Dear millennials, adulting is difficult. As a result, I’m going to cover here the things that I’ve slowly learned over the last few years. Tiny steps that I’ve made towards being an adult that I am actually pretty proud of. As a heads up, they’re mostly going to be recipes that surprised me as actually pretty easy to make.

Whenever I open Instagram (which is more often than I would like), there are basically two types posts: dogs and food. My response to dogs = awwww! and food = oooo yummm! But whenever I read the recipes from professional food bloggers, I’m always intimidated by how many ingredients there are (endless), how beautifully it is put together (even filters can’t save me from that), and the fact that it is always portioned for 4-8 people (I’m either 1, at most 2. maaayybe 4 if we do leftovers, 8 if I end up hating my leftovers). As much as I love the food pictures I’m scrolling through, I never imagine myself making it. Everything about it seemed so perfect, and as an extension, so daunting.

For dinner tonight, how about I just stick to my boiled pasta + canned sauce instead?

So here’s my first post on #adulting. Let’s start with making pasta at home:

You’ll need:

                   Pasta                   Pasta Sauce                Salt + Olive Oil                    Pot

Steps:

1. boil water
2. put pasta in a pot, along with the hot water (add a bit of salt and olive oil to improve taste) and leave it to boil for 13-15 minutes
3. separate the pasta from the water using a strainer (or however you can separate them, even with a fork or spatula)
4. pour sauce over the cooked pasta
5. Enjoy!

Need help with the ingredients?

Pasta: you can buy a box from your grocery store. Anything you like – long ones, short ones, fat ones, tiny ones…[forget the fancy Italian names if that’s too much for you – the pappardelle, fettucine, rigatoni…], you can always stick with spaghetti, that’s Italian!
Pasta sauce: also from the store, choose whatever you like. they’re usually right next to the pasta boxes

Special shout out to Marko Mille for illustrating. Check out her other work on instagram @marko_mille.