Molly Ringwald gets saucy

I’ve gone in a few days from watching Molly Ringwald at the Oscars to watching her television show, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” with my 12 year to meeting her at a Ragu “Recipe for a Good Start” event. Molly was the quintessential teen, beautiful but quirky, the star of the teen movies of my youth: Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club. Now she is a mother of three, cooking pasta for her kids.

Ragu touts the fact that its tomato sauces have more than a full serving of vegetables in every half cup of sauce, and the sauces are also good sources of vitamins A and C. But I made a very difficult decision a few years ago to virtually eliminate pasta from our diet. Pasta had become our default meal, too easy to serve my vegetarian kids and not encouraging them to broaden their tastes. We literally had it 3 or 4 times a week. Now, we have it at most once a month.

Of course, when we went to Italy, we had pasta nearly every day. But Italian meals are a multi-course affair, with a soup or salad, a little pasta, then a meat or fish course. Busy moms don’t have time to cook three courses.

But, hey, I’m breaking out the old pasta pot and wooden spoon and getting creative. Ragu has a $5,000 contest, for an original recipe using its pasta sauce. Enter at Recipe for a Good Start.