Ravioli Holiday (draft)

When I tell people what my family eats during the holidays, most don’t believe me and sometimes they even laugh at me. I’ve never had a traditional Thanksgiving or Christmas meal with my dad’s side of the family. Ever since I could remember, the main dish on the table was a big heaping bowl of home-made cheese raviolis with meat sauce and sausage.

Over the years, though, our holiday menu has expanded to include the regulars: turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, stuffing, but the raviolis are still at the center of the table. Now, there are actually more of them; there are at least two bowls. Ever since half of my cousins decided that they would become vegetarians, there has been a meat-free bowl of ravs along with the meaty pasta.

To tell the truth, I dislike the raviolis we have; now at least. I have grown to really despise that ricotta cheese that is inside them. It makes me want to gag. I loved my grandmother’s raviolis for quite a long time, along with all of her other cooking, but now I’ve begun to enjoy it less and less. I feel that maybe it’s because she’s getting older and she can’t spend hours standing in the kitchen anymore and had started buying precooked or frozen foods and serving them instead of cooking them herself. I would ask her to teach me her recipes so that I could cook them, but I don’t want to be the next holiday food slave.

There are a few things that are still home-made in the holiday meals: pizzelle and strawberry cream jello. I’ve always loved the jello like substance that is served, along with other cakes and pies, at our holiday meals. It’s very difficult to explain though. It’s a light pink, and more recently and orange one has joined the table, that actually doesn’t taste like much more than watered down Kool-aid, but with a dollop of whipped cream, it is my favorite dessert. (I want to get a link to a recipe or get a picture.)

Along with the delicious gelatin dessert are the famous Italian cookie: the pizzelle. A liquorish flavored, snowflake shaped cookie dessert. A dessert that I absolutely hate. I think that liquorish is the most disgusting food flavor ever invented. I hate the taste, I hate the smell. I wish liquorish (black liquorish at least) was never invented and didn’t exist.

Despite all the foods, some I like and some I hate, I always look forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas and all the other holidays that are an excuse to get together and eat because, even though, sometimes, I don’t eat anything, it’s my family that I go for and the warm fuzzy feeling I get when I gather around the several wobbly card tables with them.