Tortellini.

If you're visiting from SITS and wanted to read "Open Adoption Chose Us" the link is wrong!  Oh no! But you can check it out here!  But....you can....of course keep reading here and learn about my grandmother's amazing tortellini too!  

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We called my dad's mom Nini.  That's some version of grandma in Italian, although it's more the result of four grand-kids who couldn't say the Italian word Nonna (the real word for grandma in Italian) correctly when we were learning how to talk.

 How adorable was this woman? 

Nini knew how to cook like an Italian grandma should.  She made her own pasta, all forms of it, and I am not lying or exaggerating when I say I was never served a noodle in her house that was not home-made.  Her basement was littered with clothes drying racks strewn with long strands of spaghetti, fettuccine, and vermicelli.  My cousins and I would eat untold amounts of tender dried pasta off those racks--because even dried--it was delicious. She had hand-crank pasta makers clamped to the edges of multiple tables and she had an entire second kitchen down there where her and my grandpa would make their own sausage, stuffed artichokes, spaghetti sauce (which no one can duplicate, I'm sure of it), canned figs, bagna cauda (check that out if you're not familiar with it--and then never make it--unless you're going to make it outside), pizzelles, flan, and tortellini.

And did she make tortellini.  She'd grind up the veal and prosciutto herself, cut uniform squares of pasta dough, put the exact right amount of filling in the middle of them, and fold them up perfectly into little belly button shaped dumplings.  And she'd have bags and bags of tortellini in her freezer at any given time.  It was the first course of almost every meal that she made.  Perfect tortellini's bobbing around in home-made chicken broth topped with generous scoops of parmesan cheese.

She really wanted to teach me how to make tortellini.  She'd ask me all the time while I was in high school.  But I didn't really want to learn.  I wasn't that interested in cooking while I was growing up and I think that because she was so relentless in her asking I was equally relentless in my saying no.  And I'm pretty sure it hurt her feelings.  Cooking was her thing.  She loved cooking for her grand-kids.  She would have made every single person's favorite dish for dinner even if it was seven different things if our parents would have allowed it.

Every time I'd say no, she'd just shrug and say, "Maybe another time.  It's okay."  And you can guess......that 'other time' never happened.  I went to college, and I still loved eating the tortellini she'd make and bringing bags of it back to college with me, but I was even "busier" than I'd been in high school and.........Nini wasn't feeling as good as she used to.  She was sick.  The only time that Chris ever met her was before we were even engaged and about a week before she passed away. She didn't  really know we were there.

And I never learned how to make tortellini.  
And that makes me so upset.  With myself.
It would have been so simple to spend an afternoon in my Nini's basement with her folding pasta and it would have made her year.  But I didn't do it.  I just didn't do it.......for selfish and ridiculous sixteen....and seventeen......and eighteen year old reasons.

I still love tortellini.  I buy the pre-made beef tortellini and boil it in chicken broth (not home-made) and I think about Nini every time we eat it. It's actually, ironically, one of Georgia's favorite things to eat.  She cheers when I tell her it's what we're having for dinner.  A dinner that took so much work on Nini's part because it was made from scratch......and love, takes me about ten minutes and I consider it one of my, "I forgot to think about dinner so this is what we're having," dinners.  But Georgia loves it.

And I know that would make Nini so happy.  She would love Georgia and all of her gregarious energy and zest for life.  She'd think it was so amazing that Georgia was adopted......and Italian.......and ours.  Because she loved what her grand-kids loved.

Even if her grand-kids didn't understand and place enough value on what she loved.

So when I'm dumping a plastic tray of tortellini into a boiling pot of chicken broth I think about spending time with people I love.....and who love me.  And I think about how important it is to be with them, really be with them.  And to do with them, what they want to do with us.......because they want us to understand them better; they want to give us a part of who they are.

And that means our own parents, our spouses, our best friends, friends that we're just making, mentors........our kids.

Don't be too busy to make tortellini with someone.  It's probably just one afternoon of your life......and even if it's more...........who cares?

Love you Nini.  You were an amazing grandma.  A really amazing one.