Sunday Night Sauce

Anything with sauce on it is probably on my list of favorite things to eat. To me (and all other Italians) there is only one type of sauce – tasty red tomato sauce. No, marsala is not a sauce, it is marsala. Ditto for alfredo and bolognaise - SAUCE means red tomato sauce ONLY. So a tradition for many Italian-American families is to have Sunday night sauce. This means that you cook up a pot of sauce and add it to whatever you would like for dinner that night, be it spaghetti, ravioli, meatballs, etc. It’s family time, everyone eats the family’s recipe for sauce and talks (typically loudly and animatedly) and then goes home well-fed and ready to start the week.

Tricky and I did our own 2-person version of Sunday night sauce this past weekend. I asked what he wanted for dinner and he said “Spaghetti and meatballs.” Now, I’ve never made meatballs on my own, but I did have my grandma’s recipe lying around, so I thought this would be a great excuse to try it. The recipe goes something like “take a pound of ground beef and some hard Italian bread, add garlic and fresh parsley and mix it all together with 2 eggs.” Wow, this was going to be interesting. Luckily I have watched my grandmother make this so I had some idea of amounts involved.

I got all the ingredients together. Tricky wanted to be part of the process, so I prepped (I’m a great sous chef!) and then we both got up to our elbows in a bowl of would-be meatballs. We mixed everything up and rolled them out, then put them in the oven while we made the sauce (another interesting “mix this stuff together and cook” recipe).

After the meatballs were cooked, we added them to the sauce pot for another hour and hoped for the best. Finally we cooked up a pot of spaghetti and we were ready to pour the sauce and meatballs over it to test out our culinary experiment. Tricky opened a bottle of wine (V. Sattui 2005 Cab of some sort, a perfect pairing) and we sat down, bowls full of pasta and meatballs and sausage crowning the noodley goodness. We stuck our forks in, and what followed was SHOCK AND AWE.

These meatballs were so incredibly delicious, I absolutely could not believe we made them ourselves! They were dead-on as good as my grandma’s, which are (of course) the best. Tricky said they were the best meatballs he ever had in his life! We’ve been eating them all week, it never feels like leftovers.

So here’s to Grandma’s recipe and then another three cheers for Sunday night sauce. We may not be able to make it a weekly tradition but I do expect many encores.