Italians of the OT

Grew up on pasta

quote:

---

tell me about Sunday dinners and holiday gatherings.

---

Da go on for a really long time.

gabagool for breakfast. bruschetta for lunch. vino for dinner. pasta for desert. every day.

quote:

---

Italians of the OT

---

ayyyyyyyyyyy

im walkin here

gabagooool

Fuhgettabouit

My mother's side of the family is 100% Italian lineage. My great grandparents were from the "old country". My grandmother had 12 siblings. Almost all of them lived within 4 miles of one another. Many in the same neighborhood. Almost every Sunday as a kid we would go to my grandparent's house for several hours in the afternoon. There were always several aunts and uncles there, along with way too much Italian food and even more smoke in the kitchen where they all sat and talked. My grandparents owned a nightclub in their younger days (picture the Copacabana on Goodfellas, but obviously much, much smaller), so I would often kill time playing quarter slot machines in another area of the house or watching football games while my grandfather (unbeknownst to me as a kid) was taking bets over the phone. It was as loud as you would expect it to be with all of the brothers and sisters yelling, arguing, and talking about one another.

Various pastas, veal cutlets, stuff I couldn't pronounce, homemade fig cookies, cannolis, it was all there.

quote:

---

Italians of the OT

---

does a black guy count as two italians?

quote:

---

For all of you baws on here that have Italian roots, I’d like to know what your experience was like growing up in an Italian family? Did you grow up in a large family that was close knit, as a lot of Italian families seem to be?

---

My dad side is FBI, full blooded Italian. My mom's side is Cajun French. It was a family of 6 and everyone knows how to cook. You better not use domestic (American) parmesan in your meatballs. My mom (with the help of everyone else) cooked a variety of meals. It was never just Italian but spaghetti and meatballs, aglio olio jacked up with veggies and protein (shrimp or chicken) were a regular along with white beans rice. Sometimes she/we would make an awesome brucioloni or ossobuco.

Sicilian family. Sunday dinners were loud (mostly women in the family) and the best food in the world. Mamaw always had a huge pot of red gravy w/ meatballs (which could’ve fed 100 on it’s own) but that was “never enough,” so we always had some other meal in addition to that (fried pork chops, fried chicken etc) with multiple side dishes (Italian salad, stuffed eggplant, another pasta dish, bread). There was the typical dramatic family fall-out after mamaw died, so those traditions have stopped. I miss her red gravy and she didn’t cook by recipe, so I have no clue how to reproduce it