More Spaghetti I Say

(One of our kids' favorite children's books)
Had a dinner time board meeting last night and since we now have a kitchen in the new space, I decided to make spaghetti for them, as an experiment in the 5-minute recipe collection. Came close on getting the sauce all onto the stove in 5 minutes, and would have if (key teachable moment) I'd had a sharp knife and all my tools where they belonged.
Anyway, made vats of spags, and others contributed some really good salads, including a tasty and interesting radish (fresh from the Santa Monica Farmers Market), mint, and Montrachet cheese salad, and a delicious zucchini and green olive thing, also a couple of green salads and garlic bread. The board didn't eat but a half of it, so we are going to be seeing spaghetti again soon.
The really exciting news on the food front is that when I went to the store to get the ingredients the first boxes of satsumas were in. I bought a box and took one into my coworker, who is from Norway, and she breathed in the aroma and said with satisfaction, "it's winter". I guess the little oranges at Christmas phenomenon is world-wide.
Those of us who grew up in Alaska have very fond memories of the mandarins that came from Japan about December every year, in little wooden boxes, each orange wrapped in a bit of orange tissue. After you ate all the oranges (and unless mom was there to intervene that could take about 10 minutes) the boxes made swell treasures in an of themselves. Now we get them from California, and they are almost as good, in fact the quality of the Japanese ones is sometimes disappointing of late, although they no longer come in the wooden boxes, and then 'tis the season.