What is your favorite REAL Eye-talian food?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Write-in: acquacotta.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Is anyone else doing a Feast of the Seven Fishes tomorrow?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Until recent years my family didn't do the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Instead we did, well, whatever it is that non-Italian white Americans eat on Christmas, I actually don't remember very clearly. Sometime around 2010 or so my mother and I both, more or less independently of each other, started getting more culturally conservative and interested in our heritage, so we've done it for the past four or five Christmases with varying degrees of culinary success. We're still tinkering with what our menu for it is, since there was a good thirty-five- or forty-year gap where there was no tradition of it in my family, so whatever we used to do back in the fifties and sixties or whenever has been mostly forgotten by now. This year we're focusing mostly on cod and various bivalves, with some shrimp and calamari as well.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Until recent years my family didn't do the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Instead we did, well, whatever it is that non-Italian white Americans eat on Christmas, I actually don't remember very clearly. Sometime around 2010 or so my mother and I both, more or less independently of each other, started getting more culturally conservative and interested in our heritage, so we've done it for the past four or five Christmases with varying degrees of culinary success. We're still tinkering with what our menu for it is, since there was a good thirty-five- or forty-year gap where there was no tradition of it in my family, so whatever we used to do back in the fifties and sixties or whenever has been mostly forgotten by now. This year we're focusing mostly on cod and various bivalves, with some shrimp and calamari as well.

I am so happy you are more culturally conservative and in tune with your classy roots! God bless you and yours.

Thanks, Phil. We're a lot more fulfilled and in touch with who I think we truly are than we used to be, especially at Christmastime. How was your Vigilia? Ours was excellent, not quite as good as last year's but better than any other we've made so far.