^{Photo credit: Roberta Deutschman}

   Carol’s second grandchild celebrated his 13th birthday this past weekend. He is half-Jewish and half-Catholic, which means he feels twice as guilty all the time. It also means he likes to eat. And so it came to pass, that for his celebration of achieving manhood, he would get in touch with his Catholic side, and he asked for spaghetti and meatballs for his birthday dinner.

   I was named caterer for the affair. In addition to my homemade sauce and meatballs, I’d be adding homemade pasta as a bit of flair to my home-chef performance. That meant arriving early with all the raw ingredients and utensils, along with my Italian apron, fedora and Pandora set to my Italian Cooking Music station.

   Dough making by hand continues to be a reenactment of the Johnstown Flood. I can’t seem to keep the eggs from busting through the flour dam, and the resulting scramble (pun surprisingly intended) to get egg and flour together and formed into a nice, tight dough ball more closely resembles a search and rescue mission following a volcanic eruption.

   The sauce and meatballs aren’t constrained by any hard and fast rules or recipes, and over the years, I’ve found both to be impervious to screwing up. It’s the homemade pasta that’s turning out to be impervious to getting it right.

   Dough making by hand continues to be a reenactment of the Johnstown Flood. I can’t seem to keep the eggs from busting through the flour dam, and the resulting scramble (pun surprisingly intended) to get egg and flour together and formed into a nice, tight dough ball more closely resembles a search and rescue mission following a volcanic eruption. Fortunately, I performed this task back at home, so no guest was forced to watch and think, “Well, I’m not eating that!”

   But turning the dough into discernible strands of spaghetti apparently requires a mastery of technique and moisture control that has escaped me to date. The crowd of guests gathered around the pasta maker began with such high expectations for watching dough magically turned into silky strands of #9 instead were forced marched through a seemingly endless exhibition of flour dusting and dough shaping that left the kitchen looking more like a food fight had broken out, and our birthday boy well on his way to turning 14 by the time we’d accumulated sufficient pasta to be troweled out onto plates like it had come out of a cement mixer.

   Somehow it had remained edible despite my best efforts to the contrary, but I wound up with the distinct feeling the pasta maker was going to be relegated to a spot in the storage shed usually reserved for other useless items like exercise bikes and air poppers. Fresh pasta is a great idea, but it is also readily available at your corner market, and can be easily prepared without any of the time and drama it takes to sit through a Wagnerian opera.

   If I’ve given you the impression that the debut of the Smoochie Tucci Catering Company (Carol’s daughter’s catchy idea) was a disaster, it’s the wrong impression. The evening was filled with the wine and laughter of vaccinated adults appreciating the opportunity to see each other’s smiles not hidden by masks. Even the birthday boy said it was one of his best parties ever.

   I left the kitchen in a state of disarray that made the homeowners glad they would soon be remodeling anyway.

   And I’ll never look with casual indifference again at a box of spaghetti sitting on a grocery store shelf