“Coming to my table” certainly has a profound meaning today. Empty nesters like me unexpectedly have a full house and most days, the family dinner hour is all we have to look forward to. It’s the silver lining in this COVID shut down; a time to come home, be home and be together at the table.  For our family, a classic meal that offers comfort is any dish, which includes pasta. So I went back to my roots just a week into our quarantine and reached back into our memory bank from when the children were young. We decided to make pasta together and the rewards were rich.

Making pasta is a tradition in our home dating back to when the children were in elementary school.  End of July marked the halfway point of summer, and for us that meant a two-week visit with my sweet nieces from Salt Lake City. We all looked forward to pasta making day when we would take out the Atlas pasta machine, a treasured wedding gift from 1993, and plan our feast. We always made the same dish, year after year, tagliatelle with homemade pesto, which required gathering a basketful of fresh basil from our Farmer’s Market in the morning. Having 5 children around the kitchen counter, wearing bathing suits and aprons, covered in flour dust and eager to take a turn at cranking the machine was such fun, giggling all the while we were working. Seeing the sheets of pasta stretch out through the machine and then, when just thin enough, pass through the pasta cutter for long strands of tagliatelle was magical. We would get creative in how we would hang the pasta to “dry” while we made our pesto, using laundry racks and rolling pins hoisted around the kitchen. How I loved those days.

Recreating that memory with my children last week was just as enriching. Now, nearly 10 years after those special summer visits with my nieces, as we dusted off the pasta machine, we were transformed to that feeling of summer, that precious time of family together enjoying a project around the kitchen. This time the rewards were just as gratifying. Mimi and Charlie worked the egg into the flour with a bit of extra virgin olive oil, and kneaded it until it needed to rest. A bottle of our favorite chianti was uncorked as we piped in Italian cooking music to fill the air. The mood was light and cheerful and working the pasta dough was cathartic. Feeling purposeful now is key, and as we worked though the afternoon we knew we would reach our goal of our Cacio e Pepe feast. Grating fresh Parmigiana Regiano to the rind, cracking a bowl of fresh nose tickling peppercorns and waiting to take our turn at the pasta machine made the afternoon float by beautifully. And what a feast we had, cheerfully toasting a job well done.

 This is certainly not an easy time for anyone and the challenges of what we are facing are profound. Of course the kids would rather be resuming their college existence far from home, and I find myself craving the normalcy of my day-to-day cafe life. Yet, at this moment in time, I am reminded that we have been given a gift. A gift of time together; time for lasting memories to be made and mostly a time for our leisurely meals around the table together to resume.  How lucky are we to savor this moment.