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It began with a request from my, much younger at the time, daughter. One of the main characters on one of her favorite tv shows was eating a spaghetti taco. Yes, exactly what it sounds like it would be. Spaghetti mixed with meat sauce in a crunchy taco shell with cheese. "You should make that" was the request, my response was a chuckle. She looked mildly offended and said "no, really." All of the reasons a professional cook, and probably most non-professional cooks, wouldn't want to make something like that popped into my head. It was fairly early in my cooking for a living career and watching what the big names were doing had me convinced that something like that wasn't worth doing (it wasn't their fault, they never said that, it was just my own chef/cook immaturity showing). None of those thoughts were passed on to the little girl who would have no idea what I was talking about but the net result was spaghetti tacos never happened.

Fast forward more years than I like to think about to 2 days ago when my daughter mentioned she was feeling nostalgic and watching some episodes of that old show online and was trying to remember if we ever made the spaghetti tacos. I had to admit that no, we never did and I actually felt a twinge of guilt at having to say it. So guess what we had for dinner last night? Yep. I came home from work, cooked some ground beef and made a sauce. I broke spaghetti into smallish pieces, cooked it and mixed it into the sauce. Then I swallowed my pride, heated some crunchy taco shells from a box in the oven and filled them with the spaghetti mixture and shredded mozzarella. Everything just the way it appeared in the show as best as I could remember. Watching my now young adult daughter's eyes light up and a big smile spread across her face while she ate them like it was the best thing I'd ever cooked made me both happy and a little sad that I didn't do it for the little girl who wanted it years ago. So I've made it my goal to never again be too cook-cool for any request. If it makes someone happy, it's worth doing.


*Disclaimer: this is not a judgement piece for how others view their cooking, just some rambling about a bit of personal growth where I didn't even realize I needed it.