Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and it’s always been an interesting holiday around Casa McGee because neither of our kids likes the traditional turkey-stuffing-potatoes-etc. meal.
For just about all of their pre-college childhoods, Cari and I forged ahead, anyway, making or buying a full turkey dinner and asking them to eat as much as they could each year. Then I think it was right before or maybe during their college years that we finally gave up and started doing non-traditional meals on Thanksgiving. (I remember one year we ordered pizza the night before and waited until Thanksgiving to eat it!)
This year, our non-traditional meal was spaghetti and meatballs…but not just any spaghetti and meatballs. The meatballs came from Francesco’s Hole in the Wall, a Chicago-area eatery and now sold frozen at our local Costco. We really like them.
But the star of the show was the spaghetti!
When Cari and I were in New York City earlier this month, we did a tour of Chelsea Market. In one of the shops, I stumbled upon Pasta Setaro — an authentic pasta imported from Italy. Even though we didn’t get a taste during the tour, it looked really good and the name stuck with me.
When we got home, I found it for sale online — not cheap, but I decided to give it a shot, anyway.
TBH, I was worried that it would taste the same as store-bought pasta, but we all agreed that it was better! It had a more natural taste and a slightly different texture. We haven’t tried the rigatoni yet, but the spaghetti was excellent.
While I was researching this pasta online, I found this CNN video from last year — turns out Setaro is the last artisanal pasta producer in what used to be Italy’s pasta capital. Industrial producers put all the other pasta makers out of business.
That was the icing on the cake … (the sauce on the pasta?) … learning a little more about where our Italian Thanksgiving meal really began.
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