In My Mother's Kitchen: Spaghetti & Meatballs
Last week, I mentioned that pizza was probably my favorite meal for most of my childhood. I'm not going to pretend that I have a ranked list of everything my mother made when I was growing up (ok, a lot of you probably wouldn't be surprised if I did), but I do have a reasonably good idea of what my top three are. Number two was spaghetti & meatballs for most of my childhood.
As I look back on it, I don't really remember why spaghetti & meatballs was such a favorite of mine. My mother was using the same box pasta that everybody else uses. I have no idea what was in the meatball recipe, although I assume that like most meatballs it contained some combination of ground beef, breadcrumbs, assorted spices and an egg. When my mother and my sister put together a recipe book for me when I moved into my first apartment, meatballs weren't in it, and I've never really felt the lack. I have made a variety of meatball recipes over the year instead.
The sauce, on the other hand, was sometimes homemade, especially when I was younger. We had a good sized chunk of land in North Dakota. It was probably as large as the lots that my parents, my sister and I collectively own nowadays. There was a substantial garden area in the backyard, and since we were on the richest farmland in the world with a literal farm field running up against the back of our yard. Given my my mother's farm background, this was right in her wheelhouse.
The exact vegetable mix changed every year, but typically there were green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and assorted summer squashes. Green beans were blanched and frozen for use over the next few months. Cucumbers were made into dill pickles. Summer squashes arrived in such quantity that to this day I really don't care for the little yellow squashes. Tomatoes were eaten or in some cases, turned into tomato sauce. Assorted other vegetables like carrots made appearances based on my mother's preferences. Besides those seasonal items, there was also a strawberry patch, which was covered by netting to attempt to keep the birds out. The garden also had a rhubarb plant, which later moved to the side of the house and in both locations was used primarily to make rhubarb crisp.
The garden was big for the first five or six years that we lived in North Dakota. At some point after that it started scaling down, and eventually it was more or less discontinued. The timing of this change aligned more or less with when my mother started working again. All that remained was a compost pile that continued until they moved out of the house, with its output used for flowerbeds and the like.
I suspect my mother didn't make tomato sauced nearly as often as I recall it, and even though her sauce was very good, it probably doesn't really explain why my 8-year-old self loved spaghetti & meatballs so much. Maybe it's a fake memory, or perhaps the details are lost forever. In any event, I've probably only had that dish once or twice since I left home, and certainly never the way my mother made it.
As I look back on it, I don't really remember why spaghetti & meatballs was such a favorite of mine. My mother was using the same box pasta that everybody else uses. I have no idea what was in the meatball recipe, although I assume that like most meatballs it contained some combination of ground beef, breadcrumbs, assorted spices and an egg. When my mother and my sister put together a recipe book for me when I moved into my first apartment, meatballs weren't in it, and I've never really felt the lack. I have made a variety of meatball recipes over the year instead.
The sauce, on the other hand, was sometimes homemade, especially when I was younger. We had a good sized chunk of land in North Dakota. It was probably as large as the lots that my parents, my sister and I collectively own nowadays. There was a substantial garden area in the backyard, and since we were on the richest farmland in the world with a literal farm field running up against the back of our yard. Given my my mother's farm background, this was right in her wheelhouse.
The exact vegetable mix changed every year, but typically there were green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and assorted summer squashes. Green beans were blanched and frozen for use over the next few months. Cucumbers were made into dill pickles. Summer squashes arrived in such quantity that to this day I really don't care for the little yellow squashes. Tomatoes were eaten or in some cases, turned into tomato sauce. Assorted other vegetables like carrots made appearances based on my mother's preferences. Besides those seasonal items, there was also a strawberry patch, which was covered by netting to attempt to keep the birds out. The garden also had a rhubarb plant, which later moved to the side of the house and in both locations was used primarily to make rhubarb crisp.
The garden was big for the first five or six years that we lived in North Dakota. At some point after that it started scaling down, and eventually it was more or less discontinued. The timing of this change aligned more or less with when my mother started working again. All that remained was a compost pile that continued until they moved out of the house, with its output used for flowerbeds and the like.
I suspect my mother didn't make tomato sauced nearly as often as I recall it, and even though her sauce was very good, it probably doesn't really explain why my 8-year-old self loved spaghetti & meatballs so much. Maybe it's a fake memory, or perhaps the details are lost forever. In any event, I've probably only had that dish once or twice since I left home, and certainly never the way my mother made it.