CHUTZPAH ON A PLATE

SWMBO’s veal and turkey meatballs with spaghetti and Sunday gravy, AKA tomato sauce.  Yumm-O.

I gotta give props to She Who Must Be Obeyed: It takes a lot of chutzpah to invite Italians to a home-cooked Italian dinner when you ain’t Italian.  But she pulled it off with panache to spare.

Very early on in our life together, I discovered the Missus had a flair for the classic (among many Italian families, anyway) dinner of pasta with meatballs and her own homemade “Sunday gravy” - tomato sauce.  Not for her the crap in a jar - she used a recipe that had originally come from a family friend and that had been passed down to her by her mother.  Whether it was linguini, spaghetti, manicotti, or her ridiculously tasty stuffed shells, it would come to the table buried in a pile of glorious red deliciousness.

We don’t eat a whole lot of pasta these days, it being particularly deadly to the waistline and the Glycemic Index, but last night the Missus trotted out the Red Stuff (and then some) to an audience that included some friends whose lineage can be easily traced back to that familiar boot-shaped peninsula.

There was a heap of meatballs and sauce, of course, served atop whole-wheat spaghetti and/or spaghetti squash (for the carb-averse).  There were zucchini boats: split logs of zucchini decorated with tomato slices, garlic, and Parmesan, roasted off in the oven.  There was sautéed broccoli rabe with garlic and crushed red pepper.  There was a loaf of killer garlic bread, the kind that could knock Nosferatu off his feet a city block away.  And there was a tasty green salad with romaine, arugula, and other assorted leafy goodies thrown in, dressed with SWMBO’s inimitable style.


Ahoy, matey - thar be zucchini boats in these waters!


Vampire Killer garlic bread. Nosferatu, beware.

But, of course, the best part is the birthday cake, for this was not just a mere dinner, it was a Birthday Celebration for our friend Shelly T... which means everyone had to sing the Birthday Song:

This is your Birthday Song!
(It isn’t very long.)

It was a most enjoyable (and most delicious) evening.  And now that she’s out-Italianed the Italians, I guess the next thing the Missus will tackle is preparing a sushi dinner for the Japan-America Society of Georgia.