Lasagna, pies are her game plan
For years, Sue Paterno has fed Penn State fans and family, every morsel made from scratch.
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Sue Paterno, wife of the legendary Penn State football coach, may have the toughest pregame routine of all. For home games, the 69-year-old grandmother hits the ground running at 4:30 a.m.
This weekend, for instance, after the Temple vs. Penn State game on Saturday, she will be entertaining 60 guests at the Paternos' ranch-style home, serving her homemade tomato sauce and meatballs, homemade lasagna, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and homemade peach pies - as has been her tradition after each home game for the 44 years that Joe has been head coach.
Sue Paterno has cooked and cooked - and cooked some more - in a seemingly endless stream of games and guests that begins with the first kickoff in the fall and doesn't slow down until the last recruit takes a cookie for the road trip home in late winter.
She's cooked for dignitaries and donors, football players and coaches, family and friends. And every night, she cooks for the most famous man in Pennsylvania sports.
Where others might hire caterers and servers and someone to tend the bar, Paterno has done it all herself, cooking and cleaning - even sewing the tablecloths - while putting family members to work taking coats and pouring drinks.
"When we have people in our house, we want it to be from us," she says. "To make it more personal. . . . I'm a one-man show."
With her 82-year-old husband's retirement date an unanswered question, that show doesn't look like it's closing any time soon.
She sees it as part of the role she took on in becoming Mrs. Joe Paterno in 1962. "The people are fun. It's just part of life. Everything's been: 'OK, this is what we're doing. This is where we go.' "
At times, like this year with four home games in a row, it can be overwhelming, especially on top of her charitable work - Paterno is active in organizing and fund-raising for Special Olympics, the university library that bears the Paterno name, and a planned Catholic student center. She starts prepping for the next postgame party on Sunday morning: "It's a treadmill," she says.
A treadmill she runs with pain lingering after four back surgeries. She swims daily and is taped with the same therapeutic tape made famous by Olympic volleyball player Kerri Walsh.
Her postgame food is simple, but from scratch: During a typical week leading up to the Saturday kickoff of a home game, Paterno has roasted a bushel of sweet peppers and peeled them by hand, prepared pans of lasagna, made dozens of meatballs, breaded chicken fingers for the kids, and baked enough cookies, pies, and cheesecake to send any sweet tooth straight to the dentist.
And when the Beaver Stadium crowds spill out after the game, Paterno is hurrying home to get last-minute things into the oven before some of that crowd shows up at her doorstep. The party at the Paternos' house is just beginning.
It started years ago, when the first family of Pennsylvania football invited a few supporters of Penn State's athletic program for dinner after the games. As the couple became more involved in fund-raising for numerous university and community initiatives, the postgame fetes grew to include dozens of donors, friends and family.
"Joe invites people. It's whomever. You never know who's coming," she says, noting that even in weeks when she hasn't sent out invitations, friends still show up, and she still cooks.
As they arrive at the 1960s-style ranch just blocks from the stadium, the bar - usually manned by one of the Paterno sons - opens in the basement while the family matriarch takes charge in the kitchen she designed in 1995. It's an open room, but she's hemmed in on all sides by green and black counters that double as buffet lines as she begins to pull casseroles out of the double wall ovens and salads out of the fridge.
This weekend, after the Temple game, those counters will hold pans of timbale, a lasagna she makes with homemade crepes instead of pasta. Dessert will include five peach pies made weeks before and frozen. Her signature chocolate bit cookies - a recipe she tinkered with after her mother passed it down - are another dessert staple.
To manage everything, she relies on recipes she can cook earlier in the week and freeze. "You're not a magician. You can't do everything in one day," she says, although spending some time with this fast-talking woman might start to convince you otherwise.
She roughs out plans in the summer, reading some of the dozens of cookbooks that line her pantry shelves and noting page numbers of things she wants to first test out on her "guinea pig" husband before working into a menu.
The summer is also given to canning the 10 bushels of tomatoes she'll go through in a year. Paterno puts up four kinds of sauce, tomato soup, salsa, and jars of tomatoes and peppers that serve as a base for chili.
She has Joe to partially thank for this - pasta is on the menu at the Paterno household at least twice a week, a nod to his Italian American heritage. Her basic sauce, more of a process than a recipe, is his favorite for its plain, smooth quality - tomatoes cranked through a food mill and then cooked down with salt, pepper, sugar, olive oil, and tomato paste, and infused with garlic steeped in a tea-ball. "Joe is easy. Anything I make that's red, he likes."
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