Gooool!

Have you been watching the World Cup? Every four years I get rather excited for the fervor that sweeps the world and have grand intentions of sitting down to watch every game. Alas, the busyness of life always intercedes and I am lucky to watch the final. Last night, I cleared my schedule - that just involves telling Morgan I’m going to watch soccer - and sat down with some high quality seltzer and watched two whole games. It has been many years since I’ve released an involuntary, victory cheer and burst into the air, arms raised in adoration of sport. My cat, who was sleeping between my legs, was not impressed with my sudden zeal as he did a complete flip through the air, landing on his feet to pierce me with a look of total disgust. Norway, who I’d chosen to root for after a coin toss, didn’t emerge victorious but I was left excited for semifinals later in the week. I also felt like a world citizen when I walked into the coffee shop this morning and was able to throw around a few stats from last nights game.

And here I’ll tie that aside into food. As a southern kid who played American football my entire life, soccer wasn’t something that inspired any real emotion. When I was in college, my roommate was from a Sicilian family and when World Cup 2006 arrived, he made it known in our house that the next few weeks would be something like a holiday and marked a calendar of potential times the living room would be used for Italian feasts and World Cup viewing. If you recall, Italy won the Cup in 2006. Before the quarter finals, a package arrived at our house from his mom in Florida. Inside were San Marzano tomatoes, good parm, proscuitto, real pasta, loaves of ciabatta, and as I recall, a couple bottles of Montepulciano that were far nicer than we could appreciate. The morning of games, we would all cut class and cook furiously getting ready for the match. 20 years on, the memory in my head is like a 90’s movie montage with wooden spoons and tomato splashed on the walls. I was just getting into restaurant jobs and had no swagger in the kitchen but I loved the feeling of cooking to an end. To feed our friends and celebrate. I became a bandwagon Italy fan for the summer and by the time the championship rolled around, we had a house jammed to capacity with friends there to eat, drink and revel in healthy parasocial idolization of the Italian side. Those days were some of the first times I understood the power of food. Not just as nourishment but a catalyst for creating feeling, closeness and memory. I wanted more of that. In the hundreds of dinners I’ve cooked for friends in the years since that summer, I’ve often replayed those days in my memory. One of the things I most remember is the idea of starting with good ingredients and not doing much to them. That lesson has stuck.

Whether you watch the World Cup or not, opportunities abound to make eating special. If you need the best quality ingredients and subscribe to the idea that they need little embellishment, we have endless ideas for you. We were a bunch of kids in Boone obsessed with the Grateful Dead, eating bolognese, lasagna and drinking red wine on hot summer days. I’ve since evolved a bit and you’re more likely to find me eating some rare beef with grilled cucumbers and tomatoes on these hot days. Whatever it is that you cook for a gathering, I hope it stirs some feeling. When it does, those memories adhere, crystallize and become juicier as the years go by. I hope you have those kind of memories.

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