Eating is one of my very favorite activities. I grew up in a second-generation Italian-American family, so Italian food was a staple of our diet. Lots of macaroni, which was NEVER pasta, topped with delicious gravy, which was NEVER sauce, filled with meatballs, or sausage, or bracciole or even chicken. Soup every Monday night, no matter how stifling hot the weather was. We lived on the second floor of a two-family house, so oftentimes we all gathered at the kitchen table sweating like we were in a sauna eating steaming hot soup on a July or August Monday night. There was something bizarre about that, but we would never give up our soup!

Fridays were always meatless so we had pasta faggioli or lentil soup or spaghetti and oil or homemade pizza, baked very thin in my mother’s family’s Neapolitan style. That was before pizza became an American staple, so that most of our non-Italian acquaintances had never even tasted pizza.

Holidays had their favorite Italian foods, such as zeppoles at Christmas and pizza ghena at Easter. Pizza ghena is probably the single most saturated fat-filled delicacy every invented, stuffed with hard-boiled eggs, sausage, mozzarella, ricotta, and parmigiana. But talk about delicious! Easter is still one of my favorite holidays because of the pizza ghena.

I love cooking, which probably relaxes me more than any activity other than reading (and if you don’t realize how much I love reading, you haven’t been paying attention to these blogs!), which is part of the reason why summer vacations are so much fun. In the summer I work on the computer most of the day, then cook dinner while Jean and the boys are at the pool in the afternoon, so they return to a homemade dinner every night. Our friends think it’s so good of me to cook for them, but I’m really cooking for myself too.

As I tell people occasionally, a happy life is a life filled with passion. If you don’t care about SOMETHING deeply, then you’re probably going through the motions from day to day, job to job, dawn to dusk, without anything but duties and obligations. No matter how frustrating my job might get, my books and my food are always waiting for me, giving me something to get excited about over and over and over. When I lose those two passions, then it will be time for me to pack everything in and say "Goodnight, Gracie."

(Cathy, this blog's for you ☺)