52 Ancestors Week 14: Favorite Recipe

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 14

The theme for Week 14 is "Favorite Recipe." Food has a way of bringing up memories, whether it's the cooking of a favorite recipe, meals shared with loved ones, or memories of kitchen mishaps! This week, explore a favorite recipe and the person or people who make that recipe special.

Gambit says you better like his jambalaya.

    A while back Ancestry conducted a poll on their website and one of the questions they asked was "How often do you have the food of your ancestors?" I chuckled to myself and said "I plead the fifth". When I was growing up we had an Italian dish for dinner every week. It was usually a pasta of some kind served with chicken, lobster or shrimp. That tradition still continues to this day and I should probably check to see if my heart is okay. At least all that carbo-loading is good for people like me who are into running. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that while I order some pasta Bolognese for dinner. It's not my fault pasta just slides down real easily!

    It's honestly hard for me to pick a favorite Italian recipe. I had only one Italian grandmother and Olympia and her sisters, the "Little Old Italian Ladies™" , cooked up so many great dishes from eggplant parmesan to various cookies. Now, I bet you are all drooling and lapping the screen right now. That's gross, guys. Stop that!

    I guess if I had to choose a great Italian recipe it'd have to be pasta fagioli. It's a simple dish and to be honest it's a comfort food for me because it reminds me a lot of my grandma Ollie. 

    Preparing the dish is easy. You take tomato sauce, a pasta of your choice and some cannellini beans and you put them all together into a soup. The standard recipe usually calls for ditalini as the pasta of choice. However, you can use almost any small form of pasta and it'll come out great!

    What's really good about pasta fagioli is that you can put various leftovers into the soup or garnish it with any type of meat ranging from ground beef to sausage. If you want, you can even toss in bits of carrot and no one would mind. I swear the soup is the ultimate comfort food to have on a rainy day. It narrowly beats "Italian Wedding Soup"! However, it's not quite as good as escarole soup!

    Pasta fagioli is so versitile and because of that every Italian house has their own version. Grandma Ollie often elected to just use the recipe I described. She rarely put in sausage or any meat for that matter. If she did, it was usually ground beef.  However, nine times out of ten it was just straight up pasta and beans. And that's not a bad thing!

    I have many good memories eating the soup at her house. I think I was probably eating it when grandma Ollie and my father were talking about her father Giuseppe and his brothers Rocco and Pasquale. I guess you could say my genealogical adventure started with a heaping bowl of pasta fagioli! Hmm....It could be worse, right? It could be liver and onions!

    Seeing and eating the soup just reminds me of simpler times, you know. It reminds me of being at that big round table in my grandmother's kitchen and enjoying a meal together. The funny thing is that every time we were over her house, she'd make us bowls of the soup. It didn't matter what time of year it was or what the weather was like. She'd make it and you better believe that we ate it and enjoyed it. We even took some home with us! Why not?

    Food really does have a great way of bringing up memories and like I said every time I see or even have some pasta fagioli takes me back to that kitchen table. As time goes on, the memories of being with grandma Ollie and talking to her about her parents and living in Haverhill over a bowl still has a place in my heart.  Sure Ollie's other dishes had the same effect. But, there was just something special about the way she made the soup for us every time we came over. She somehow always had a pot ready for us even if we stopped by unexpectedly. It was a good soup and I'd honestly give anything to have another bowl.

If you want to check out the recipe yourself, follow this link: https://www.willcookforsmiles.com/pasta-e-fagioli-soup/#recipe

Mangia!

See ya next time!