As you can see my spaghetti has issues. I am using 2 noodles as a group. I have played around with the normal and tangent and can’t seem to get them in the bowl correctly. Maybe there are some rules to the geometry of the noodles I must adhere to. Any ideas on how to get my spaghetti into the bowl?
Can I use physics and drop the spaghetti into the bowl and have the bowl catch it?
Yes you can. 
Add collision.
Your spaghetti are like metal bars as far as Blender knows. There is no way you can glue them to the bottom of the bowl and not have them stick out one way or another.
You can try using physics. Soft bodies are definitively what I would use for spaghetti. Just be prepared for a lot of fun… or pain, depending on your mood. The settings can be tricky. Google isn’t really your friend here… except if you want a ton of Jello cubes delivered on your doorstep. 
i would also suggest the cloth simulator, but build a false bottom, because that much spaghetti might cause your processor to melt.
So where is the center point of the individual noodle? If it is at the end, you may want to move it to the middle. Also, I notice you are using a group. Are all objects that generate the noodle included in that group? If not, strange transformations can occur.
Hmmm, yes my spaghetti is dancing like metal bars. If I take a single noodle object and add soft body it behaves correctly, but if I make that object a particle system it doesn’t seem to inherent the soft body attributes. Is there a way I can “bake” or apply the particle system like a modifier and say, ok I’m happy with the number/rotation etc, I want to treat the whole thing as an object/mesh and then apply soft body to that system? Thanks.
Well I have temporarily given up on particle systems and am just duplicating the objects and rotating them a bit, it looks OK, but I’m still not happy with it. Any thoughts on improving the noodles?
Apply a good sauce to them!
Out of kidding, they need some glossiness and …sauce.
Keep it up, they’re becoming eatable.
paolo
Well I’ve got a sauce heading in the right direction. There was a good hour there when it was looking like a diseased cow tongue, thankfully I got through that stretch. Now I’ve got noodles sticking through the back side of the bowl, is there any way to edit the vertices of multiple objects at the same time? Or do I have to join them into a single object and lose my ability to edit them without using vertex groups? And what else do you see that is hurting the realism? Appreciate the feedback.
can you trim it off with the grooming tools?
I don’t think so, I’ve done that with hair systems, but I was never able to get a particle system working for soft bodies on the noodles. It’s really bad design but each noodle is a separate object.