Thanksgiving & Christmas Meal Traditions with Italian Flair

I was born into a nice, big Italian, Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York. If you know anything about Italians or Italian-Americans, two words we never use in the same sentence are “fast” and “food”! To us, food equals love so if you stop by the house, we have to feed you. It is very common for the family to get together every Sunday for the big family dinner and growing up, that is pretty much what we would do. My mom would cook, my aunts would cook, my grandmother would cook and there would be more food than could possibly be consumed BUT we were all expected to eat it. If you want to insult an Italian, don’t eat his food as we take great pride in what we cook and eat. Now this Sunday meal consisted of a number of courses and would last pretty much all day. We would come back from church and then the feast would start with what is called the antipasto or primo. This is the course before the pasta. It consists of mainly cold appetizers, things like roasted red peppers, olives, Italian meats like mortadella, capicola, salami and prosciutto and cheeses like mozorella, provolone and pecorino romano. Sometimes my Aunt Margie would make Caponata, there was always caprese and I loved the arancini or rice balls as well as the fennel or finocchio. It tastes like black licorice and was fun as a kid to put the stems in our water. The center is hollow so they make great straws and flavor the water. The next course, or secondo was the pasta course which usually consisted of a stuffed pasta such as ravioli, manicotti or stuffed shells with the red tomato sauce my mom had cooked for hours the day before. The sauce was flavored with the meatballs and sausage that she would make. After that came the main course, always two meats like roast beef and ham or lamb and pork and wonderful veggies including my Aunt Lee’s stuffed artichokes, my Aunt Margie’s eggplant parmigiana, roasted potatoes and some green vegetables.

Then it was time for dessert. That included all of the wonderful Italian pastries such as cannoli, biscotti, sfogliatella, espresso coffee with anisette and red table wine throughout the meal.

For Thanksgiving the menu stayed the same except we would substitute the stuffed turkey for the meat and add some sweet potatoes. It took me a while to adjust to moving to North Dakota because I found out that not everybody eats like Italians do. It was hard to find many of the ingredients to make the things I was used to eating and most of my friends here and none of my wife’s family were used to eating this way. Fortunately I love to cook and entertain and for many years have been having people over for the holidays where I cook my big, Italian meal. We eat all day, fellowship and enjoy. We also have Christmas traditions as well and we always did the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. This includes lobster, clams, calamari, sardines and sea snail but unfortunately living 1,600 miles from the ocean makes it challenging to find any of these so I have had to adapt the menu a bit! I love to share my traditions and to also keep them alive. My children live overseas so we all get together and celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas when I go across and I have passed the traditions down to them as well. That means I get two Thanksgiving’s and two Christmas’s every year which makes me doubly blessed! I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and until next time, I’ll see you from the stage!