Meatballs, Sausage, and Tomato Sauce alla Nona
There have got to be more than a million recipes for meatballs and spaghetti, but this one is near-and-dear to our hearts. Willa and Phoebe’s grandmother, their Nona, grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn; her father was off-the-boat from Italy as a young boy. Nona has passed this family recipe down to my wife and her sister, which we now follow as faithfully as possible every time we’re in the mood for the truest comfort food we know. This sauce is a good-old Brooklyn-style gravy, as they like to call it on our current neighborhood. My wife’s family just calls it “red gold.”
Jane Grey Battle’s Shrimp and “Spaghetti”
I haven’t been entirely forthcoming with you, and I’ve been saving this post for very special reason. There is actually a kind-of-a-big-deal chef in our extended family and we just finished up a family reunion where we got to see her.
Bucatini all’Amatriciana
This is the Big Bang, the prime mover. Without this dish, I wouldn’t have thought about unleashing yet another food blog on the world. But this is the first dish that got our kids really excited about food, and gave mommy and daddy some hope that all would not be mashed sweet potatoes and plain fried chicken for the rest of our lives.





