Once again, I got together with some of my Louisville High School classmates (Yay classes of 1965, 1967 and 1969!) in December to celebrate Christmas, Life, and Italian cooking! I like to call it my “Being Italian For A Day” day. I used to boast that I was 1% Italian from my first Ancestry DNA test, but alas, they sent me an update about a year ago and now I am 0% Italian, which makes this day even more special to me.
Our classmates Joannie, Jeannie, Ricki and Wilbur, showed us how to make homemade gnocchi and spaghetti, and we enjoyed the fruits of their labor at our luncheon, plus we got their recipes.
Wilbur, or “Squeak”, as we affectionately call him, (every good Italian man has to have a nickname – it’s an Italian rule) even brought his own Italian spaghetti noodle maker, the Chitarra, and showed us how they make spaghetti in the old country.
His recipe consisted of eggs and flour. Lots of eggs and lots of flour. The key, it seems, is that you roll out the pasta and constantly add flour. Roll and add flour, roll and add flour, roll and add flour. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make spaghetti noodles, but it does take a lot of patience, and that Chitarra is not as easy to work with as Squeak makes it look. It takes a lot of upper body strength to get that pasta through those Chitarra strings, as you can tell when our classmate, Mary Ann, gave it a try. Look at the concentration on her face!
You also have to know the right time to put a bowl over the ball of pasta to make it “sweat” before you make it into noodles because otherwise, well, your noodles are just not going to be any good. Who knew?
Joannie brought all the ingredients, mashed potatoes and flour, and showed us how to make gnocchi. Up until this point in time I always thought it took a lot of ingredients to make good Italian pasta, but after all these years I found out you only need eggs, potatoes and flour. And lots of patience and muscles. Joannie brought her gnocchi maker, and she also showed us how to make them the old-fashioned way – by hand.
Everyone had a blast and got hands-on experience with making spaghetti and gnocchi, and there was flour flying everywhere! Which is better than having eggs and mashed potatoes flying everywhere! I think flour flying everywhere is another Italian rule when you make spaghetti and gnocchi. If there isn’t flour all over your kitchen you just don’t have good noodles!
Kathryn, who hosted the party, made Italian Chicken Cacciatore. Isn’t it beautiful?!
Joannie gave us lessons and the recipe last year. Of course, you have to remember her original recipe called for 118 pounds of chicken, 132 mild cherry peppers and a couple of gallons of white wine because she made it for her restaurant, the Blue Parrot. With the help of the Ferrera twins, our classmates and engineering geniuses, they formulated the recipe down to one chicken, 20 cherry peppers and one gallon of wine (grin). I did say this was Italian cooking at its best, didn’t I?
We didn’t put any wine in the spaghetti or gnocchi, but that’s not to say there wasn’t any in the cooks or the classmates! Like the sign I have in my kitchen – “I love cooking with wine! And sometimes I even put it in the food!”
Buon Natale, everyone! E un Felice Anno Nuovo!
Carolyn Anderson Jones 