I've been wanting to make macaroni art with the boys for a while because I remembered when my nephew, Evan, did it when he was a small fry. I FINALLY looked up how to do it and this morning I colored the pasta. This is SO inexpensive. The box of pasta was $1.00, the vingegar was $1.39, and I already had the food coloring. In order to dye the noodles, you have to mix food coloring with white vinegar, which I believe is how you color Easter eggs. I was so bummed out when I saw the directions. Vinegar smells SO disgusting.
I remember the first time I ever smelled vinegar. (I have a lot of food memories which probably comes as no surprise considering my, ahem, "pleasantly plump" physique.) I was at my Grandma and Grandpa Zimmerman's house playing school bus on the open staircase of their 1948 farmhouse, and I know that I was either kindergarten aged or younger. I smelled something odd, but then the smell went away. I thought it was gross, but didn't have a clue what it was. A little while later, I smelled it again but this time it wouldn't go away. The smell was so disgusting I felt sick. I walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. My grandma was in there, and the smell didn't seem to be alarming to her. I walked around the island to the stove, looked up at my grandma and said, "What is that smell?" She said, "It's the vinegar I'm cleaning with. Don't you like it?" To this day I don't know if she was kidding or serious. My grandma was a wild woman and it really could have gone either way.
This morning as I was measuring and pouring the vinegar all I could think about were the hours upon hours I spent at my grandparents' house when I was a little kid. I LOVED it at their house! My grandpa would pick me up from morning kindergarten everyday, then we would rush home so he could make me lunch before watching The Bold and The Beautiful. And heaven help you if you dared to ask him a question while his show was on. He was never mean, but you could tell he was seriously ticked off when unnecessarily interrupted. I could write about times at my grandparents' for days, but this is about pasta......so......moving on.
I had red, blue, green, and yellow food coloring, so of course we used all of those colors. Then I decided to make purple. Well, wonders of wonders, I messed it up. I am not artsy. I don't understand "expressing yourself" through anything but straight forward words. I don't get it. I don't understand it. And to be quite honest, I don't even appreciate it. Art just isn't my thing, so it never occurred to me to check the "recipe" for purple food coloring. I put in six drops of red and six drops of blue. The result was disgusting. It was just really, really, really ugly. I was so disappointed. Who would have guessed that you need to mix the red and blue in a 3:2 ratio. What the heck, food coloring?
So, now we are in a holding pattern. I dyed one box of Rigatoni, and we are waiting for it to dry. I think we are simply going to string the noodles to work on hand-eye coordination. I also have some Trio building blocks that come with tall rods that I am going to put into a base of blocks for Eli to "thread" his noodles on. I can't wait to see the end results. For now, please enjoy my attempt of an "artsy" picture of our dyed noodles. I think they look really great.
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