NoisyNora's Open Salon Blog

Sunday Dinner: Mom's Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 08:04:07 -0400

I’m making Mom’s spaghetti sauce and meatballs for Sunday Dinner. Mom grew up in an Italian-American household, but she and her siblings were encouraged to be more American than Italian, despite a father who’d come from Bari as a young man. Homemade sauce was one of just a few dishes she’d eaten growing up that she made for her own family. We called it sauce, not gravy or marinara. We weren’t that Italian. She had revised her parents’ recipe, using store-bought tomatoes instead of home grown, and she’d let me help her from the time I could stand on a kitchen chair and stir. I open the cans, and begin.

I stir water into the tomato paste I’ve scooped from the first can, smoothing until the lumps are gone. Pour in tomato sauce and another can of water. Mom used to add whole tomatoes pressed through a sieve, since she didn’t like chunks of tomatoes in the sauce. I use puree, but I remember the fun of squishing those slippery tomatoes. Sometimes my inadvertent squirts would warrant a scolding, but for the most part cooking with Mom was fun, and she was typically in a good mood in the kitchen.

Work kept Mom from cooking during the week, but we always sat down together for dinner when she got home. On Sundays she made a big meal - Roast Beef and potatoes one week, spaghetti and meatballs the next. It was a nice change from the convenience foods my older sister made weekdays – tacos or fish sticks, Soup Starter or Hamburger Helper. As my sister got older Mom scrawled recipes for her on a steno pad before leaving for work. I still have some of those notes, Mom’s hand-written directions for Beef Stew and Stroganoff. When Mom first told Linda to teach me to cook, Linda had me do the dishes. “That’s part of cooking, too,” she informed me. Later my brother and I took turns to cook, and we all learned our way around the kitchen.

I loved cooking with Mom on Sundays. She relaxed, and told stories, and let me get my hands into the food. Once the tomatoes were all stirred together in the pan, she’d let me sprinkle in the oregano and garlic, basil, salt and pepper. “Cover the top,” she’d instruct, and my nose would fill with the sharp smells of spices as I dumped them across the top of the sauce.

Then it was time to make meatballs. I was the one who’d walked to the butcher on Saturday, a note tucked into my hand with the money, so I knew it was ‘two pounds of ground round’ we were using. Egg, parsley, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper. She’d moisten a heel of bread in cold water, then let me crumble it into the meat.

Stopping to light a cigarette, she’d say, “Don’t squeeze,” as I mixed the meat mixture with my hands. Watching with one hand on a hip, the other holding a Kool Super Long to her lips, she’d inhale, pause, exhale a stream of smoke over my head. She’d bring a frying pan to the table, to line with the balls once we formed them. A sprinkle of salt in the bottom of the pan, cigarette stubbed out in the ashtray, and then it was time to roll. We’d each pinch off some meat and flatten it a bit in our hands, then rotate our hands in circles with the meat in between. I remember watching the way her hands moved, and wishing I could make meatballs as quickly and uniformly as she did.

I still hear her instructions as I gather my ingredients now. I moisten and crumble the bread, form balls of meat, trying not to squeeze too much. My hands look like hers did, rolling quick circles, dropping each meatball on the pan. She used to fry the meatballs before transferring them to the sauce, but I brown them in the oven instead. I make dozens, expecting all my kids for dinner.

The sauce simmers for hours. While I go about my Sunday chores, the aroma follows me outside. Drifts through open windows as I work in the yard. The spicy smells emanating from my kitchen are the smells Mom and I created, all those years ago in her kitchen. I picture the kitchen chair and the big saucepan simmering, while garlic and oregano waft out. I see Mom in her housecoat, smoking and smiling.

Back inside I put on water to boil, make a salad, warm some bread in the oven. Then I call my family to the table. All my kids are here for dinner.

Although Mom’s not, I pass on to them what she passed on to me. The taste of the dish that I put on the table reminds us of who we all are.

Spring Blooms

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:04:44 -0400

A couple of summers ago, I took a job working at my favorite local Garden Center. As a Nursery School teacher I have the option of teaching summer camp, but decided I wanted a break from kids. This will be my third season tending flowers instead of four-year-olds.

My 'summer gig' starts in April. Here in Chicago tulips, daffodils, hyacinth and ranunculus are the required antidote to long grey winters, and they can't come too early for color-starved gardeners. This means that during April and May I work weekends while still teaching all week. Although it's physically exhausting, it's also invigorating.

Working in the garden center, I am surrounded by beautiful blooms and wonderful fragrances. While I can't afford to plant a field of ranunculus for their short bloom season, I can gaze adoringly at their lovely heads while working, and greedily sniff in the scent of hyacinth wafting through the air.

One of the things people love about this Garden Center is the abundant displays. Plants are arranged on tables in masses, and part of my job is the constant replenishing of the pots of plants on the tables from the flats underneath. I also help haul in the flats when the trucks come in, and wheel racks of flats in from the sidewalk at the end of the night. Watering and deadheading take up even more time once the summer annuals come in. Helping customers design their plantings and containers is another part of the job.

While I wouldn't give up teaching permanently, it's nice to have time off from the emotional demands of kids (and their parents.) Working with flowers can be just as messy as working with kids, but I've found that plants will never wipe snots on your sleeve or puke on your shoes. With plants you can just snip off the funky bits, and if a plant doesn't show the growth you'd expected you don't have to call a conference with its parents.

*****

Missing: My Writing Self

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:06:30 -0400

I drifted away from her, convinced we’d grown apart.

I ignored her, turned a deaf ear to her voice, shut her out of my everyday life.

I turned my back on her. Denied she existed, and didn’t beckon her from hiding. Allowed her to turn away and pout, not giving her light or time to play.

I ridiculed her preoccupation with words. Told her she was less then she was - not of value, not worth nurturing.

I ridiculed her, scorned her efforts, told her she had nothing to say, shut her up.

I left her on the side of the road, roared away into real life while she kicked pebbles along the shoulder.

Still, she surfaced, dragging a toe in the gravel, forming words with a scrape of her shoe: Here I am.

The Fourteenth Kid

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 00:01:33 -0500

I wanted a few more days off, despite the two week break. Grumbled at the alarm clock and shivered despite my long johns as I warmed up the car. Instead of feeling grateful that I'd had the time for breakfast with my family and dancing to bluegrass with my best friend, movies and shopping and playing cards with my sister, and luxurious bubble baths and brand new books, I resented that it was over. Back to real life, and my regular routine.

I ate my trail mix bar in the car, sipped coffee from my to-go cup and navigated the icy parking lot. My mood followed me inside, despite the warm greetings from colleagues and the smiles on the kids' faces as they arrived. I huddled on the radiator as I helped unspool their scarves and take off their boots, stuffed hats into sleeves and mittens into pockets. After reminding the fourteenth kid to leave his boots on the rug in the hall and hang up his coat, I sighed. The kid looked me in the eye, and surprised me with his comment, "I know," he said, (this five year old in a dinosaur shirt.) "Sometimes I feel like that, too. Nothing to do."

I guess we all feel bored with our lives sometimes, but if we're lucky we find something to smile about, amid the most mundane routines. I smiled a little brighter at the fifteenth kid, and the sixteenth, and the seventeenth.

I guess I'm ready to be back at school, after all.

Winter Oasis: Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 08:01:31 -0500

"A park should be a place of natural scenery......to find needed rest and comfort." Jens Jensen (designer of the Conservatory)

Jensen knew what he was talking about, and a recent visit to the Garfield Park Conservatory offered a warm retreat from the icy Chicago winter. These are "little whimsies", as Lorado Taft described the figures in his sculptures flanking the entrance to the Fern Room.

Lorado Taft's sculpture 'Idyl'.

"It was my intention merely to make something graceful and appropriate for the greenhouse, something that would add to the impression of fairyland which strikes all visitors in that wonderful place." Taft, 1913

The Holiday Flower Show is still holding court in the Show Room, with poinsettias of every hue and stripe.

Every room in the Conservatory bursts with flowers.

Even in the Desert Room,

pink erupts on ruffled edges.

Blue butterflies dance in the Children's Garden.

Leaves soak up sun,

and stepping stones in the foot path remind us what's really going on.

That energy can be easily absorbed by visitors to the Conservatory, where a stroll through the tropical foliage provides the perfect antidote to the endless grey of January.