Saturday, December 29, 2007

Ain't No Chinese Food Here...

A Jewish Christmas Eve in Brooklyn

Like all good Jews, each Christmas Eve my family invites over twenty of our closest friends and family to our home and attempts to kill them all with gluttunous amounts of red sauce, pork and shellfish.

Each of my parents makes their signature sauce. My Mom's is a shellfish stew which she has adapted from Dom DeLuise's cookbook. After years of tweaking and fidgeting, Mom's sauce is still the best seafood sauce I've ever had:








My Dad's is a meat sauce, the recipe for which he received from a coworker years ago and has since made all his own. Teeming with meatballs, hot and sweet sausage, pork ribs and braciole, his sauce is always amazing and forms the basis for a great lasagne. This Christmas Eve marked the first in three years where I allowed myself to eat his sauce (I had a no-red meat thing going on for a while there, but that is now kaput). His meatballs made me wonder why I had ever tortured myself like that in the first place.








There were eight trays set up above sternos for everyone to feed themselves to their heart's content, but like most family gatherings, there was an overwhelming amount of leftovers. But with this stuff, as you can imagine, I have had no problem complying with my parents and trying to make a dent in what's left.

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