March and the struggle of an empty larder (with a garden to come)

It's April now, officially. But March, as a month, is a rough one for cooking. I was thinking about how uninspired most of my cooking was over the past month coupled with a very bare farmer's market and I began to think a lot about food and surviving a hard winter before it was possible for a person like me to go to the grocery store and pick up bananas.

It's so much harder imagining that sort of life than I like to admit.

I try so hard to eat seasonally. Strawberries are only allowed on my table in early summer. That's why we shop at the farmer's market whenever we can and are working on planting our own garden. For the first time ever, I get to work my own plot of land! No more five pots of sweet peppers hidden on the balcony. It's exciting: starting seedlings, waiting for ground to thaw (another reason I can't imagine having to rely on this garden for my food. This has been a particularly bad winter. We're just seen the ground for the first time since January about a week ago.). Really, the planning has gotten me through this truly uninspired month.

Gardening means a lot to me. 

I can remember my parent's garden and the year they accidentally crossbred strawberries and habanero peppers, creating a very interesting experience. I also remember my nonno's garden in the backyard: mostly made up of fragrant tomatoes for his famous sauce. Incidentally, we a planting a large number of fragrant tomatoes in our own plot this year. I hope to replicate that sauce someday. To make up for all of the terrible years I refused to eat it as a child.

Gardening's in my blood as much as anything.

Mi bisnonna in -her- own garden

Waxing Rhapsodic on Spaghetti

I don't have a recipe for you this week. I was kind of embarrassed about that, honestly. I've been under the weather and in a bit of a funk when it comes to cooking lately. I still want to write something though, and I thought, since this blog isn't strictly about recipes, but learning about myself and my family through food, what better place to start than writing about the most ubiquitous and controversial Italian food: spaghetti.

I mean that. People can vicious when it comes to their opinion on proper spaghetti.

I think there's a reason for that. At least for me and mine. Unlike polenta, which I stated before was not a traditional food of my Sicilian heritage, spaghetti does indeed, historically, belong to the island my bisnonna originally called home. We all know the story of Marco Polo bringing macaroni back from China, and while the Chinese were indeed creating pasta as early as 1100 BCE, pasta worked into long forms was recorded by geographer/cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in his descriptions of Sicily during the 12th century over 100 years before Polo's journey.

The tomato sauce is a little harder to pin down. I think I might be weird in the Sicilian-American food department as my family never referred to it as gravy, but it's something I'm picky about. Good sauce can make or break a dish of spaghetti. Historically, of course, tomatoes were not introduced to Europe until the 1400s, but there are some recipes for sauces involving apricots and figs. Can you imagine what those medieval marinaras must have tasted like? One of the oldest known recorded recipes is for Roman pesto. Mmmm. Pesto.

It's funny now, looking back, that nutritionists at the turn of the century were -horrified- by the food the Italian immigrants brought to the United States. They determined that garlic and tomatoes were were of no nutritional value and far too expensive for people of lower class means. Social workers tried to teach immigrants how to "cook properly", luckily...they were mostly ignored.

I know that's really digging into the details, but there's something about the history of food that I find fascinating. Food roots us into who we are, and who we think we are.

For me there is a sense of identity in spaghetti.

Making it is a meditation. Not like continually stirring a double boiler of honey meditation, but more ritual meditation: coming home from work, salting water and putting it on the stove to let it reach a boil, adding the noodles, cooking them until they are just the right ratio of wiggly to al dente, trying to get as much of the pasta water into a jar for later reuse and failing miserably, add the perfect amount of marinara and grated romano cheese.

Spaghetti was the first thing I relearned how to cook. Spaghetti was my bridge from sodium-rich noodle packages nightly (A box of cheap low-quality spaghetti a local store was about comparable in price to 5 packages of noodles) back to myself .

It's funny because I was always a little bit of a pasta snob, turning up my nose when offered anything out of can, but cheap dry pasta actually gave me a lot. My roots are there: just the right ratio of wiggly to al dente.