It's cornflour!

"Spaghetti is made out of cornflour," my bro living in Roumania said.

"No, it's not it's made out of wheatflour," I answered, and to finally end that discussion I had a look at the ingredients of the only package in my cupboard. I studied it, read every word but no corn. Wheat it is.

"It's wheat," I told him.

It was years ago at the time we used MSN and I was right but so was he. The spaghetti he could buy was mainly made out of corn. With us cornflour is expensive and with him wheat flour is. The next parcel with food and goodies I sent contained spaghetti and just like the chocolate I sent it tasted completely different from what he was used to. About the chocolate, I knew but not about the pasta.

Yesterday was the first day of my life I ate spaghetti made of corn. The package is expensive because it is gluten-free. So the poor, cheap food my brother was eating is an expensive diet food today. As soon as "gluten-free", " light" or "diabetics/sugar-free" is on the package you pay three times more.

Homemade corn cookies we are used to by now they are good. Cornflour partly works with apple pie and in butter cake and if it's the minor ingredient in the cake you can use cornflour too but it doesn't taste in pancakes and we gave up on it. Cornflour not only makes everything you bake with it extremely dry (you choke in it) but it has a typical smell you don't seem to get rid of.

My tomato sauce with onion, mushrooms, garlic, basil, pepper, and parmesan cheese on top wasn't able to cover the smell of this spaghetti. I smelled the strange, unfamiliar cornflour and wasn't the only one. My children ate it and the package is enough for two more meals but I need to find a way to cover up this smell. Smelly food is no good, it's a warning to our brains not to eat it.

It's possible that what is added to it makes the smell worse. If you ever made a dough out of cornflour only you know it is sticky and you need something extra to take that dryness away. There's no way you can make pasta out of water and corn only, neither you can bake bread this way. It needs something extra.

"Spaghetti is an old invention," my kid says. "Corn didn't exist where pasta was invented."

This being said we agree spaghetti, pasta should be made out of wheat flour, not cornflour. Not that it changes anything. If we cannot get over the smell or cover it or it's too expensive we eat pasta sauce with rice, potatoes, or just so (with salad is possible too). It's gluten-free too although the package doesn't mention it.