About once a week, for my entire upbringing, my mother would prepare a very simple side of pasta with a sweet, buttery tomato sauce. Usually she used elbow macaroni pasta, because usually a small bowl of tomato pasta would be served alongside tuna macaroni salad, our standard Catholic fish-on-Fridays family meal. Mom would just make extra macaroni and stir in the tomato sauce for it. She did this because my dad requested it, and he wanted it because that’s what his mother in Minnesota used to make for him. Oddly, the hot buttery tomato pasta was, and still is, a perfect taste complement to the cool, crunchy, acidic tuna salad.

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