Pasta

My dad always used to say that the one thing worse than finding a maggot in your apple was finding half a maggot. In other words, it was too late- you had already eaten the other half of the maggot!

I felt the same way about the pasta I bought in town a couple of weeks ago. One Friday evening, I was in a rush to make dinner. I created a creamy cheese sauce and hastily emptied half a bag of pasta into another pot of boiling water. Once it had boiled, I quickly drained it and added it into the cheese sauce, a little distracted by  keeping an eye on Joel playing at my feet and whilst answering a million and one questions thrown at me by a lively and hungry Esther and Ben...With relief, I served our hungry family. We all ate happily.

 Two days later, we decided to have pasta for lunch and Andrew offered to cook it- hurray! A break for me! I was set free from the kitchen! However, it was not long before a disgruntled Andrew called me into the kitchen, where he was busy examining the other half of the bag of pasta we had tucked into on Friday. The pasta was alive- with weevils!! They were not only having a lovely time scurrying all over the pasta shells in the bag, but they had actually built little homes in each individual pasta shell - each piece had a weevil firmly embedded inside! They must have been there quite some time and were very much at home. With squeals of  disgust, Esther and I took the bag outside to the bin, whilst Andrew was busy in the kitchen having a fascinating time, dropping escaped, live weevils onto the oven hotplate and watching them pop and boil!!

We realised with dismay that we had must have eaten the other half of the weevil colony along with our cheese sauce on Friday evening! Yuk! Weevils for dinner:

I suppose at least one consolation is that they had been boiled with the pasta and were not alive when we ate them, like the ones we sometimes find in our cereal! And another consolation could be the thought that we unwittingly added a bit of protein to our diet with our dinner that evening!