The Last Lasagna . Memorable Meals give Comfort & Value

How often we enjoy bragging about great meals we’ve had, like our new collective-obsession … taking Pictures of our food!

Remember the last time you photographed your meal? Come on, just swipe through your or a friend’s recent camera pics and bet you’ll find one within 20 seconds!

So maybe your starting to warm up to where I’m going with this. Food is fun, fundamental and often familiar. When food also looks visually amazing who can hold back from digging right in …well long enough to Snap the all important Pictures, right ?!

For many, like myself, there’s often one meal in particular that holds that special place in our memory. The spot this meal holds may also have more to it than just the vaulted memory of taste and appearance. This unforgettable meal may just happen to have a number of other important factors and meanings associated with it.

For me, two important factors associated with an incredible meal are Who made it and Where it was enjoyed. So, in this case, it was my mother’s and her mother’s two day homemade ‘Lasagna’. That sheer joy of eating it, surrounded by many beloved family and friends. Who says food is just a means to an end?

So what about this Last Lasagna? That’s next, plus the extra special thing about it for me.

Day one of Lasagna preparation: the sauce and the meatballs simmer on the stove upward of six hours, then allowed to cool, then sit refrigerated overnight. This step allows very special and significant blending and enhancing of flavors of the many varied ingredients and spices.

Day two the actual assemblage of all parts: the meat sauce, cheese filling and pasta done early in the day, so again there would be a cooling off and sitting phase before being reheated in the evening for family enjoyment. Put together with fresh Italian bread and butter, wine and a non-stop cacophony of loud happy, satiated voices and what’s not to love and fondly recall !!

Remembering this loving, incredibly delicious meal is really twice a special somber and valued memory. You see, my loving, grace-filled mother of 7 kids, ‘Last Lasagna’, would precede her own mother’s. Regrettably, Mom lost her battle with breast cancer the spring of her middle-child’s senior year in high school. Her last Lasagna with her mother’s help was a year or so before we lost her. I learned how weeping felt the last time I saw her kneeling at her coffin and had to be carried from it. She was 46.

Her mom, our beloved matriarch ‘Noni’, would live on to the fully conscious age of 99 and thus kept my mother alive in that memorable meal of wonderful meals. Yet even she would have her ‘Last Lasagna’ announced to all as she faced the loss of strength for making such an involved meal. It would then be forever up to us to try and replicate. Yet, only come close to that unique taste that will never leave me.

My ultimate point about a special, memorable meal: the food-memory is also a transport to all that was good and real and loving about two very important women in my life intertwined with the very last incredible tasting Lasagna they made together for us all to enjoy. Their infusion of grace, joy and love provided a special advantage I have in life, not just from a great meal, but of 2 great souls and many happy times shared.

Now, don’t you just maybe, have a memorable meal of your own that’s this inspiring?