Recipes I learned over the phone, Part 2:

May 5, 2020

Week two of social isolation, the week I learned to make pasta e rapini over the phone, was the week I started preparing for emergency remote teaching.

In May 2019, I was sitting at my desk at my old job in Ottawa when I got called for an interview for my dream job. The day before, I had just sobbed into the phone about giving up. I had applied for at least 30 jobs in Montreal that month - and many more before - and hadn’t gotten a single positive response. But then I got that call. Within two weeks, I had an interview, got the job, and started teaching. I spent the next month between Montreal and Ottawa, between the two jobs as I tied up loose ends before moving my last boxes back to the city I call home. I spent the next two months furiously trying to keep up, catch up, and not feel like a complete impostor. Having just finished my master’s, I knew how lucky I was to be teaching in a college classroom. Despite the initial precarity, it’s a position many are dying to be in. By the time I found out I would get the chance to teach again this term after not getting any courses in the Fall, I was still thinking: “who in their right mind decided I could be here and that I could do this?”

Nonna Ida was a teacher. She lived the first nine years of her life in the small town of Cantalupo nel Sannio, in the Molise region of Italy. Before her father came to Canada, he was often abroad in Europe, as a mercenary and, later, working in mines so that the family could afford at least one pig a year. Traditional dishes like piedi di porco and trippa - a rare treat today (for those of us who like them) - come from the necessity of having to eat and preserve every part of that pig, making it last as long as possible. She went to school in a small building near her home, where her teacher taught all grades in the same room. She had one notebook for class, which she used year after year. Even though she was just a kid, I imagine her penmanship as neat and as elegant as it is today. She’s told me stories of how, after finishing her own work, she would listen in on the lessons her teacher was giving to the older students. At nine years old, when her father had saved up enough money mining in Lethbridge, Alberta to sponsor the trip for her, her mother, and two siblings, they made their way to Montreal. Before she left, her teacher gifted her a pen and nib, a farewell gift that crossed the ocean with my Nonna. She treasures it to this day.

My Nonna was held back a year when she first started at St. Brendan’s Elementary School, not knowing any English or French. She remembers her teacher helping her at lunch so that she could catch up. And she did. She would go on to complete high school and teacher’s college. By the time she reached her last year, there was such a shortage of teachers in the city that schools started hiring from her class, even though they hadn’t graduated yet. She taught for thirty-three years before retiring. And then the dining room became her classroom. I have hazy memories of all the activities Nonna Ida would plan: papier mâché eggs, painting suncatchers, reading to us from Aesop’s Fables, and, as we got older, allowing us to pick one of the novels from the bookshelf downstairs. The worn pages of my dad and uncle’s old books made up the library we never tired of visiting. Bits of beautiful decorative tissue paper were stored in a little box, to be pulled out for next year’s eggs. My Nonna doesn’t waste, or give up on things, or throw them away.

We passed the time making friendship bracelets, eating thick cookies fresh out of the waffle-iron, watching the PowerPuff Girls, playing outside, and working on our latest arts and crafts. And at some point during the day, Nonna Ida would put those aside and have us practice our cursive, or do additions and subtractions, or write a story at the heavy wood table beside the kitchen. It was a privilege to learn at that table, with Nonna’s patient but firm guiding hands, where we were taught to both colour inside the lines and think outside the box.

I’ve been lucky to grow up like this, in places and with people who have encouraged creativity, learning, and doing things with and for love. On the other hand, it might have also contributed to my sometimes naive tendency to always see the glass half full. I often joke with my boyfriend that between his more pessimistic and my more optimistic natures, we can meet somewhere in reality.

When we finished a story at Nonna Ida and Nonno Sam’s, we would hole-punch it and tie it together with ribbons. She taught us how to curl them with scissors. We found out later that these stories, too, were put into boxes and stored away.

I want to be a kitchen table teacher. Despite everything that has changed since my first day last June, and since March 16, when the Quebec government decided to close all schools for those initial two weeks (we’re at the beginning of the eight week now), the desire to have that spirit of gathering, generosity, comfort, and togetherness is something I’m not willing to let go. And I don’t know if it’s because I think my students need it, or if it’s because I know I really need it. It doesn’t always feel like I’ve achieved it as I sit at my computer for the 10th consecutive hour of the day, wearing my new wrist brace to try to mitigate whatever damage has already been done from my not-so-ergonomic home office set-up. But there are moments, messages, emojis that make me feel like somehow, in some way, we’re still gathered around that big wood table.

In the past two months, I’ve been feeling caught between thinking that I'm both doing too much and not enough for my students. With every new memo from the government and from the school, I feel them slipping further away: apathy, depression, anxiety, frustration, what’s the point. With every new memo, I remind them: I don’t take you or your work for granted, I will meet you halfway. I won’t let you fall through the cracks.

Today’s emotion is best described as just emotional. The new academic calendar for the term has finally been released, there’s closure but there’s also uncertainty. I don’t know what comes next. Summer school is a big question mark. Two hours ago, I posted the last lecture for one of my classes. I almost cried - of disappointment that we can’t do it in person, of nostalgia for that same reason, of relief because it’s finally almost over. Only two more weeks to go.

And I tell myself: I won’t let you fall through the cracks.

Lunch at Nonna Ida and Nonno Sam’s means the staples: homemade ravioli, gnocchi, spaghetti or cannelloni for special occasions, with homemade sauce or rapini and sausage; homemade wine and sopressata; tiramisù or lemon mousse cake; and lots of cookies. Rapini, the bitter greens that Mary Rizzo wrote so beautifully about recently, has been part of my diet since childhood. A common side dish - the way Mary and her mother prepare it - to meat and potatoes, it’s part of a family story about me: I’m not and was never a picky eater, and shocked my parents as I devoured both the bitter rapini and sucked on sour lemon wedges as a kid. Pasta e rapini is by far one of my favourite dishes. It’s simple, but kind of a rare treat: Nonna Ida will make ravioli more often; Nonna Lucia loves trying the newest recipes she finds on Facebook. For me, it’s one of those things my Nonne make, and those things have become kind of mythical.

The first time I had rapini in my own fridge was a few weeks ago, early in our COVID-19 story, before it was near impossible to get a grocery delivery in Montreal. I saw it on the grocery store website and impulsively added a bunch to my basket. A week later, when our groceries arrived, I called Nonna Ida and asked her how to make her pasta e rapini. It was week two of social isolation and I haven't been able to find any since.

These days, when I call my family, I hear how their voices have changed since then. And I know mine has, too. I hear it on the phone, when I’m on Zoom, and in the lectures I record. Nonna Ida called the other day. We often joke that she and my Nonno are probably the most well-prepared for long-term quarantine: they have a well-stocked cantina and four freezers full of homemade pasta, vegetables from the garden, cookies, and who knows what else. But as she confessed that she feels like crying every time my dad or one of my uncles stops by their porch to pick up some cured meat or drop off groceries, I know that no matter how much we prepare and how many things I bake, none of us has what we need right now.

Nonna Ida usually makes this with homemade gnocchi, but we made it with store-bought gnocchi.

1 bunch of rapini
A few cloves of garlic (I like to cut the cloves lengthwise and have those bigger pieces with the rapini)
Vegetable oil
Olive oil
Salt

Fill a pot with water, bring to a boil and add salt. Heat up vegetable oil in a pan, add the garlic. Keep on medium heat. Boil your rapini for a few minutes and then transfer into the pan with a slotted spoon (make sure you remove as much water as possible). Add the gnocchi to the rapini water, they will only take a few minutes to cook. When they float they’re ready. Your rapini will be ready at the same time (add salt - to taste - to the rapini at this point if needed). Strain the gnocchi and add them to the pan. Mix everything up, drizzle with olive oil.