Tag Archives: tomato sauce

Meatballs with Sausages: Breaking the Code of Silence

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

They must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.  – Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

This is going to take a minute, so if you’re just here for the recipe feel free to skip on down.

I got my first job at sixteen in an Italian restaurant/pizzeria owned by the people who lived across the street from us. The place was a retirement of sorts. The mister was formerly of the stock market, Alabama bred but with a mid-American accent learned out of professional necessity. Get him laughing and Gadsden came out. The missus was from Brazil. They both spoke English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She added French, German, and a bit of Italian. Their son who helped run the place spoke all of those but German.

They were all clever as can be. (And still are. I see them almost weekly, but this is a nostalgic anecdote and there’s power in “were.” It creates for the reader a sense of being transported, and once frame of reference is changed the experience is more immersive.) There’s an old saying that a gentleman is someone who’s as comfortable in the company of pirates as of kings. As a trader, he spent time with New York financial power players. She was practically Rio aristocracy. They could pull off Ma and Pa shop keeper. No problem.

I remember one afternoon, the missus complimented a woman on her purse. The woman, in her thirties and from the over-the-mountain community (we know because she managed to get that in), was working out whatever insecurities she needed to work out by implying that (a) yes it is a nice purse, (b) you’ll never be able to afford one, and (c) what would a shop keeper know about fashion accessories anyway. The missus gave a Brazilian smile and nodded. “It really is nice, though.”

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Farrah Fawcett and Grilled Spaghetti Sauce

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Farrah smelled like trees.

If you’re a male heterosexual and the same age as I am, you knew that the most important attribute a prospective childhood friend could boast were parents who sprung not just for cable, but for one or more of the handful of premium movie channels that ran rated-R movies. My parents wouldn’t pay for cable, much less HBO, so I had to seek out bad words and boobs.

The Cannonball Run was not rated R so the most it showed were nipples outlined through thin shirts, but my parent’s inconsistent puritan streak got wind of inuendo in the film so I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theaters no matter how many times I told them that Bernard’s and Tony’s parents let them go. Thankfully Tony’s parents didn’t talk to my parents about such things so one night at a sleepover at his house I got to watch it on the same TV set that would later find fame as the giver of Purple Rain.

Looking back through my now-older eyes, I have to say that it’s a fantastic movie. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 29% from reviewers. No surprise there. It was always a proud bridge and tunnel set movie. What’s surprising is that Cannonball got made at all.

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Spaghetti al Lent with Tomatoes and Smoked Trout

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I had a theory about Lenten fasting that was described by someone whose opinion I value as “the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard.” He added something along the lines of “Where do you get this nonsense?” but I thought there was something to it so I’m going to share with you here.

I saw a map of the olive oil-butter line; the dividing line between areas of Europe that primarily use olive oil and those that primarily use butter as cooking fat. Now the EU has super-fast trains and Ferraris to carry goods from one region to another, but that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, you shopped locally without needing to be told to do so by a t-shirt. If you lived below the line you cooked with olive oil. Above, with butter. I remember looking at that map years ago during Lent and realizing the countries to the north of the line were mostly protestant.

The Catholic Church used to have a much larger appetite for fasting. By some accounts nearly half the days of the year were designated as preparation for feast days or days of remembrance or were part of a holy season. All of those were subject to dietary restrictions. If you’re an Italian Catholic in 1516 enjoying a nice dish of turbot sauteed with zucchini in olive oil and one of your dining companions reminds you that the next day, as the first Wednesday after the Feast of Santa Lucia and thus an Ember Day, was a fasting day, you might check the stores to be sure you had more turbot, zucchini, and olive oil to cook them in for tomorrow because the rules likely made no difference to you. The Mediterranean diet was such that you had to be sure and only inject lamb, pork, or beef into your regimen three times a week, which is likely two or three times more often that you were used.

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Boxing Day Recipe: Lamb Stuffed Cabbage Rolls In Tomato Sauce

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Why can’t I simultaneously heat the interior of my car and defrost the windshield? Why is this an either-or proposition? Yes, I can get heat through the floor vents while defrosting but the steering wheel is freezing and leeching whatever warmth was left in my numb fingers so immediacy is required up top instead of down below and no promises of eventual relief from rising heat will mollify my mystification at the inertness of the wide open and ready dash vents. I drive a Hyundai. It’s not the most luxurious vehicle ever devised but if there’s one thing they nailed, I mean engineered beyond my dreams and avarice, it’s the power of the heater. I can go from teeth-clattering misery as I get in the driver’s seat to wishing I had taken off my jacket or sweater in a matter of minute, from sitting in an icy pond to standing under a launching space shuttle. It’s a quick quickener.

The Koreans outfitted my car with four fan speeds. That tells me that there’s a little wiggle room. I could set the heat at fan speed two or three to warm me and my fellow travelers and there should theoretically still be enough juice in the motor to push warmed air through the vents at the base of the windshield where carpool number cards live. Naturally, I’d prefer to have both the defrost and heater roaring at speed four, but I would settle for as low as two if that’s what it takes to see both in action simultaneously. Not speed one though. I’m not a pushover.

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