Tonight we had spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread, salad, and shredded Romano cheese for the entrée. It was great, but this is what I learned.

I probably won’t make meatballs from scratch again. Not that they’re a lot of complicated work. It’s that I can buy meatballs at the supermarket we like just as well. Which led me to think about other foods I once made from scratch that I don’t anymore.

Pie crust: Pepperidge Farm makes a great pie crust. You simply unroll it and plop it in the pan. They come two to a package, so you have options.

Mashed potatoes: Bob Evans makes fine mashed potatoes in several varieties. There’s sour cream and chives, garlic, buttermilk red skins and a kind called loaded; but I’m not sure what that means. Usually I just purchase the original. My only complaint with Mr. Evans is that each variety has its own number of ounces, making some more economical than others.

Fresh fruit: I’ve moved from thumping a melon or smelling it to simply buying chunks that the produce department has cut and packaged for me. It may be more expensive but at least I’m not paying for rinds and seeds that are inedible. I never was very good at thumping anyway.

For the record, I still make my own spaghetti sauce from a recipe my Italian mother-in-law gave me half a century ago. It will never be replaced by a jar of Prego or Bertolli, because there are still some things that can’t be improved by convenience.

What possessed me will remain a mystery, but I decided to make meatballs this afternoon. A spaghetti dinner was probably on my mind, but as a rule I just make meat sauce. It’s ground beef one way or the other.

Earl, since he is often the sous chef, and I got the ingredients together. And he mixed them as only he can. He can blend anything to the right degree, so I knew the recipe was well mixed. Then we made the balls and cooked them in the oven.

As an aside, Earl does all the things I don’t like to do. Chops onions for anything, shreds zucchini for baked bread, mixes ingredients for other recipes that I cook. It’s appreciated.

He made the meatballs with a cookie scoop and we put them on a cookie sheet to bake according to the recipe. Less than twenty minutes later, we had funky looking meatballs somewhat smaller than a golf ball and certainly more crispy.

I sampled a couple and thought they were really salty. But then Earl will love them, because he eats with a saltshaker in his left hand. Tomorrow we’re having the aforementioned spaghetti and meatballs. Review of same to come.