In an effort to be all #BeAwesome I decided to make my seriously out of this world spaghetti after we returned home from a long few days in the woods. I had some browned meat in the freezer so I got that out and announced my awesomeness to my husband who wholeheartedly agreed that this was definitely a #BeAwesome worthy moment.

I had an ulterior motive here though. Our son’s girlfriend had just come for a visit and left us with a lovely bottle of wine. It’d been just too hot to be motivates to drink wine while she was here and finally it was cold, well cold for Florida, ok more like less than sweltering.

It was only around noon when I announced the awesomeness we would be indulging in for dinner and by 5pm I couldn’t wait any longer for the wine part. I popped the top and poured. Mmmm, son’s girlfriend did well.

By the time glass #2 was gone I was ready to start the cooking – which really just entailed the making of the noodles, heating of the meat and sauce, and throwing some butter and garlic salt on a few slices of bread to toast up. Note: our idea of awesomeness is pretty simple. Anyhoo…

Meat’s in the pan heating, pot’s full of water, a dash of olive oil and salt just waiting to boil when I go to the pantry to get the noodles. I have NO noodles. Honestly y’all I don’t know how this is possible. I always have spaghetti noodles on hand. We’re not big pasta eaters so I don’t have a wide variety of noodles at all time but I always have spaghetti noodles yet I absolutely do not have any spaghetti noodles. We scoured the pantry, each of us, hoping they might magically appear in an odd spot but no such luck.

My husband, in his dismay over the lack of noodles happened to look over at the meat on the stove longingly and then tilted his head slightly while scrunching his eyebrow. “Oh great, what now?” I asked fearful of even looking to see what was wrong. He asked if that seemed like a lot of meat in that pan so I looked. Hmm, that did look like a lot of meat. Crap that was two pounds of beef not one.

Lightbulb Moment

Let’s review – I’ve had two glasses of wine and no food. Roger’s had a few beers and running to the store for noodles is out of the questions but we have and excessive amount of meat heating on the stove. This is when the concept of Sloppy Joe’s hit me. Naturally, when I make Sloppy Joe’s they are hard core spicy so we have appropriately renamed them Sloppy Jose’s. Since this would be an Italian take on them, served on garlic toast it only seemed appropriate that I should holler out while wielding a spatula in the air “We’ll have Sloppy Giuseppe’s” followed by a little self indulgent #BeAwesome dance. *I know y’all but it was the only Italian name I could think of at the time. The rest of the evening went off without a hitch. We enjoyed our Sloppy Giuseppe’s and all the rest of the wine. Ok so I drank all the wine.

I prefer to think of this incident as a #BeAwesome moment in creativity and “improvise-adapt-overcome” rather than an indictment of my grocery shopping skills.