How Wolfgang Puck sent me back home.

Year after year after I married, had children and worked full time, I took liberties with my mother's recipes. I began to use frozen meals, canned products, simplified version of the dishes she cooked.  My minestrone began to taste like the water-down version in a can of Campbell soup.

I stopped eating the minestrone I prepared.

My husband, raised on Chef-boy-R-D tought everything tasted fine.
I was too tired to care, actually.  After an entire day on high heels and tight girdles-yes, the picture is important because my legs and calves suffered-walking around a classroom of unruly teens, I wanted to collapse at the end of the day, not fix a meal that took hours to develop all its flavors.

I opted for quick meals, and knew not what I was doing to our health.

Then, after we visited a Wolfgang Puck cafe in Santa Monica, and I saw how the chef sauteed the vegetables on the side before adding them to the cooked beans, after I tasted the authentic minestrone of my childhood, I swore never to take shortcuts again. 

It's just not the same thing.
So, I have to give credit where credit is due.  I'm plagiarizing Chef Puck's recipe. It is also the original recipe my mother passed down to me. She would be proud of me.

Should you wish to see this recipe, it's on my  Real Food blog.

How the Past Reasserts Itself

I didn't need Memorial Day to remember the people in my life who sacrificed for me. In our immediate family, we have relatives who served in just about every major war.  Between us, my husband and me, we can list grandfathers, uncles, brothers, all having served in the military.  In my case, my grandfather Paolo, sitting here with my infant mother on his lap, received a leg wound that troubled him for the rest of his life, changing the children's fortunes, and their children's fortunes and destinies.

My uncle Ted was a prisoner of war during World War II, surviving seven years or so of captivity under the British, in India. Yes, he was an Italian soldier fighting in North Africa, captured and taken to India as a prisoner until the end of the war.  Had he been captured by the Russians or the Germans, he might not have survived captivity.   He learned English and learned to paint, enough English to help him emigrate to America as a student at the end of the war. He paved the way for me to come to America as well.

Somebody does something; and the results from that event are immesurable.

My mother used to say, "Every spit counts !" She meant, everything counts.

It was this portrait of my grandparents that pushed me to write my memoirs. I was fascinated by the tall woman and the crippled man I never met. Who were they? How did they influence my mother's philosophy? How did they influence me?  (Should you be interested read: Memoir )

We are our past.
We are our accumulated thoughts and achievements.
We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.

Everything you do today is because somebody in your life influenced you.

I will cook minestrone today, the way my mother made it when she was barely big enough to stand with a big knife and chop up the vegetables.  I'll remember what she added, and when she added each ingredient. She would taste the food constantly, adding a pinch of this, a strand of that.

I grow rosemary, thyme, oregano and basil every year. Today's minestrone will have fresh basil leaves and a walnut size chunk of parmigiano simmering with the vegetables. These are not recipes as we have come to know them.These are cultural markers.

The past still lives in our hearts and souls.