Wallace Pasta

This isn’t so much a recipe as it is a tribute. By the time I lived with the boys on Cherokee Road, Sallie Wallace and I had spent hours and hours together watching Vanderbilt baseball games. She would keep score and fill me in on Cooper’s football training. We would giggle over the girls that would giggle over David. On one baseball road trip to Alabama, she treated a bunch of us to Dreamland where they throw a slab of ribs, a package of white bread (still in the package), and a roll of paper towels onto the table.

When David became my roommate, she became a surrogate mom in Nashville. One night, the four of us were all over at her house for dinner, and she made the easiest, boy-friendly side dish I’d ever seen. From that night on, I might have made Wallace pasta three nights a week for the boys. I once shared the memory with David’s wife, Lauren, who couldn’t believe the boys ate that way. But with football and baseball workouts, they were always trying to gain weight.

1 box of shaped pasta

1 tub of grated parmesan cheese

1 pint of heavy cream

1 stick of butter

~ Boil and drain pasta.

~ Dump the rest of the ingredients into the pasta and mix.

~ That’s it!

Over the course of that year, I started sneaking broccoli or asparagus into the mixture; David would get so mad at me. Someone asked him once if he liked the stems of broccoli, and he answered, “Only when Margy sneaks them into the pasta.”

Years later, I would work with David’s mother at his high school, Christ Presbyterian Academy. It was a bit surreal to have this surrogate mom come over the loud speaker with daily announcements. I miss sneaking upstairs to get a David update or the latest Lakely picture. Now our paths cross intermittently in Nashville, and she always yells, “Come here, so I can hug your neck!” And then it’s as if we’re still sitting in those Hawkins Field bleachers watching David play baseball.