Sundays in the Kitchen: Cooking, Family, and the Labor of Love

I’ve been cooking for as long as I can remember. My first memory is helping my mother roll meatballs for our Sunday afternoon feast, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighborhood friends would all come over and enjoy the pasta- old word “all day sauce” that my mother would start cooking saturday morning for sunday feast. She always started the sauce by browning the pork, sausage, and meatballs in the sauce pot, then adding garlic. The smells were and still are intoxicating. We would have antipasto first- then pasta, meatballs, sausage, hard boiled eggs, salad, italian bread and finish with something sweet, cookies, fruit or something like that.

The intoxicating aroma to this day makes me think of love, family tradition. The conversations at the table, everyone talks over each other because their voice had to be heard. I swear they were fixing all the worlds problems. Those sundays, my mother taught me cooking was a labor of love- the meal brought us together - it was the catalyst for so much love- I knew I wanted to do that for people.

-Chef Jason