SPAGHETTI WITH MEAT SAUCE

This recipe for spaghetti with meat sauce is prepared Greek style, my mother-in-law’s way. My Sicilian girlfriends, their mothers and grandmothers also use cloves and cinnamon.

Ingredients:

1 lb. or 16 oz. package spaghetti
1 lb. lean ground meat (such as sirloin)
4 oz. canned tomato sauce
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. ground cloves
Dash cinnamon
Coarse grain salt and pepper to taste
Grated mizithra or parmesan cheese

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

In another pan over medium heat, sauté garlic in olive oil.
When garlic is soft, about 1-2 minutes, add tomato sauce.
Mix tomato sauce well into garlic and oil.

Add ground beef.

Mix beef with sauce, then add ground cloves and cinnamon, salt and pepper, stir.

Cook over medium heat until beef is done, stirring occasionally.

The meat sauce, when done, should be somewhat thick – add some pasta water if you like the sauce loose.

Drain cooked pasta and add to the pan with the meat sauce, or plate the pasta and add spoonfuls of meat sauce over the plated pasta (my mother-in-law serves it the latter way).

Top with the grated cheese.

Recipe Courtesy of Harriet Gianulis

“Meet us at 5:30, it’s the Italian restaurant in the strip mall by your house,” said my Mom. Mom and Dad occasionally (well, often times) treat my husband, kids and I to dinner on the weekends. Sometimes you just want someone else to cook Sunday dinner for you.

Aside from my craving for Marinara, the restaurant choice seemed meant to be – the name of the place is Pietro’s, what our many Italian friends call my husband, Pete.

When we got to the restaurant where my parents waited, I saw seats filled, smelled garlic immediately, and was tempted to swipe a few ornamental jars of bucatini, which sat next to the pictures of the 2006 Italian soccer team (the team that won the World Cup). Chianti bottles waited in wine racks and posted Italian proverbs had me trying to remember the romance languages I knew. But sometimes you have to hear a proverb to get its full effect, like this one…

Unna fazza, una razza. One face, one race. Greeks and Italians – who share culinary traditions, history, architecture, political models and a love for soccer say this catchy phrase to each other, as I learned at dinner that evening, to establish a short cut to brotherhood based on said similarities.

Dinner started with bruschetta – fresh torn basil, mozzarella, tomato and bread over garlic and olive oil. We were happily devouring these antipasti when a man approached our table, pointed to my husband and said, “I think I know this guy.” It was Pietro, the chef. The owner of the neighborhood restaurant that has been serving authentic Italian cuisine for thirty-one years. That’s a long time to be competing with corporate restaurant chains. How does he do it? Well, with an Old World charm, congenial nature and heavy-on-the-last-syllable accent, he walks the house and says to his new customers as well as his regulars, “I know you, don’t I?”

I know you, you want your kids to have fresh food and scratch sauces. I know you; your Mama probably uses cinnamon or cloves in her tomato sauce, too. I know you; I overheard your son talking about soccer. I know you, you like extra red pepper flakes and I make sure you get them.

“He’s Greek, not Italian,” I said, I don’t know why. I love my husband’s Greek-ness, and think I was Italian in many former lives. “Ah, una fazza, una razza!” said Pietro. That didn’t take long to decipher. Even without any linguistic reference, it was clear they just established unity over culture, a culture I could never get enough of.

All of a sudden, I loved this guy, Pietro. He talked about a Greek Opera singer he loves, he asked if we like our food, but was careful not to disrupt our family meal which was silly. I wanted to ask him to pull up a chair and tell me about the little boy in the pictures on the wall making pizza dough with him. I wanted to hear him go on and on about his family and secret ingredients. Pietro is the type of guy one can learn from.

He represents everything I love about Europeans (I have never traveled to Europe, but I know many Europeans; it’s the next best thing). Passionate for cooking food, for pleasing people with food, for communicating with food – and Pietro radiated warmth that comes only from people with good will and no pretensions. It was in his smile and the marinara stains on his chef’s coat.

I imagine that he could chat about the history of his country as he made that marinara, both being second nature. Because with that fazza exclamation, it’s clear he knows the history of his country. He knows how the Greeks colonized much of Italy, and left culinary traces that bring them all together. Not just culinary, either, as Pietro is quick to point out. “The Greeks and Italians, we both like soccer, and we both like the girls.” My Welsh-English father pats my son on the back as only guys do with each other. My husband smirks as he finishes cleaning the olive oil, minced garlic and oregano off his salad plate with a piece of bread from the large basket brought to us. My youngest daughter eats the pitted Kalamata olives plucked onto her fingertips without a clue as to the language they are speaking, thankfully.

So the una razza at the table began their dialogue when our Chicken Marsala, cheese ravioli, eggplant parmesan, pepperoni pizza, spaghetti with sausage and lasagna arrived. I have seen how these expressive Europeans get started with a little bit of wine and a lot of food, then a lot of wine and talk of Mussolini and democracy, then on to women and soccer. It’s very entertaining and I actually sit and listen every time. But that night, I was hungry and chilly and I just wanted my marinara.

The lasagna and eggplant were steaming with a thin, rectangular layer of mozzarella draped over them like a bridal veil. The sausage was made at the restaurant, this I know, I could taste the different types of meats that went into the casing with the fennel. The Bolognese sauce was hearty and deeply red, as if it had been cooked for hours. The marinara was light, with the color and taste of a just-been-picked tomato, and was a little brothy beneath the spaghetti (that made it real to me). The cheese ravioli was the most unpredictable – the ricotta inside was sweet and pillowy; I could have eaten it all night. But the Chicken Marsala had our usually generous family fighting – really, fighting – over who got to take the leftovers home, if there was Chicken Marsala left (there wasn’t). Because the sliced mushrooms added to the chicken and wine were whole just seconds before being sautéed, and the Marsala flavor rang a bell somewhere between the Mediterranean and the New World. What not just the una razza but the human race would cook if everyone was as happy at the table as we were.

When we left, Pietro stood by the door to wish us buona notte, and my son told him “The Marsala was my favorite, I am going to order that next time I come here to eat.” Pietro seemed pleased with this. Pietro then said to my husband, Pete, “Next time you come in to eat, we’ll talk about soccer and food and other things we know.” Because they already know each other, the una razza. And what do I know? I know, because of my acquaintance with the una razza (as well as the human razza) that it will start with a food and end with a bottle, or the other way around depending on the day, and continue at a later time with a [soccer] ball.

This could go on for centuries. I certainly hope it does.

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons peanut butter (I prefer smooth!)
½ cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt (I prefer iodized sea salt)
3 cups oatmeal
1 cup raisins (dried cranberries or chocolate chips if you like)

Preheat oven to 350º.

Melt butter and peanut butter together in microwave. Stir in sugars (white and brown), eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, salt and baking soda. Add flour and mix well – then stir in oatmeal and raisins.

Scoop cookies onto lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake approximately 9 minutes at 350º. All ovens are different, so they may take a little longer than 9 minutes.

When Zoë came home from the hospital, she had a hard time latching. It took eight weeks to get the whole breastfeeding thing down right with her. In the middle of the night, when I had to take her out of the comfortable bedroom to the kitchen to supplement with a bottle or try to endure the screaming with attempts at nursing, I turned to food to be my motivation.Zoë was born right before Christmas. As a gift from someone at work, my mother received a mason jar filled with dry ingredients and a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies: first a layer of oats, then a layer of flour, then a layer of sugar, you get the idea. Our first venture out of the house with our second baby, we went to dinner at my parents’ house.

My mom had made the oatmeal raisin cookies, they sat on the countertop in a little wicker basket inside a holiday patterned tea towel. They cookies just spoke to me, the scent of cinnamon, the heathery color, the soft texture. They almost broke apart when you looked at them, and they were fresh from the oven. You know how you can tell a soft cookie from a hard one? Look at the edges, and underneath the cookie. There should not be too much browning on either area of the cookie.

I took home all of the remaining cookies and ate them when I woke up with Zoë that night. It made it so much nicer to feed her, lie on the couch snuggled in a blanket with her, eating cookies, listening to CNN and watching the blinking Christmas lights on the tree. Zoë and I had our first niche. We were both happy.Oatmeal raisin cookies also happen to be my husband’s favorite cookie. Opting for oatmeal raisin over chocolate chip, growing up on olive oil instead of butter is probably why my husband still has only nine percent body fat. It’s just not fair.I made these cookies about twice a week while Zoë was a newborn. When I knew these cookies were waiting for me, it was easier to get out of bed at 2 a.m., 4 a.m., and 6 a.m. However, my weight started going in the other direction – up, that is, and I desperately wanted that baby weight off so I could get into my jeans I hadn’t worn in months.

About the time I cut down my oatmeal raisin cookie habit, Zoë got the hang of nursing quite well which meant I could just pick her up and nurse her in my room where she slept. No more trips out to the living room, no need to make bottles three times a night, and my waistline went down.

And one year later, it came time to wean her. At eight months old she started reaching for her big brother’s sippy cup, and she could handle one pretty well, so I gave her one of her own, filled with either soy milk or regular milk. She didn’t want it, she wanted the comfort of nursing, not a cold, hard plastic cup. She screamed so loud when I denied her nursing that in the middle of the night, to keep everyone from waking up, I walked paces across the living room floor until she stopped, once again looking at the twinkling lights on the tree. To calm her down, I wound up the Snow White snow globe on the mantel which played “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, and sang it over and over.

Weaning didn’t just take two or three nights. Like learning to latch, Zoë did it on her own good time, and I missed the deep, uninterrupted sleep I got for a few hours at a time. I was losing my resolve to wean her, more than once in the middle of the night I considered putting off weaning another month or so just so I could continue getting sleep to restore my energy. “I’ll wean her after the holidays are over”, “I’ll wean her when Alex starts pre-school”, “I’ll let her wean herself”. Excuses, excuses, and withering motivation. What to do?

Make oatmeal raisin cookies, said the voice inside my sleep-deprived conscience. The next day, or shall I say, when the sun came up, I reached into my memory and the pantry to make the coveted oatmeal raisin cookies. But this time, there was another hungry little mouth to feed. Another little hand reaching into the cookie jar. Yes, as soon as my little girl was old enough, I packed her screaming, eight-toothed mouth with a cookie and followed it up with milk, and just like her mother, she would calm down almost immediately. The scent of cinnamon lingered in her mouth when she said “Momma”. The cookies actually made Zoë’s breath sweeter than it was before. It certainly made her midnight disposition more pleasant when we snacked in the wee hours.

I dreaded those nights of lost sleep, of listening to screaming, of praying my son would not wake up and hoping my husband would not fall asleep in the car on his way to work after listening to snow globe music all night. But I looked forward to the cookies, and to a time when my daughter would just sleep through the night, which I now believe is something neither they nor I will ever do. Maybe not for thirty years or so. Life just has a way of carrying on into the late night hours, no matter what kind of day we have had…very soon I will be weaning my third child, the older kids inevitably wake and wander into our room in the middle of the night, and one day they will become teenagers who come home late and we, as parents, won’t sleep until they return. Sleep is somewhere in the distance, waiting for me until I get there.

But those nights singing to Zoë, swaying to fairy tale songs on piano keys resonating from the snow globe, under the moonlight that came through the windows – those are gone forever. If only I had not been in such a rush.

When I am feeling particularly sentimental and sense that this is happening way too fast, I find myself dragging the oats, raisins, peanut butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, butter and cinnamon out from the pantry. I am honestly being moved by some force of nature that longs for pudgy cheeks, curly soft baby hair, sprouting teeth under gums but most of all…cookie breath. Cinnamony, sweet cookie breath.