As with most things Italian, many New Year’s Eve traditions are celebrated with food and other good-luck charms.
The Italian people eat a traditional New Year dish called cotechino con lenticchie… pork sausage served over lentils. This New Year food is eaten because of the presence of fatty rich pork sausage and lentils in it. Cotechino sausage is a symbol of abundance because they are rich in fat; while lentils symbolize money (being both green and gold coin shaped. So this New Year food promises double-packs of luck!
2021 was a year of many changes for me, both joys and losses and I’ll be ringing in the New Year with dear friends who know who they are and who’ve been immensely supportive and simply loves in my life. I don’t think I could have gotten over some of the bumps without you. Xoxo
So because I personally, happen to LOVE lentils, on my stove is a pot of lentil stew with pork sausage–and I’m ready to bring in this New Year, traditionally tomorrow.
As with most things Italian, so many of the celebrations center around food. Meals are served slowly… one course at a time. This allowed the people sitting around the table to talk and listen and laugh… and clearly laughter IS good for the soul.
New Year’s Eve traditions are no different. Yes, the food is important, but the friendships were even more so 🙂 Have a safe, healthy and happy New Year.
New Years Lentil with Sausage Soup
1 1/2 cups dried, & rinsed lentils
1/2 lb Italian sausage or turkey sausage, casings removed
3 carrots, dicedsmall
1 onion, diced
3 celery stalks, diced small
3 cloves crushed garlic
1 can roasted tomatoes or chopped whole tomatoes
1 quart broth, chicken or vegetable + 1 cup water
1 tsp each: dried thyme, oregano and ground fennel
dry white wine
*opt – pinch red pepper flakes
Sea salt & ground pepper to taste
Olive oil and grated Romano cheese to garnish, with plenty of a good crusty garlic bread
Note: sometimes I add in a bit of torn Swiss chard or spinach at the end of the cook, but that’s optional.
To Prepare:
In a heavy bottomed pan, drizzle with olive oil and add in the garlic, onion, celery and carrots, sautéing gently.
Add in the sausage.. Sauté til the sausage is cooked through and veggies softened. Add the spice mixture, stirring well to mix in evenly.
Toss in the dry lentils, coating them with the vegetable mixture.
Pour in the broth, wine and water Add the tomatoes.
Bring to a light boil, then allow it to simmer until the lentils have softened . Tastefor seasoning.. adding more if needed.
** If the lentils thicken up too much for , simply add a bit more water or brothto loosen it all. Lentils, by nature tend to swell up. Feel free to double the recipe.. it’s that good!
Garnish your New Years Soup with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of freshly grated cheese.A nice loaf of garlic bread to mop up the juices too.. perfecto!
Tic toc, tic toc…counting down to the New Year.This wonderful essay was written by Michael Gartner. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, and a favorite of mine.
No Left Turns
My father never drove a car.
Well, that’s not quite right.
I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, bull——!” she said. “He hit a horse.”
“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
Our 1950 Chevy
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.”
It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
The ritual walk to church
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church.
He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. (In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”) If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.
As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?” “I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
“No left turns,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”
“What?” I said again. “No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support. “No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. “Loses count?” I asked. “Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”
I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.
A happy life
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.” “You’re probably right,” I said. “Why would you say that?” he countered, somewhat irritated. “Because you’re 102 years old,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet.” An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.
I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life.
Betty White left this earth today as she was about to mark her 100th year of living, seeing, feeling, laughing and loving all beings great and small. This icon and humanitarian will be hard to forget. All things are born into this world or created to someday pass, but is how they existed , lived and are utilized that matter. She was the prime example that it is how you live before you leave this world that matters most. Another radiant light has gone out for sure. May we remember her and her good deeds fondly.
Best wishes for the turning of the season & happy Winter Solstice… the shortest and longest day of the year. December 21 marks the beginning of lengthening days and shortening nights. It is when the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere is tilted as far away from the sun as possible and half of the planet will see the shortest hours of sunlight and the longest dark hours of the year. So it only gets brighter from here!! ☀️🎄
Our first real storm of winter is about to begin, continuing through tomorrow. It’s been just a matter of time… Ten inches at worst they predict… manageable. Are you ready? Looks like it will be a white Christmas after all.
Thyme Goes By... 