spaghetti,” the children’s song that follows the journey of a meatball from the top of a plate of spaghetti to a garden where it grows into a tree. In addition to our spaghetti dinner tonight, we’ll likely also sing a round of that song tonight, while eating spaghetti with veggie meatballs.

 

When I played the song for my 11-year-old, he called it disturbing, which is likely a sign that we have moved away from the children’s songs portion of our life.

Our Medley Moments

In celebration of National Spaghetti Day, we ate spaghetti for dinner and for National Trivia Day, we played space trivia and state capital trivia with Alexa (the name of our Amazon Echo, in case you’re not familiar with it.)

I also played “On Top of Spaghetti” at the beginning of dinner, which got a big thumbs down from everyone, although the 7-year-old did giggle at the words.

My husband also made a small batch of spaghetti sauteed in olive oil and garlic cloves. Yum!

There are many blogs with lots of delicious spaghetti recipes to try, but I’m going to include some real-world advice here if you’re a novice pasta maker: Don’t try to get fancy when you drain the pot – use a colander.