Pine Nut Rissoles, Lasagna Love, and Giving Back

I was busy, and I should have been working or making Pine Nut Rissoles, but instead I sat in my car crying.

I had just delivered a lasagna to a mother of three who had recently broken her foot. With her youngest child’s medical needs requiring weekly trips to Atlanta, she had a lot on her plate. She was so grateful for the lasagna, and I was grateful for the chance to make it for her.

But it was also a crazy time for me.

We were in the middle of tech rehearsals. My trunk was full of video tiles. I needed to race to the theater. I certainly didn’t have time to make a lasagna.

And yet, there I sat in my car, crying because I had.

Back in July, after I saw a friend post about concerns over possible SNAP benefit cuts, that friend shared a link to Lasagna Love. It is a nonprofit that began during the early days of COVID and connects volunteers who make and deliver lasagnas with families who sign up to receive one. You can read more about it, request a lasagna, or volunteer here.

I grew up eating and making lasagna, so volunteering was a no-brainer. I had just moved to a new town in Tennessee and did not know my way around well enough to commit to something like Meals on Wheels. Lasagna Love filled my need to give back.

Over the last twenty-some-odd years, I have volunteered with different organizations. I have also been on the receiving end of help.

For a time, my kids and I were homeless, and dear friends helped us find a place to live. For a time, I used WIC benefits and drove two towns over to buy groceries because I was afraid I would run into someone I knew. For a time, when my children were little, I did not know how I would afford the next week’s groceries.

I understand that the hardest part of receiving help is often finding the courage to ask. Asking is not easy. Receiving is not easy, either.

Maybe that is why the simple act of delivering a lasagna made me cry. It was never just a pan of pasta, cheese, and sauce. It was a few hours of one family’s life made a little easier. It was someone saying, without needing the perfect words, I see that things are hard right now. Let me help.

I wanted to count that lasagna as this week’s cookbook recipe, but that would not have been fair. So when I got home, I pulled out the cookbook and realized I would be making something far less delicious than one of my lasagnas: Pine Nut Rissoles.

What surprised me about this recipe was the use of pine nuts. That seemed extravagant for the early 1930s. Perhaps the Great Depression was just beginning, and they were less of a specialty item than they are now, but I cannot imagine pine nuts were cheap then, either.

After hunting through the expansive nut section at the grocery store, I finally asked someone where they were. “Oh, they are in the Italian section,” she said.

My response was simply, “Okay?”

Once I located them, I was taken aback by the $14 price tag for about two cups. But I threw them in my cart anyway. I had committed to Pine Nut Rissoles, and apparently, I was going to see this expensive experiment through.

The recipe also called for two seasonings I could not find: Savita and Summer Savory. I learned that Savita was likely an old savory flavoring paste, so after consulting the self-described foodie at my local health food store, I walked away with Marmite instead—a thick, tar-like yeast extract that was also, as it turns out, expensive.

The recipe instructed me to make my favorite pie crust. I used puff pastry, because I have no favorite pie-crust recipe and puff pastry seemed like it might give these little rissoles a fighting chance.

All in all, this was not an inexpensive recipe.

I expected them to be better than they were. Maybe it was the puff pastry. Maybe it was the pine nuts. Maybe it was the Marmite, which has a very strong personality. Or maybe the high of making and delivering a lasagna gave me unreasonable expectations.

Whatever the reason, they were not good.

They tasted a little like salty sand wrapped in puff pastry.

As I tossed my work into the trash, I thought about the early 1930s and the beginning of the Great Depression. Maybe these recipes made sense in a time when people stretched ingredients, used what they had, and turned a few pantry staples into a filling meal. Maybe Pine Nut Rissoles were meant to be economical, comforting, or just different enough to make a difficult week feel less repetitive. But standing there with a $14 bag of pine nuts, an expense jar of Marmite I’ll never use, and a tray of salty sand pastries, I wasn’t feeling the historical romance of it all.

I was just grateful that earlier in the day, I had made something I knew, loved, and trusted to turn out well. Something warm, familiar, and worth sharing.

A lasagna will never solve everything. It cannot fix a broken foot, erase the exhaustion of weekly medical travel, or take away the fear of not having enough. But sometimes it can make dinner one less thing to worry about.

And sometimes that is enough.