My Inner Italian Screams

Back? I don’t know if I’m “back” yet but, then again, I never really left. I just didn’t have anything that I thought, at the time, was worth sitting down at the computer and typing up to place onto OD. I mean, for a while there, my diary was turning into a “what I cooked and ate today” journal instead of the diary of my life I thought it should be.

Maybe I’ll get back into it. As for the title, there is a back story to it.

*Back Story*

As I was growing up, my mother was a huge fan of Italian cuisine. So much so that we would have spaghetti at least once a week (my mother makes a GREAT spaghetti sauce) and it quickly became one of my favorite meals – along with her homemade macaroni and cheese.

This went on for a number of years and as I got older, I began to appreciate more than just spaghetti as my Italian food fix. There is, of course, pizza that would fix my inner Italian. But then there was the calzones, the chicken parmesans, and the ever popular fettuccine alfredo that would keep my inner Italian at bay. I learned to appreciate all forms of Italian cuisine because it is all good.

*End Back Story*

Fast forward to 1999 and the evening I drove to Oxford from Memphis to meet, for the first time, my future wife. She immediately won my heart over by preparing spaghetti for dinner with a dessert of homemade banana pudding…even though she did something sacrilegious to the spaghetti by mixing the sauce and noodles together in the same pan. My opinion on this is that you should be able to get the amount of noodles and sauce, individually, that you prefer. But, I left it alone that night and things have progressed to now.

It is now 2009 and over the course of the last ten years, my beautiful wife has told me on a number of occasions that she is not a fan of red sauce…the type that goes onto spaghetti and into lasagna…which hasn’t been too much of a problem due to the fact that I was on the road and could have anything Italian that I wanted when I stopped for my meals.

That’s right…I feel in love with and married a woman who doesn’t like Italian food. And it’s too late for me to do anything about it.

But, now I am home every day and my inner Italian feels as if it has been neglected for too long. As a matter of fact, when Gina and I went shopping this past weekend, I told her that I absolutely needed spaghetti because it had been too long and my inner Italian personality was screaming for Italian cuisine. Luckily, she was okay with it and we had spaghetti over this past week sating my inner Italian for a short time.

I wonder how long it’ll be before I get to the point that I’ll need to say something again. I hope it’s not the 2 months it’s been again though.

Till Next Time,
Blessings!