I grew up next door to my grandparent's house--the house in which my mother grew up with her five brother's and sisters. [Pictured here is an old photo with my grandfather on a lounge chair and grandmother standing in the background in the doorway]. Nanna and Pop Pop had a long history of making their house a home for our extended family and I enjoyed every major holiday and many Sunday dinners with aunts, uncles and cousins around the dinner table. The adults sat in the living room and a card table was added to the dining room table for a 'kids table'. Each meal usually consisted of the same basic thing—homemade pasta, sauce and meatballs with a side of baked chicken pieces. On special occasions a birthday girl or boy could request ravioli's which were my grandmother's specialty. She made them quite large in a square so as to not waste any bit of dough and they were so soft they almost melted in your mouth. Her meatballs were the same and I used to love to watch her cook in the kitchen. She'd let me help roll out the dough in long 'worms' and then feed it into the cavatelli grinder to make the little canoe shapes that she pronounced 'cava-teels'.
There would always be a few small pieces of dough left at the end of each 'worm' and these were put aside for Pop Pop. He would come in and with his two large soft fingers he'd pull the pieces into a handmade canoe shape and if you were lucky you'd get one or two of these in your bowl which of course tasted the best. These gatherings were my first experience of community and looking back now I think I have searched to recreate them in every group I've been a part of. Why were they so special to me and how can a gathering over food create a community with others are just two of the questions I'm looking to answer with this project. But more on my reasons later.
For now, I've decided to kick off this series of dinners with an homage to my Nanna, and although my cavatils came from a bag (frozen but Italian) I did make her sauce and meatballs recipe and we shared it with our extended family/good friends 'Uncles' Matt and Dan and Gryffin's half sister Beckett.
As usual I made the sauce using the Hunt's tomato sauce as a base (the darkest and richest can brand that my grandmother found to be comparable to what she had in Italy). Also as usual, as a nod to my grandfather, Pop Pop, I made one larger egg shaped meatball as Nanna used to do to denote that it was the one for him with the raisins in it. And for the first time, I added a can of crushed tomatoes to make the sauce a bit chunkier, and also for the first time I made little tiny meatballs for Gryffin and Beckett. The meal was both a gift to my loved ones but also a self welcome home of true comfort food.
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