Man 'stable' after draining cooked pasta water down the sink

A Retford man is expected to make a full recovery, after accidentally draining his starchy cooked pasta water straight down the sink, instead of retaining it to mix in with his pasta sauce, it has been confirmed.

The incident occurred whilst Pete McBride, 45, was doing some 'theatre cooking', rustling up a cheeky penne with arrabiata sauce, for himself, his wife and two daughters, while they sat at the kitchen table.

'I don't know how it happened', confessed an upset McBride, after enduring a tense meal, punctuated only by quiet sobs from his 10-year-old daughter and complaints that the sauce was 'scarily bland' and just hadn't bound together at all.

'It was a schoolboy error', admitted McBride. It's basic advice in every pasta recipe in every cook book. I could hear Ainsley Harriet's chirpy tones stressing that 'You must keep a bit of starchy water as you drain the pasta sauce. You really must.' 

'It seemed to happen in slow motion', continued McBride. 'I just let it all drain down the sink in a colander.  I could see my wife's mouth drop in horror. I panicked and quickly tried to add a bit of cornflour into the pasta sauce, and a few capers, but the sauce started congealing and lumping up before my eyes. It was gut-wrenching.'

McBride has agreed to undertake a process of rehabilitation, including basic refresher training in how to place an empty pan under the colander to collect water, as well as watching repeats of every episode of Saturday Kitchen ever.

Image credit: Wix AI

Meanwhile in the TV kitchen ...

Meghan’s new cookery show teaches you how to Photoshop a lentil

The new Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, launches on January 15. But already the fan of the Duchess is raving about some of the astonishing food hacks contained in the lifestyle-promotional televisual plea for absolution and lots, lots more attention. ‘I bought myself a House of Sussex notebook and pen and made copious content notes. And – as Meghan advised - finished each with a heart and smiley, and other emojis, to detract from the imperativeness of the standard cooking advice lexicon.’

Smiling pan-racially at every moment, the Duchess welcomes culinary neophytes into a cutting-edge world of insta-conscious gustatory presentational techniques. And what she has unleashed in sustenential positivity is being talked up in some quarters as full karmic compensation for all those years of Covid. For this is not your average cookery show. It is the full, para-royal inversion of a genre.

In the trailer for the series, Meghan can be seen picking produce from her garden and warmly ignoring her father. Back in her Montecito kitchen, while Harry cleans the oven with a very old toothbrush, Meghan spends the first hour of the show thanking her ‘amazing team’ one by one. Using words such as ‘fantastic’ and (again) ‘amazing’ she says that she is ‘beyond grateful for the support’, leaving viewers pondering how ‘beyond grateful’ might take form in language or emotion.

Then it’s down to business! Lentils, the Duchess explains, don’t look good in most close-up shots, even the red ones that are actually from India. So Ms Markle walks viewers through the process of using image editing techniques to make tasteless brown mush gleam like the diamonds worn by the whore played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. While the food on the plate looks about as appetizing as Walsall street pizza, the resulting image would make you want to eat the screen through which it fakes.

At which point the show ends, leaving viewers gasping at the ingenuity of the knowhow, the smiliness of the Duchess, and the fantastic, amazing teaminess of the team. But be careful! Despite the Duchess’s heartfelt encomiums for a delicate moderation in all things diet, With Love, Meghan is product you might just want to binge. 

Editor's note: The best interpretation we can make of the term 'beyond grateful' is 'not grateful any more.'

Picture credit: deskpilot