If It's Wednesday.....

Most of the neighborhood is more than likely making sauce. I haven't seen it yet this year but last year, on trash pick up day shortly after the full moon during the harvest season, there were so many tomato boxes on the curbs that you had to navigate carefully to avoid toppling the huge stacks of empty crates. Since I've been away quite a bit I may have missed the annual ritual.

My lovely neighborhood is of mixed ethnicity with a heavy lean toward Italian American with the occasional Greek, African or Irish American in the mix. We live on the northern east side of Metro Detroit which is famous, or infamous, for having a large number of Italian neighborhoods. This was all very strange for me when I first came here four years ago. Now four years later and 20 pounds heavier it is beginning to feel like the natural flow of things.

I've learned a lot from all these wonderful people but today is Wednesday and I'm making sauce so let's talk food. There are so many markets down here where you can get the freshest fruits and vegetables imaginable. The bakeries are loaded with fresh bread daily and the desserts are beyond, beyond. They cook seasonally and have very little in their refrigerators but display what they are fixing that day in big bowls on their counter tops like beautiful eggplants and peppers of assorted shapes and colors. People still come home for lunch and Nonna, the Grandma, cooks for the whole family.

They eat very little meat and reserve it for the evening meal that is served much later than I am used to, dinner was always at 6:00 when I was growing up. Coffee with milk or espresso for breakfast. A fresh cooked vegetable dish with bread, or maybe pasta for lunch. A small amount of meat with pasta often, veggies and bread for dinner. The portions must be much smaller than I tend to consume of all this delicious stuff because they are very tiny people.

Probably shouldn't generalize about an ethnic group and I'm not, but on my street on Wednesday were making sauce ~~~~~~~.

The photo above is one of my favorite cookbooks via Amazon.