Those who know me know two things about my eating habits. First, I’m a slow eater. Second, I can really put the food away. (See my Headhunter story.)
So when I married into an Italian family, I had no end of well-meaning in-laws convinced that I only needed some Good Italian Feeding to cure my skinniness.
Fast forward to a couple of years after our wedding when Mary was first pregnant. We decided on a boy’s name instantly, and argued about the girl’s name for nine months until we settled on Diane.
So, of course, it was a girl.
As night follows day, so does the baptism follow the birth and the christening party follow the baptism. So, with Mary’s cousin John as godfather, we started planning the event.
We secured a hall for the party, and John convinced his boss to let us use his restaurant on their day off to prepare the food. We invited about 100 people, but John suffered the double whammy of being Italian AND cooking for his own party so we ended up making for for 200.
Now, let me tell you, cooking for 200 is a totally different style of cooking. Take salad, for example. I bought a half box of lettuce. (Did you know that lettuce comes in boxes? Yes, 24 heads to a box, that’s how it gets to the supermarket.) A few cuts each head (I didn’t have hours to gently tear each leaf apart) and I chucked them into a large (clean!) garbage bag. (Yes, you read that right.) A few more salad fixins, twist tie the bag, and shake… Voila! Tossed salad.
(Of course, after weighing the bag we realized we had something like 2.5 pounds of salad per person invited…)
Fried rice, Swedish meatballs, baked ziti, and some other things I can’t recall quickly took form.
And, my crowning achievement, was a fruit punch I made with my sister Debbie’s assistance. (Take a bundt cake pan, put some fruit piece on the bottom, then enough water to cover them. Freeze it. Add more fruit and water, freeze. Repeat until you fill the pan. You end up with a giant ring-shaped ice cube with fruit in it.) Add that fruit ice thing to a large quantity of fruit punch, then mix in the right amount of Everclear pure grain alcohol.
Everclear was some serious stuff. Instead of advertising nonsense, the label was filled with warnings about how dangerous it was – don’t drinking it straight, keep it away from flames, and such. I did the math several times to make sure I wasn’t poisoning the guests.
When the day finally arrived, we had the baptism and then the party. Everyone had a blast. My favorite part was when the party started breaking up. I got to stand over the food and insist forcefully that all my Italian inlaws take some food with them. “Here, take this or I have to throw it away.”
Mangiare!