Grandma's House

I know that this might be an unconventional first-blog, considering that we went to the farm for the first time this week, but this weekend food was on my mind in a very different way.

I am lucky enough to have two very active and wonderful grandparents that live only an hour away from Colgate in Skaneateles, New York. Whenever things get crazy at Colgate (as they did this weekend) I escape to their house for a lot of love and an inevitably wonderful home cooked meal. Our family is Italian-American, and food has always been an important part of our lives-- we basically worship meals when we are together, but when we are apart phone calls to remember family recipes or report on the status of our tomato plants keep us connected across state and now country borders.

This weekend, my grandmother's cooking was in particularly good form. As I pulled into the drive she and my grandfather were picking basil in their small back-porch garden, which I knew meant that they were cooking her all-time specialty, pesto with spaghetti. The smells of that basil brings me to memories of hot summer nights when our family sits out on the back porch for hours on end eating pesto and enjoying each other's company.

Also on the menu Saturday was a simple tomato salad with tomatoes (also from this garden), figs and prosciutto with balsamic vinegar (which I literally inhale whenever they are set out as starters), and fresh baked bread from Rosalie's, an Italian restaurant in town that bakes amazing bread fresh every day. In true Italian style, my grandmother allows the fresh ingredients to be the star of her meals, sticking to salt, olive oil, and in rare occasions, butter, to pull everything together. A meal like this seems so close to the ground it came from.

As we sat down over this remarkably simple but delicious meal, I marveled at how effectively my family has been able to use food as a tool to bring us together--just the thought of this pesto sends me running from Colgate right into the arms of my grandparents and their fragrant kitchen, keeping me grounded even when college life seems to take over. Between cooking, harvesting, and talking about food, I know that a lot of aspects from this class will become the topics of our family email chains and skype conversations, and especially those precious meals with my grandparents.