Sunday Recipe: Aunt Fulmay's Sunday Dinner Spaghetti Sauce

My great-aunt Fulmay as a very young woman

My Aunt Fulmay was actually my great aunt -- my grandmother's (older?) sister. Though her given name was Philomena (after St. Philomena) everybody in the family called her Fulmay. [Her friends from beauty school called her Philly, a great nickname for Philomena.] Growing up in Western Pa., the name Fulmay never seemed odd to me, but when I got to college, none of my college friends could pronounce Fulmay (I have no idea why), but they always said Phoo-May, as though she were of Asian descent, rather than Italian.

In a family full of great home-style cooks, all of them with big personalities, my Aunt Fulmay had one of the bigger personalities. I was modified-vegetarian through most of my 20's (I ate fish and dairy, but nothing that walked the earth.) Aunt Fulmay told me to come up for a roasted chicken and when I told her I was vegetarian, she screeched, "But honey! What do you eat?!"

Then, she offered to make pork instead. True story.

Sunday Recipe: Sicilian Meatballs with a Basic Tomato Sauce

It started, simply enough, with a stale hunk of bread. Really.

I had purchased a loaf of rustic Italian bread from Breadworks and used about two-thirds of it. There it sat on my butcher's block in it's paper bag. It was too hard for sandwiches, yet I left it there. Finally, that stale hunk of bread taunted me. Silently, I could hear the bread whispering recriminations as I tried to catch up on my viewings of Top Chef and Parks & Rec. I tried to get on with some writing assignments, but the bread was almost shouting at me. This went on for a solid day. The next day I woke up and thought -- meatballs.