My Big Sunday Italian Family Meal

My family is Italian and this Sunday most of us got together for a Sunday family meal. Of course I could have written My Big Fat Italian Family Meal but no one is fat. Well, I might be a bit fluffy but the others are not. So, this Sunday a few members of my family got together to share a meal together. We will be sitting around the kitchen table and the overflow will be sitting at the folding table.

I am making my pasta sauce and my mother’s meatball recipe. I have to say that my meatballs are good…really, really good! My kids and friends love them and that is good enough for me. I learned how to make them from my mother and I have her secret ingredients…so eat your heart out, readers! Along with the pasta and meatballs, there will be sausage, a big salad, stuffed artichokes, and there will be crusty Italian bread (thanks to one daughter-in-law), to sop up the sauce. My other daughters-in-law are providing the desserts.

Rests assured that whatever food is left over will be taken home or I will keep some of the sauce and meatballs and dole a container out to a friend and use the others for another meal.

A family dinner isn’t always possible. We no longer fit comfortably around a table. Now it is two long tables and a small card table. The number of family members totals 38. But some of my kids will not be here to share this meal.

My cousin, Netta, from Utica gave me her mother’s large pasta bowl. The bowl has to be over 50-years- old. It’s a bowl that my aunt would use for her pasta dinners. My cousin handed me a few photos of our family sitting around the table eating. Included in the photos are my aunt, her two friends, my mother, and my grandmother. The picture had to be from the 50s. She made me promise to toast the family with – Salute to the Aiello family/from the village of Nicastro/ the provincial Catanzaro/Calabria, Italy. In all my preparation in trying to get the meal on the table, I at first forgot the salute. Mid-way, way I remembered it, and we toasted my family, clinking our water glasses together.

I am trying my hardest to have a family meal, once a month. So…we will see how that works. If it doesn’t then there is always the option of smaller family meals. I sigh when I think how it all used to be, but right now I wouldn’t change a thing!