I’ve embraced my inner Italian this week by making several pounds of meatballs for a party tonight. I mixed and fried up the meatballs Wednesday, with plans to put sauce on Thursday. I felt a true kinship with my mom, and her mother before her, and her mother before her as I stood in the kitchen, up to my elbows in that gooey mixture of meat, egg, cheese and bread crumbs.

As I finished frying, Jen came into the kitchen and took a meatball out of the bowl I was putting them in.

“I need to sample one and make sure they’re all right,” she said.

“Are they?”

(from the other room) “Oh my GOD. They’re ORGASMIC.”

Needless to say, when I came home from my class last night ready to put them into sauce, a significant number of meatballs were mysteriously missing.

“I don’t think we have enough meatballs,” I said. “Plus I told R I’d try to save him some.”

“Um, I took the rest of the meat out of the freezer for you,” Jen said.

Heh.

So I put on sauce with what I had, and then defrosted and prepared to make more meatballs. I could only make a small amount, as I only had a tiny bit of bread crumbs and cheese left. (I get my grated cheese from home, where my grandpa orders it from the “Cheese Man.” It’s a blend of parmesan and romano, and it is SO good, and relatively inexpensive…compared to what you get in the grocery stores.)

As it were, I ran out of bread crumbs and promptly called the nice Italian landlord to see if they had any. Of course they did. He told me to come on over, and his wife handed me a whole can.

“Is seasoned okay? I actually bought too many.”

Perfect. I promised to bring them some meatballs, too. I may just end up making meatballs for the rest of my life.

Last night, my mom called. Jen walked into the room and said “Tell her I said thank you for giving birth to you, so you can make meatballs.”

“Are they as good as mine?” Mom wanted to know.

Well, I suppose I’ll have to let her be the judge of that… 🙂