The Way to a Man's Heart

My grandmother, Caroline Martone, who was born in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy in 1892, made this version of Ragu.  Every family in Emilia Romagna has a Ragu recipe, and her family was no different.  Now, our family heritage holds that Caroline wooed Vincent Euzzine with this recipe, using the tried and true method of getting to a man's heart.

Caroline and Vincent immigrated to America in 1924, and settled in Connecticut, to join other members of the Martone family in Branford.  Caroline died in 1938 and Vincent side in 1940, leaving six sisters, the oldest just 18, and my monther Nancy, the youngest, just 8 years old.

All six sisters were wonderful cooks, and a few of their mother's recipes survived and were passed along.  My mother fell in love with a handsome Irish hunk, Edward, and she used this ragu recipe to snare him.  When I showed an interest in cooking at an early age, she taught me to make this sauce.  It's nothing like the jarred versions of tomato sauce made popular in the 1950's and 60's (and some still on the shelf today).  In fact, it has very little tomato in it, which makes it stand apart from the normal Southern Italian fare popularized in the Northeast.

So, when I certain genleman came into my life with all the right stuff, I made up my mind to use my family's love potion to seal the deal.  The first time I made it for him, I thought he was going to cry.  The second time, he showed a particular interest in learning how to make it.  The third time, which I thought was going to be the charm, he showed up early enough to "help" the cook.  He painstakingly wrote down every ingredient as I added it, and watched the pot cook slowly to perfection.  Again, tears when the meal was served. I eagerly awaited his proposal.

I never saw him again.  I thought he wanted me, but he just wanted this recipe.  So, here it is.  Take your time with hit, buy the best ingredients you can find, and be very, very careful who you serve it to.

The Honeymooners and Hazelnut Biscotti

There are certain projects I have learned not to tackle.   I used to, but now I just want to throw some money at it and have someone else do it.  Take for example,  deck painting.  My painter had given me a quote to paint the deck in the Branford house.  Decided that was just throwing money away.

Chris and I had just started dating and he offered to help me paint it myself. 

WOW, I was impressed.  

The back yard had quite a slope to it, so much of the railing required getting on a ladder to reach it.  I spent the entire day holding Chris by his legs onto that ladder, while he held the power sprayer. 

I thought:  “He sure has great legs.” 

My sister had come over to help. 

Me (whispering):  “Is he cute or what?” 

Her:  “He’s freaking adorable!” 

At the end of the afternoon, Chris and I sat outside on lawn chairs, dirty, covered with paint, and had happy hour.  It was very romantic.

Last week he asked if I would help him clean out the gutters.  This entailed husband on aforementioned ladder,  and me holding on to aforementioned husband’s great legs while he used the leaf blower to clean out said gutters.  I also had to hold  the leaf blower on the top step of the ladder because he had attached a hose contraption with duck tape to the leaf blower so he could reach the higher roofline.  (And he calls me MacGyver.)

You know that black muck leaves turn into while they sit all season in your gutters?  As I gazed up at my husband, it fell on our heads,  in our faces, all over our clothes.  Disgusting. 

You know the honeymoon is over when things you do together that were once romantic are now chores.   Except for the happy hour, for which I had made a special treat.  Hazelnut Biscotti. (Yeah, I know, but mine are really good with a glass of wine.)  

I promised myself all of my posts on this site were going to be beautiful, funny, or both.  So here's a glamour shot of said husband.  He cleans up real nice, and he looks great holding a Champagne Flute. 

It's getting very Halloweenneee!

Chris cringes when he hears me say this.  In all fairness, I only say it on October 1st, as that is the official start of the Halloween season around our house.  That means Halloween Movies, Halloween Projects, Halloween Costumes, Fall Recipes, Fall Foliage, and Fires.

I hate carving pumpkins.  I've tried every gadget there is, and there is simply no way around the mess and the fruitflies.  So this year we decided to paint pumpkins instead.  And not those goofy clown-looking things from the grocery store.

 

We wanted Glamour!  We wanted Elegant!  We wanted Easy!  We wanted Cheap! 

We got three out of four.  Cheap they were not, but the good news is that the expensive craft supplies from Michaels are reusable, so there is definately an ROI for next year.   (See Black Painted Cats below)

After that, we raided my closet for a glamorous witch costume for The Girl.  Not very difficult as most of the clothing in most women's closets is black anyway.  Just add hat, broomstick and stripped socks.

So easy I had time to do my decorating inside and make Coq Au Vin for our favorite guests, Tom and Beth.

Chocolate Ginger Spice Cookies: An All Day Pajama Party

The weekend of our Wedding Anniversary was our weekend to have The Girl.   We get her from school on Friday and her mom picks her up on Sunday morning to take her to Chinese Class (I know.  Most kids think they are smarter than you, Grace actually is).  But this Friday she had a class trip to Boston and Chris was to pick her up at the school when the bus got back at 6pm.  Right.  He didn't get her until 7:30pm and was 30 minutes from home. 

Needless to say, it was a very late evening.  Grace landed on the couch with dinner in bowl (Chicken and Polenta) and Hocus Pocus on.  The next day, she was still there.  We planned to go out to dinner that evening, but couldn't find a pajama friendly restaurant. 

It  is  shown here with simple roasted vegetables, rather than the polenta (I'd like to say because we slimmed it down, but the truth is we ate it all before I could get photos)

Between piano lessons, viola lessons, art lessons, chinese class, regular school and homework, by the time we get her, she is pooped and just wants to be a couch potato all weekend.

But I have a secret weapon:  baking.  So I got her off the couch with a promise of making one of her favorites:  Ginger Cookies.

Carrot Cake and Anniversaries

  As I kissed my husband, I commented that we had made it through the last two years without killing each other. 

“The night is young.” He said.

When we moved into our new house, neither one of us was working.  We sold both of our houses and scraped together every penny we had to build the one we are in.  When it was finished, there was no money left over for a wedding.  Chris was on this third, and even though I had never been married, I wasn’t one of those women who started dreaming of being a bride when she got to wear a white dress and a veil at her first communion.

My one wish though, was to have something in a home, and in the Fall.  Moving into a new house in late summer seemed like the perfect opportunity to have both.   It was also conveniently within our budget for a wedding venue ($0).  So we planned a very small ceremony and reception for early September, out on our wraparound porch overlooking the vineyard. 

I am very partial to dresses with an Asian flair and always wanted a cheongsom dress.  When I found a local shop that specialized in this style of custom-made clothing, it was a simple decision.  The end result was quite lovely, as you can see in the pictures.  

The interim result was nothing short of clown costumes.

I found the perfect ivory silk brocade for my dress, and Grace, Susan and myself fell in love with a gorgeous gold silk brocade with pink dragonflies woven into it.  Susan was to wear a short coat of the gold brocade over a pale pink silk sheath dress, and Grace was to wear an Ao Ba Ba, which is a traditional Vietnamese long silk shirt of the gold brocade,  over pale pink silk pants.  The gentlemen would wear pale pink silk ties, and the flowers would be white and pink.

Didn’t quite work out that way.  

I got a call from the dressmaker a couple of weeks later informing me that the gold brocade was no longer available for the season, but she had a suggestion.  Her people in Vietnam would obtain a gold silk brocade and have pink dragonflies embroidered on it.  She said she trusted her people in Vietnam to make the right choices.  I should have trusted my instincts, but she talked me into it.

When the dresses arrived I thought it was joke.  Mine was perfect.  But the clothing made for Susan and Grace was downright laughable.   Taffeta.  Yeah.  Taffeta, not brocade.  You know that puffy stiff fabric that nightmare bridesmaids dresses are made of?  And yellow, not gold.  The dress and pants were a lovely shade of bubble gum.

And then, there were the dragonflies.   Remember the movie “Mothra?”  You got it.  Big, bug-eyed monsters all over the yellow taffeta.  And stitched to enhance the natural poofyness of the fabric.  

I will say that the dressmaker was wonderful about accepting them back and getting new clothing made for us without charging us.  This time, black brocade for Susan over a black sheath, and the same ivory fabric as my dress for Grace, with black pants.  We did end up having to move the wedding date into October.  Which was fine with me, I had wanted October from the very beginning.  Columbus Day was my first choice.  We couldn’t get the JP, the Photographer, or Chris’s best man on any day that weekend.  We went with the following weekend. 

The weekend of the Double Nor’Easter. 

  

It was also a record low of 36 degrees that day, so we moved our ceremony to inside, in front of the fireplace.    Not so bad. 

 

 My Groom

My new daughter

At the very end of the day, the sky cleared up and we got a tiny peek at blue.  Just enough to get a shot or two outside.

I want to thank our JP (who claimed to be a part-time magician, that should have been my first clue) for showing up in his vintage Members Only jacket, and making all of my hard-earned fashion sense disappear.

The Acorn doesn't fall very far: Tomato Bisque

Chris is very organized and meticulous.  He will re-load the dishwasher after me.   Every sock is folded a exactly the same way.  His omelets look like props.  Me?  Remember the name of this site?   If you go into his bathroom, all of his sunscreens are lined up by SPF. 

He told me before I met Little Grace Pretty Face (LGPF) that when he took her to lunch one day and she held her hair back with one hand when she was eating her soup, he knew she was growing up.

The first time I cooked with LGPF, I let her measure out the dry ingredients for whatever we were making.  She’s very good at math and fractions.  Most of it ended up on the floor, but that didn’t bother me.  These days, she wants to get the spoon into the pot, which means she is standing by an open flame. 

She was helping me make her favorite soup, which is Tomato Bisque with chicken and rice (otherwise known as Grace's Favorite Soup), and I nearly had a heart attack when I realized she was inadvertently pushing the pan off the flame trying to hold hair back, and with the other was reaching with her sleeve over it to stir.

So when I was standing at the check-out aisle, I saw a display card full of little hair bands and scrunchies, in assorted colors and sizes.  Perfect. 

I just left the card on her bathroom counter.

Broken Promises and Pecan Sandies

When my niece Chelsea was a very little girl and I was visiting home in Connecticut, I felt this sharp pang when I had to get on a plane and go back to DC.  She was playing in the yard, pushing a toy baby carriage around, and I just didn’t think I could leave her.  So, I asked her to make me a promise that she wouldn’t grow up until I came back again. 

She said to me very matter of fact, “Ok.  If I turn five, I’ll pretend I’m four.” 

She didn’t keep her promise.

She's all grown up now, and recently married a handsome Army Ranger.  For her bridal shower, she asked me to help with the bridal favors, and chose these cookies, which are a browned butter toasted pecan shortbread.

Red Velvet Cake and the Kitchen Slave

I told you about my little kitchen slave, right?  At 11, she’s 5 feet tall, and an eyelash farm.  (So is her father.)  I have to buy a lot of mascara to keep up, but that’s not the point of the story.

She’s been helping me in the kitchen a lot lately.  I’ve taught her to run the stand mixer, and the food processer.  She thinks the neon buttons on the new Cuisinart are cool.

We decided to make Red Velvet Cake with Raspberries and Blueberries, and I thought I was being oh so clever thinking she was going to do all the work.  Truth:  she did everything but handle the red food coloring (a wise move on my part).   Teaching and learning take time.  It goes very slowly when you are standing for three hours.  We started at 2:30 and took the cakes out of the oven at 5:30.  Then I had to clean up the mess in the kitchen. 

Is that red cake batter on the ceiling?

A word of caution about cakes with cream cheese frosting.  Don’t make them during the summer heat wave.  We finally got a break in the weather this year, down to about 85, and I couldn’t wait to turn off the A/C and open some windows.  Big mistake.  We didn’t frost so much as poured it on the cake.