2. Top Ten List of meals you've made with love for someone or were made with love, for you.

I don’t really enjoy cooking and my tactic is to teach the little I know to my partner and have him cook for me. I usually only cook if I am depressed but I love to eat other people’s cooking:
1) Having my grandmother cook plates especially for me (pasta burro e parmigiano) on Christmas eve (la Vigilia) since I don’t eat fish and tradition has it that only fish plates are served.
2) Requesting my favorite meal on my birthday to my mother every year which consisted of fettine panate e patatine fritte (breaded cutlets and homemade fries) with the grand finale of Betty Crocker chocolate cake with fudge frosting (these mixes were very hard to come by in the 80’s in Italy).
3) Making croccantino with my father and sister as a child. It consists of melting sugar, adding hazelnuts and putting it on the cold marble windowsill to settle before chopping it in bits. It was particularly good when the hazelnuts were still slightly warm.
4) Having merenda (mid-day snack for children) in Belmonte (a town in the country) of bread (pane casareccio) and nutella. Or if I was really lucky getting my friend Caterina’s grandmother to warm up a fettina (slice of meat) from lunch in oil and then warm the bread in the same oil and make a sandwich.
5) Celebrating Thanksgiving in Rome every year and having my mother make tortellini in brodo (in chicken broth) and turkey with fabulous roast potatoes that stick to the pan that I would later scrape out.
6) During my childhood, my father would come home on Sunday evenings and make pizza from scratch. I would help him knead the dough and decorate the pizza. The whole house would have a reassuring smell of pizza every Sunday night.
7) Going to Brookline to eat kosher food (I remember the schnitzels) every Saturday after sundown for a year when I was dating a Jewish guy that turned orthodox on me and I had adapted for love.
8) Cooking pans and pans of lasagna in my pajamas when I was depressed and pining to leave Boston to go back to Rome.
9) Inviting my parents and my sister for the first Christmas outside our family home to my house and taking hours to peel “puntarelle” (a hearty chicory that you serve with a garlic and oil) by hand vs. buying them cleaned and cut.
10) Eating special spaghetti Bolognese cooked by my English boyfriend for his kids and me, watching “Chitty, chitty bang bang” DVD.