I make my nana’s recipe for filling. She never wrote it down, of course, but I learned by watching and helping her from the time I was a little girl. The first step is setting bread out to get stale for a few days prior to the Big Day. We were going to be away this year leading up to the food preparation, so how was I going to get the slices crispy? Our excursion was a road trip to Canton, Ohio with our nephew and I decided to take three loaves of bread with us. On Monday I took them out of their plastic bags and put them into a large brown bag in the trunk to get stale.
I like to cook and am pretty good at it. I owe that to two people: my mom and my nana. My mom hated to cook but passed on her love of reading to me when I was a very small child and it remains a passion of mine to this day. I stand by my fervent belief that if you can read, you can cook. My nana loved cooking and weeks spent with her when on summer vacation were filled with hours and hours in the kitchen. I will never win Top Chef and everyone’s a football fan on Thanksgiving. But how many people can say their filling has been in the (parking lot of the) Pro Football Hall of Fame?
