Why Don't I Just Bring You Some Spaghetti with that Risotto?

Maybe you are familiar with this neurosis within Italian-American families.  Or maybe you aren't.  Let me advise you.  Whenever you visit the Italian side of your fiancee's family, never--and I mean NEVER EVER--contemplate piling multiple starches on your dinner plate.  (Technically, they would never make such a faux pas, but maybe they are testing you).  Make a gaffe and you will be responsible for starting a conflagration of this magnitude:

Big Night Risotto Scene

And let's face it, Tony Shalhoub is right (when is he not?).  What person in her right mind would put two or (God forbid) three starches on a dinner table?  Actually, I have an answer for that.  My husband, whose family origin can best be described as "European Eclectic", has a passion for carbohydrates.  At Christmas and Easter there is puska, a sweet, rich bread dyed deep yellow from the amount of eggs and butter in the mix.  It can happily accompany stuffing (Hungarian and bread varieties), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and dinner rolls on the holiday table.  I cannot convey to you the level of my horror when I first witnessed such a display.  Memories of my mother revising dinner menus up till the last moment to make sure there was a perfect balance of meat, vegetables and starch rose up before me like the Wave of Kanagawa.

So now it is time to 'fess up.  Below you will see the evidence of my guilt...the very image of what my life has become:

Can you see the transgression, friends?  One might be able to forgive the crusty baguette meant to accompany the spaghetti, but the roasted potatoes?!  A starch with a starch next to a starch.  It made my mother gasp and declare that she was not hungry.  It made me take stock of my life.  The fact is, I overturned the cosmic order of the dinner table for one reason: I was trying to get Ciccio to eat something. 

Was it worth replacing the yin and yang of gustatory harmony with a yin and a yin and a yin?  The original dinner was (wait for it) Mahi Mahi poached on a bed of herbs and the rosemary roasted potatoes.  *Snort*.  Who was I kidding?  As I rushed to put the table together, my principles fell apart before the plates were set.  I did some quick back-tracking and threw spaghetti into a pot.  (Another rule of thumb is this: always have sauce ready to go).  All of those years of indoctrination--meat, vegetable, starch--like a culinary syntax being drummed into my head, governing every cooking act I had accomplished, gone in the blink of an eye.  And why?  A picture is worth a thousand words:

Yes.  All principles go out the window for the moment when this child opens his mouth and eats.  Okay, not all.  I still have my lines in the sand.  But clearly on this evening, the line did not encompass the starch exclusivity rule.  Now I begin to wonder just how far I am willing to go. What's next?  Will chicken nuggets--perhaps with a side of risotto--make their way into my house?  (If only you could see my face at this moment).  Ciccio knows what he likes and the list is short: nutella, peanut butter, spaghetti.  He has his own culinary syntax.  While I may scream if I get another glob of peanut butter on my fingers,  the satisfaction of a mostly empty plate almost ranks right up there with finishing my dissertation.  Well, almost.

This incident highlighted an unexpected complication.  The fact is, Ciccio did not eat potatoes with his spaghetti.  He sensibly downed a quarter cup of pasta and nibbled on the bread before slinking away from the table while we pretended not to notice.  My husband, on the other hand, dug in.  I can only imagine that his house finally felt a little more like home that night.  And the Mahi Mahi?  As beautiful as it looked, it was undercooked and had to go back in the oven.  Nobody had fish for dinner and the table suddenly looked overwhelmed by...bread.  I am thankful that Mom (our personal Tony Shalhoub) decided that she wasn't hungry enough to sit down to dinner that night.

You might think that this incident made me shy away from starches for at least a few days, but if you stay tuned for the next two installments (cabbage and noodles and rice balls), you will see that I have bounced back quite nicely.