The Spaghetti Blender
Story circa February 18th, 2001 | Back to Blog Listing

Taken about 10 minutes before Dayna flew over the handlebars and smashed her face
In the late winter of 2001, Dayna and I took a trip up to visit her parents in Irving, Texas. Her family wanted to go over to the park and so they got her and I a pair of mountain bikes that we could ride around on. Probably not more than an hour or so into our riding around, Dayna somehow managed to slam on the front breaks causing the bike to flip forward. She landed square on her face on the sidewalk below and to say the least was screaming in pain.

Her mom and I took her to the emergency room in Dallas and after a number of x-rays and what I assume was a rather painful examination, they concluded that she had broken her jaw and would need to have some wiring done.

It should be pretty obvious, but there are lots of things you can't do when you have a broken jaw. Some of them are worse than others, but near the top of that list is eat solid foods. Since you can't really apply any pressure to your jaw, it's near impossible to chew.

Fast forward a week or two.

Dayna and I were back in Austin and she was really getting tired of not being able to eat anything. Incidentally she had been living off of Broccoli Cheese Soup from Jason's Deli and was desperate for a change. I felt awful for her and so one night invited her over to my house as somewhat of a dinner date night. She was hanging out on the couch while I cooked a full meal of spaghetti and meat sauce. I prepared it just as anyone would, boiling the pasta, cooking the meat, simmering the sauce, and mixing it all together. Finally I was done. Dayna was a bit confused as to why I would have gone through this effort seeing on how she couldn't eat it. But I had a plan.

I took the entire meal and tossed it into my blender, still piping hot. I hit puree and let the blender do its thing. What was left was this steaming hot pile of mush with little chunks of meat in it. The excess starch in the pasta gave the meal a really interesting consistency. We both sat down to have our mush meals only to find that they were about the worst-tasting things we had ever tried. Unfortunately, and despite my best effort to give Dayna a good meal, we couldn't eat them.

I still got credit for the nice gesture, but for future reference, blended spaghetti is NOT a good meal.