Each night time, there’s one other celeb Christmas particular to look at: The Osmond Brothers, sporting shearling coats just like the one my father had from his dude ranch days, sing carols from Temple Sq. in Salt Lake Metropolis, monumental flakes of snow settling down on their thick, attractive, Mormon eyelashes. John Denver, sporting a metallic silver, yoke-front, western-style shirt sings Merry Christmas Little Zachary, a music to his new child boy, from inside a heated glass geodesic dome atop a mountain in Aspen, whereas Annie Denver and a passel of their hippie EST pals watch contemplatively by way of matching spherical granny glasses. There are The Waltons, the daddy of whom is ceaselessly getting stranded in a freak snow storm excessive atop Walton’s Mountain, leaving Livvy Walton, and the youngsters, and Grandma and Grandpa fearful sick— too fearful, even, to take a seat down at their large farmhouse desk laden with the items of the season that Livvy purchased with spare change hoarded all 12 months in her apron pocket, after which hidden in a blue glass Mason jar within the midst of The Nice Despair. There’s the Andy Williams Christmas present, and The Partridge Household, The Brady Bunch, The Carpenters, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin, who sings Ave Maria. There’s Perry Como, who my mom swoons over, and when Bing Crosby sings The Little Drummer Boy with David Bowie, I yell for Gaga, my grandmother, who’s frying latkes in our kitchen.
She comes working down the hallway, almost tripping over the canine, and her eyes develop misty when she sees the rocker and the crooner— Bing in a blue golf sweater, Bowie in a decent shirt and sport jacket, a large gold cross dangling round his neck as if he must persuade viewers of his devotion— standing on a darkish, muted set adorned demurely, like an empty parish home hooked up to a really outdated church: no glamorous, kicking Rockettes dressed like snowflakes, or camels or sheep or Smart Males. As a substitute, a piano, and a Gothic window behind the 2 singers; faux snow is perhaps gently falling within the faux backlot woods outdoors.
My favourite music, Gaga says, wistfully, standing over me in my bed room with a Teflon spatula in a single hand and an oily kitchen towel within the different, as we watch the little Sony Trinitron tv that my dad and mom have given me for Hanukah. She begins to hum alongside in her low, guttural mezzo-soprano with one of many weirdest duets ever assembled for contemporary tv, between a Nineteen Forties film star with a powerful non secular, proper wing streak and an rising historical past of brutality in opposition to his huge brood of lilywhite kids, and an area oddity named Ziggy Stardust.
Gaga loves this music; she’s liked it since she first heard it on her kitchen radio within the late Fifties, when my mom was out of the home and singing on community tv, and Gaga was dwelling alone whereas my grandfather was working at his Grand Road furnishings retailer, supplying most of south Williamsburg with beds, chairs, desks, tables, and the remainder of the mundanity of life. Right here, within the third flooring house that Gaga shares along with her husband and daughter, the place they’ve lived since lengthy earlier than the conflict, I think about her sitting within the kitchen, turning the amber nobs on the outdated burled walnut RCA picket radio that used to face in the lounge— changed by the Common Electrical console tv they purchased when my mom started showing on The Galen Drake Present— and tuning in a neighborhood station taking part in in style music. It’s Christmastime, and her Italian neighbors who stay each upstairs and downstairs have adorned their home windows with wreaths and tinsel, and tied balsam roping across the banister from the bottom flooring all the best way as much as the roof. Candy, yeasty clouds of scorching, baking panettone— the ripe, pungent souring of the biga, the apricots and raisins and Fiori di Sicilia— billow from beneath her neighbors’ doorways, and Mrs. Lambiazi, who lives two flights beneath her, comes as much as borrow additional egg whites for the Torrone she’s making for her son, who’s coming in from Windfall together with his new spouse and child. By the twenty fourth, Gaga tells me thirty years later, the constructing will start to odor like a fish market: her neighbors are making baccala and scampi and fried eel, and there’s a lot hocking and pounding and chopping and shouting in Italian happening in each house that she activates the radio to calm her nerves, and sits down at her kitchen desk to hear, alone, and hears, for the primary time, The Little Drummer Boy.
These are the smells of life and of sustenance, she tells herself, that separate the banal from the joyful. She longs to cook dinner nice, huge vacation meals that her household— her 4 sisters and their husbands and youngsters, her personal daughter and husband— will love, that they’ll flock to. However her sisters have scattered, some to Florida, some to Queens, and her daughter is afraid of meals— she offered the sandwiches that she carried along with her to highschool, and starved herself to shed some pounds in order that she may very well be on tv— and her husband, who can’t maintain weight on it doesn’t matter what she feeds him, treats it just like the gasoline he pumps into his Plymouth. So Gaga makes her weekly hen soup, and her weekly blintzes, and her weekly brisket as if it’s nothing greater than a chore, and it’s eaten— whether it is eaten in any respect— mechanically, angrily, on-the-run, solely with out pleasure.
Christmastime swirls round Gaga, and it sucks her in; through the years, she’s come to like it, to stay vicariously by way of the goodness of it, by way of the noise and the meals and the psychic coronary heart nourishment that she so desperately yearns for. In Brooklyn, the vacation doesn’t care whether or not she is Jewish, and neither do her neighbors: Christmas climbs the steps of her house constructing and creeps up into the rattling radiators and into the pipes, and when Mrs. Lambiazi reveals up one Christmas Day carrying a sheet of steaming Lasagna Bolognese, meat and cheese collectively, and Gaga says Thanks however I can’t, Mrs. Lambiazi tells her in Italian that she is now household— Tu sei la nostra famiglia— and that it comes from her dwelling, and her coronary heart, and that Gaga should. And so she does.
There are solely three Christmas songs that Gaga really loves and can hearken to: White Christmas, as a result of it was written by Irving Berlin, and he or she loves something written by Irving Berlin; The Christmas Tune, as a result of she loves Nat Cole; and I’ll Be Residence for Christmas, which she additionally loves however can’t get by way of anymore— if solely in my goals— for the reason that morning, fourteen years earlier, when Mrs. Lambiazi received the telegram about her older son who was at Anzio together with his battalion. Gaga heard the screaming from two flights up and ran down the steps to search out her neighbor collapsed on the kitchen flooring, the radio on, her baccala nonetheless simmering in a pan of water on the range above her.
If solely in my goals Gaga hears, and he or she has to take off her glasses to wipe her eyes; as soon as she begins, she will be able to’t cease, so deep is her feeling for Mrs. Lambiazi, however actually, for her personal life and state of affairs, for her longing to feed folks, and to fill a home with the type of heat and laughter and music she’d had when she was youthful and residing in her mom’s dwelling on South Fifth Road, earlier than all of her sisters had married and moved out, and he or she, the eldest at thirty-three, was left behind, and other people started to speak.
The primary time Gaga hears The Little Drummer Boy, alone in her Brooklyn house, she loves it for its simplicity and its message of peace, and its lack of economic extra; years later, on this night time, in my room in Forest Hills, she sits down on the sting of my mattress and collectively we watch Bing Crosby and David Bowie whereas her latkes cook dinner within the kitchen down the corridor, and all she can consider is Mrs. Lambiazi’s lasagna, and the smells of simmering baccala and balsam roping, and life, and sustenance.
Vegetable Lasagna
My first expertise with vegetable lasagna was after I was a junior in school, and often took my meals within the college’s vegetarian eating room. There, they served one thing referred to as East/West Lasagna which lodged in my mind as precisely what vegetarian lasagna ought to by no means be. Through the years, I’ve provide you with this model, which includes greens of contrasting textures: there’s fennel, escarole, kale, eggplant, and caramelized onion, cooked forward of time and layered between blankets of tomato sauce, ricotta, mozzarella, and lasagna noodles. The outcome shouldn’t be the damp mush that vegetable lasagna generally is, however a mix of flavors packed into what’s extra a densely cooked torta. One caveat: it takes the higher a part of a day to organize every little thing, assemble the dish after which cook dinner it, until you purchase pre-made sauce, which you could possibly actually do.
Serves 8-12
Tomato sauce
- 2 tablespoons additional virgin olive oil
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
- 1 medium onion, peeled and diced
- 1 medium carrot, shaved and diced
- 2 stalks celery, diced
- 1 28-ounce can crushed San Marzano tomatoes
- 1/4 teaspoon recent oregano
- pinch crimson pepper flakes
- salt and black pepper, to style
Greens
- 1 giant eggplant, thinly sliced length-wise (use a mandoline)
- sea salt, to style
- 2 medium fennel bulbs, stems and fronds eliminated and reserved, core eliminated, outer woody leaves discarded
- 3 tablespoons additional virgin olive oil, divided
- 2 medium Spanish onions, peeled and sliced
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
- 1 small bunch escarole, darkish inexperienced outer and white interior leaves roughly chopped
- 1 bunch Lacinato kale, leaves stripped off stems, and roughly chopped
Meeting
- 15 ounces recent ricotta
- 1 egg, overwhelmed
- 16 ounces recent ricotta
- 1 tablespoon additional virgin olive oil
- Completed sauce (recipe above)
- 1 pound lasagna noodles (I desire pre-cooked for ease of use; by all means, use recent lasagna sheets or recent noodles if accessible)
- Cooked greens (recipe above)
- 1 pound recent mozzarella, grated
- 1/2 cup grated Parmigiana Reggiano
Make the sauce
In a medium saucepan, heat the olive oil over a medium flame till rippling. Add the garlic, decrease the warmth, and add the onion, carrot, and celery. Prepare dinner very slowly over a low flame, about quarter-hour, till the greens have softened right into a sofritto, stirring incessantly to ensure that nothing browns. Stir within the tomatoes, elevate the warmth barely, and proceed to simmer for quarter-hour, set cowl askew on the pan earlier than including the oregano, crimson pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. Style for seasoning, and put aside.
Prepare dinner the greens
Preheat oven to 300 levels F.
Sprinkle the eggplant slices with a little bit of salt and set them on a cookie rack for 10 minutes. In the meantime, deliver a medium saucepan of water to a boil over medium excessive warmth. Quarter the cored fennel bulbs and simmer them within the water till tender, about 20 minutes. Take away from pan, slice the fennel into 1/2 inch thick slices, and put aside.
Pat the eggplant slices dry on each side— don’t rinse. In a big bowl, toss the eggplant slices with one tablespoon of olive oil, and roast on a sheet pan till simply barely golden, about 20 minutes. Take away from pan and put aside.
In a big skillet set over medium warmth, heat a second tablespoon of olive oil and add the onion. Prepare dinner till the onions start to show jammy and golden, about 20 minutes, stirring incessantly to stop burning. Add the garlic cloves, and proceed took for an additional 5 minutes. Take away the onions, garlic, and their juices to a small bowl and put aside.
In the identical skillet, warmth the remaining olive oil, add the fennel slices and white escarole leaves, and cook dinner over a low flame for about 10 minutes, till they soften. Add the inexperienced leaves and the kale, toss effectively, and canopy. Proceed to cook dinner over a low flame till the greens are wilted, one other 5 minutes. Take away from the pan and put aside.
Assemble the lasagna
Fold collectively the ricotta and the egg, and put aside.
In a 9 x 13 inch lasagna pan flippantly greased with olive oil, ladle half a cup of tomato sauce into the pan and unfold it evenly throughout the underside. Place three to 4 lasagna noodles, or one sheet, on prime of the tomato sauce.
Beat the egg into the ricotta. Unfold a 3rd of the ricotta combination on prime of the primary layer of noodles. Layer on a 3rd of the eggplant slices, a 3rd of the onion and garlic, a 3rd of the fennel and greens. Ladle half cup to a cup of sauce over the greens; they shouldn’t be submerged (the quantity differs based mostly on the depth of your pan). Sprinkle a 3rd of the mozzarella over the tomato sauce, and set down one other layer of noodles.
Repeat two extra instances. On prime of the ultimate layer of noodles, ladle sauce and unfold evenly, prime with mozzarella and Parmigiana. Loosely cowl with flippantly greased foil.
Set the lasagna pan on a baking sheet, and place on the oven’s center rack, and bake for 45 minutes. Take away the foil and proceed baking for an additional 15-20 minutes, till the highest is golden brown and effervescent. Fastidiously insert a knife into the middle of the lasagna, to ensure the greens are cooked by way of.
Let relaxation for quarter-hour earlier than serving.
This submit was initially revealed on Elissa Altman’s weblog Poor Man’s Feast, The Beard Award-winning journal in regards to the intersection of meals, spirit, and the households that drive you loopy. Learn extra on her Substack, or sustain along with her archives right here.
