Growing up, one of my least favourite home-cooked meals was spaghetti and meat sauce.

Dubbed “Saturday night special” more than twenty years ago by my dad, spaghetti and meat sauce was a staple dinner in our house. With the benefit of adult hindsight, it genuinely isn’t that bad – it’s pretty hard to ruin pasta, ground beef, and tomato sauce, and my mom isn’t a bad cook.

As a teenager, I hated it.

I hated it straight off the stove at dinner time. I hated it after four hours of congealing in the microwave, waiting for me to come home from work and eat it. I hated it on Saturdays, and on every other day of the week it landed on the table. Much like green eggs and ham, there was nowhere and no way I wanted to eat Saturday night special.

I couldn’t understand why my mom continued to make it. It was clear that I didn’t like it (sorry, Mom!), and it wasn’t like it was anybody else’s favourite dish either, as far as I could see. She made a fabulous penne and meatballs dish – why not make that?

When I moved out, I promised myself I was done with spaghetti and meat sauce. I love pasta, and my cupboard always had a good stock of rotini, ziti, macaroni, penne, rigatoni, and farfalle in it in the early years of my marriage. But never spaghetti.

Eventually, when we switched grocery stores and my pasta options became a bit more limited, I started buying spaghetti. It was cheap, and it’s not like the shape changed the taste. I’d do it with olive oil and parmesan like I did other pasta, but never with tomato sauce. I was still determined that Saturday night special would never make an appearance on my table.

And then, one night about six months ago, staring into my cupboards with the age-old question What can I make for dinner? cycling through my head, three kids yelling at each other in the background and thirty minutes or less to get dinner on the table, I caved. The box of spaghetti was sitting right there, with its cheerful “Ready in 8 minutes!” label on the side of the packaging. The shelf below had jars of tomato sauce, ready to go.

With no small amount of self reflection, I grabbed the spaghetti and the tomato sauce and got to work. Twenty minutes later, as I put bowls of spaghetti and tomato sauce down on the table and called the kids in for dinner, Bea came running to check what we were eating. “Yay!” She yelled. “Spaghetti!”

The kids cleaned their plates that night. So did Marc. I cleaned up the dishes and had a good laugh to myself as I washed and dried the pasta pot and sauce pan. What an easy, simple dinner to make – we could make it a weekly thing!

I get it, Mom. Fifteen years too late, maybe, but I get it.

Since that night, I’ve made spaghetti and tomato sauce at least once every two weeks, if not more. And when I do, I like to imagine my kids in the future, sitting down at the table and moaning “Spaghetti again? Mom, I hate spaghetti!” It’ll be the perfect full-circle ending to my spaghetti journey.

Humble pie, it turns out, tastes a lot like pasta and tomato sauce.