Friday, June 7, 2019

Italians: Endgame

What do you do after you eat copious amounts of amazing Italian food?  You have dessert, obviously.  Just a little something sweet to go with your coffee.  Not too much, or you'll end up exploding like that guy in the Monty Python movie, which would not be a good thing, especially if you're on a date.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about desserts.  My general feeling on the subject is this is why God gave us spumoni.  Maybe a cookie to go with.  Cannoli, if it's your birthday; cannoli cake if it's your wedding.

The cannoli comes from the bakery.  The spumoni from the freezer.  Tutto finito.

That being said, my husband's Aunt Geraldine used to make spectacular homemade cannoli for Christmas, substituting chocolate and vanilla pudding for the ricotta filling.  For the record, the traditional way to make a cannoli shell is to wrap the dough around a piece of wooden broom handle and fry it until it's crispy.  I'm sure you did not know this.  It's a great way to recycle a broom.  Wash it first, please.

However, if you're adventurous or bored, you can always make a dessert.  The most spectacular dessert I know of is my pecan pie, and I've already given you that recipe.  I know it's spectacular because I just got back from my son Nino's graduation, where several people from several different nations told me so.  And these people are not stupid, because Nino graduated with a master's degree from Harvard, so all of his friends are smart.  And he apparently spent a certain amount of time baking pecan pies with the aim of bribing people to be his friends.

 Successfully.

That's Harvard, mind you.  And my daughter Nikki studies at the University of Chicago.  So there's no shortage of brains in the Staccato family, unless you take into account our oldest cat Moof, who's the dumbest ball of fur who ever hacked up a hairball.  But she's fluffy.  And she purrs a lot.  Which is her way of bribing people to be her friends, since - lacking intelligence and opposable thumbs - she can't bake a pecan pie.

But even she could probably figure out how to get the spumoni out of the freezer.








No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment here. Be nice.