See if you can help me out with a little disagreement I had with Cheryl this evening. We’re going to take this pretty quick so try and keep up.

If you use alcohol to disinfect, why do you need to wash a container used to shake up distilled spirits? That whole spaghetti fiasco is making a little more sense now, eh?

Here’s an experiment that you can try at home. Take half a pound of cooked spaghetti. Next, run the water in your kitchen sink and start the garbage disposal. Now feed as much of the cooked spaghetti into the disposal as you can at one time. With practice you should be able to feed almost all of it down the disposal at one time. If you have standard residential plumbing this should cause water to start collecting in the other side of your sink (this will only work if you have a two sided sink). When you turn off the water at the faucet the water should slowly recede from one side, and slowly transfer to the side with the disposal (the level of water in each side of the sink should equalize).

Now here’s the best part. Take an ordinary toilet plunger, apply the business end to one side of the sink… and plunge away. If you do it right, you should get a geyser of water logged spaghetti puree from the other side of the sink. This fantastic towering spectacle of spaghetti mush will only be toped by the disgusting mess that will fall within a three foot radius of the sink.

There you have it – real world science at work in the comfort of your own home.

Come back next time and join us for our discussion on the best solvents to use on spaghetti sauce.