pomegranatesandpaper

Newsletter 13: To The Dogs

In the spirit of a Very Famous Blogger, I have decided to write monthly s whenever I feel like it newsletters tp my children  the dogs.

Dear Cucciolo and Bella Sera,

Where has your first year of life gone, Cucch? And Bella, you've only been here since March, but it is like you were always here. In fact, I can't remember life without either of you. 

But I do remember MORNINGS without both of you. 

I remember when we used alarm clocks. And occasionally overslept. Or stayed in our pajamas and drank coffee and read the papers in bed.

Sometimes when we go downstairs to let  you out of your crates, it's so dark that we're not sure if the black dog is actually in her black crate. Of course, we know you are in your crate, Cucch, because you have alerted us to that fact since 4:00 a.m. What a good timekeeper you have turned out to be!

((Speaking of the crates, I really enjoy the urban edginess that two crates bring to a small dining room. Amidst the antique quarter oak barrister bookcases filled with my great grandmother's china and crystal, the handpainted curved glass side-by-side, and the green bookcases holding my collection of cookbooks and books on Italy and travel, stand the dog crates. The smelly, huge dog crate and the smelly, mid-sized dog crate.  With their very cutting edge steel feeding bowls and vintage chewed bones. But the glazed chintz raspberry hand-sewn drapes really pop against the black!))

We hope that Architectural Digest will feature us in the coming year.

Your hair, your toys, your bones, all add that English country home patina to our already cluttered house. The leashes by the front door, the chewed socks under the ouch, the grit of biscuit crumbs in the kitchen, and the giant red plastic water bowls and puddles all over the kitchen floor mean that the dogs are home.

We hope someday to actually see the sofa cushions and the toile scatter pillows on the sofa and not scattered on the floor. But, after all, they are scatter pillows, no?

Dad and I finally had to pull some tough love and insist that you sleep in your crates. So Daddy lugged your giant crates downstairs into a corner of the kitchen. But you cried all night. So Daddy lugged your giant crates upstairs into the spare bedroom and Mommy was scared that you would bark all day because you were used to sleeping in the dining room. So Daddy lugged the giant crates back into the dining room and Mommy  just sighed over and decided that she didn't really have to have company actually sit at the dining room table and Daddy said some bad words and took some pills for his back.

But you do sleep in them. Until the moon sets at least.

When Daddy lets you out of the crates in the morning middle of the night,  six mornings middle of the nights out of seven (Mommy is so good hearted as to relieve him on Sunday mornings...), you are very well-behaved and run back into the crates while he gets your food. After the ten seconds it takes you both to swallow the bowl whole, you play a fun game: Run Up The Stairs and Wake Up Mommy By Jumping On Her Head, Pulling Her Hair Out By Her Roots And Strangling Her With the Covers.

After you have licked Mommy's face, neck, arms, hands and any other body part not trapped under the sheets by two 100 pound hairy bodies, you leave her alone as soon as Daddy opens his sock drawer.

As soon as you hear the creak of the sock drawer opening, you spit out the clean clothes that Daddy laid out on the bed before getting you (silly Daddy!) and you patch out on Mommy's rear end and stand at attention at the end of the bed, waiting for The Monster to appear.

Sometimes The Monster stays in Daddy's sock drawer. But if it is a dark, rainy morning, and Daddy needs The Monster to see if he has two black socks in his hand or a black sock and a blue sock and he turns on The Monster, you know your job is to protect Daddy and jump off the bed and attack The Monster, knocking it right out of Daddy's hand and under the bed. 

Then, sometimes Daddy plays hide and seek and runs into the bathroom to finish getting dressed. Sometimes he tries to crawl back under the covers and cry. Silly Daddy!   Daddy likes all this fun right before he has to leave for work. I don't know why he leaves for work earlier and earlier. He is missing so much fun!

My favorite part of the day is evening when both of you decide that the only place to be is with me. On the bed. With bones. Or rather, one bone that you continually steal from the other, leap-frogging over the laptop (incoming!) and landing with your hundred pound weight on my ankle bones or varicose veins.While continuously farting because you've eaten so many bones.

Mr. Pom is so lonely downstairs watching the ball game. I offer to send you guys down there. I suggest that you guys in fact go down there. I throw your bones over the stairwell railing. I drag you by your collars. I slam my door. I turn up the TV not to hear your whining. I ignore the paws scratching under the door. 

Finally, I give in, you manage to slam the door open.

Daddy just came upstairs. Bedtime for dogs! he says.  You are naughty and  ignore him completely. Time to go out! he says. Oh look, you are fast asleep! Daddy tries to get a corner of the covers. Daddy says,  Get off the freaking bed!  You snore more loudly and pass a little gas. Mommy sneaks out of the bed, tiptoes downstairs, goes into the kitchen, and opens the refrigerator door.

You magically appear!

Mommy throws a handful of kibble into each crate. Both of you run right into your little crates. Mommy throws the locks.

Silly dogs.

Will you never learn?

See you for the four o'clock feeding.

I'm Back!

Hey, guess what?

My camera and I are finally in the same room at the same time with the laptop! And everything is charged! So.....here's Johnny!

During our travels this summer, we woke up early one Sunday morning in Baltimore and The Teen took us of in search of the Farmer's Market. She'd been there earlier in the summer and had called me from it to say I would love it.

And I did!

We have Farmer's Markets around here, of course, but the suburban ones tend to be pretty small and standard fare. Of course, there's always the Union Square market, but you don't always want to drive 30 minutes into Manhattan to buy some fruit.

This was an adventure, beginning with trying to find it based upon The Teen's sense of direction and navigation skills, which are generally...nil - and she'd be the first to tell you.

It was worth all the wrong turns and the mistaken in getting on the parkway when we realized that the market was under the parkway and we were speeding away from it.

Lookie what you can buy at six a.m. on a crisp Sunday morning!

Plenty of peaches that tasted like the essence of peach, an inhalation of summer, heat, and bees. Like nothing you can buy in a supermarket, ever.  The breads were overwhelming; those are Calamata olives and pumpkin seeds. 

Strange, exotic house plants, looking more at home in a rainforest than in a grimey parking lot under the expressway. I'm not really a fan of houseplants and especially ones with huge elephant ears.

The Pomegranates were all smug and condescending about the lobsters and all like, "buy lobsters here when we can get them off the boat on the Cape??"

Now Bison, that's another story....oh, no, wait - where do they raise bison in the Chesapeake area?  I'm sure it was great but we didn't have an ice chest and the heat was building as the morning wore on.

The smell of smoke hung heavy in the air and grew thicker as we walked further into the market.  Our noses led us further and further into the crowd, following their lead like dogs on the hunt.

We ended up on a long line, waiting to get breakfast. I can't remember another time when I had smoked breakfast on a roll with hot sauce at 9 a.m. Especially under an overpass.

I didn't see the omelette truck until too late. It would have made a great side to the brisket.

There was a big crowd up ahead.

This is how I knew we were in the south: the crowd around the bean man was bigger than the crowd around the fried doughnut man. 

You have your crowders, your speckled butter beans, your limas,  and of course,

your okra, which I never developed a taste for despite our years in Memphis. Though a neighbor did make some fried okra that I remember eating like popcorn one hot night.

Oh, but what a pair of melons! And for sale! 

I bought me a Canary Melon. The vendor said it was a cross between a canteloupe and a honeydew, but it really just tasted like a honeydew. Maybe I didn't wait for it to ripen enough.

Our stomachs full, we slowed down to take in all the nonfood items.

Aren't these plant stakes gorgeous? I wanted to buy a armful but since I was already lugging ten pounds of Roma tomatoes, my family just dragged me past them.

We thought these were lovely and really wanted to take one home. Gave me a great idea though and after the next storm, I'm heading into the woods to find  some tree trunks to plant. 

The Teen made sure we bought a bagful of giant cookies before we left, so we bypassed the doughnut man and started back to the car. With my arms loaded down with my Roma tomatoes, I ended up quite a ways behind The Teen and Mr. Pom.  As I slowly walked with laden arms, I had plenty of time to reflect on a summer well spent. We'd traveled up and down the east coast. Had lobsters and oysters and fresh corn on the Cape, crabs and corn in Maryland, fire grilled pizza in the city, and gelato everywhere.   Drank cappuccinos watching the sunrise and the sunset. Toured colleges, moved our son into his new home, job, and city, was reunited on the Cape with the whole family, and spent many a night sitting on the porch, quietly reading by the firefly lights and drinking wine.  

It is sad to see summer go, but to everything there is a season.  Time to go home and make vats of marinara to freeze until a cold snowy winter night when the family comes home to the smell of tomato sauce and basil and the sweet and tangy red sauce revives our winter-worn souls with a taste of summer.

Smatterings

Mid-week and the weather is more akin to August than September. Hot and humid with a dash of muggy on the side, just enough for a nice dish of headache with a side of hair frizzies.

Grumpy? Not really, just trying to get through the week with a sinus infection. I tried to ignore it for about ten days, hoping it would go away with antibiotics, but it's come back full force and I am doing things like going to bed at 8:00 and waking up at 2:00 with a pounding head.

This in turn, makes me very lethargic and hungry - that weak, shaky feeling that demands to be fed carbs and sugars. So suddenly, I am eating things I haven't consumed in over two years.

And that makes me grumpy. 

Has anyone but me noticed that my last three posts have been about food? Good grief, I'd better watch out or I'll have a closetful of nothing-fits.

In other news, Mr. Pom and I are enjoying a beautiful evening on the porch. Candles and fairy lights are lit. The air, declares The Teen, smells like summer. The puppoli are getting "furminated" by The Teen,  after she and I gave them lick-and-a-promise doggie baths in the backyard after work. This consists of me spraying them with the hose while The Teen holds the leash with one hand and shampoos with the other. Labs aren't supposed to get baths too often, but when they come home doggie day care, they often stink to high heaven.

Still crazy here with bathroom reno bids, frantic calls, emails, and faxes about various issues about the Cape Cod house (HOW much to install gas??), getting ready for Art Is, which always coincides with the latest magazine submission (as if I didn't know all the dates a year in advance and did NOT have to volunteer to make 75 journal covers....), and trying to get organized for The Teen's college visits and college apps.

Calgon take me away!

Or at least remind me to buy a chocolate bar on the way home.

Time to Eat

Let's face it: Any time is Time to Eat time. At least for me.

But the change of seasons do evoke an appetite to have what we haven't had for a year. Though truth be told, I think we pretty much eat a lot of the same things year round. Living in New York, we have the advantage of great restaurants, incredible food sources like Farmer's Markets and specialty stores,

Right now, the stores are full of the fixings for brisket and potato pancakes (latkes)  and you don't have to be Jewish to crave some pastrami on rye with mustard, a kosher hot dog, or some potato kugel.  I love potato kugel - what could be better than a dish that combines potatoes, custard, and sugar?

Up the street, the Greek festival is in full swing and the smell of frying dough and barbecuing meat fills the air.  The orchards have apples, pumpkins, pies of every kind, jelly and caramel apples, and smoked turkey legs.

Soon it will be time for Oktoberfests and beer and bratwurst will be on the menus.

So let me tell you, it is not easy eating right and staying away from high fat, high carb food.

 I so enjoyed all your comments about what fall is like in your parts of the country, that I am dying to know what fall foods are specialties that you look forward to eating.

Today I have roasted half a  turkey on the grill, which we will make into sandwiches. I made little stacked towers of fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes from the Farmer's Market as the primo course.

We were having sweet potato pie. But instead, Cucciolo had sweet potato pie. Enuf said.

Fortunately, The Teen brings home bags of baked goods from her job and I am defrosting and heating up tiny Bundt cakes - red velvet, lemon poppy, and cranberry. The air smells like Long Island Sound. It is cool enough to wear my favorite long-sleeved denim shirt but warm enough to have on my magenta and gold Havaianas, and I think the porch sofa is calling my name for a little nap.

But first, The Empress is coming after church for brunch.

I know I will be hungry during the week when I don't have time to cook much. I made lentil soup and have enough leftover for dinner tomorrow night.

You need to leave a comment with your favorite autumn meals or dishes so I can drool over the monitor at night and nibble on my celery sticks.

Sweater Weather

I can stick my head in the sand, but my butt would be cold.

A rather inelegant way of saying, the seasons have changed.

I know they've changed because

• I put on a sweater and blouse I haven't worn since last year and "trouser socks" - how dorky does that sound? But that's what they call them at Lord & Taylor.

• It sounds as though rifle shots are cracking in my driveway as thousands of tiny acorns hit the car and pavement from my neighbor's gigantic oak tree.

• I frantically bought a pair of boots on sale because they always sell out of the wide calves and me, I need the wide calves.

• Mr. Pom had a gleam in his eye as he fished out the electric blanket from the spare room closet and put it in his closet. Just in case.

• The dogs are on prancing around all day and conking out early at night.

• I am cooking up a storm. Sunday, I made tomato gravy with sausage, my own meatballs, and top round. Then, I made Julia Child's Beef Bourguignon cause all my friends and I are raving about the bb featured in Julie and Julia. Don't you just want to hug Julia Child in that movie? Don't you wish you were Julia and living in Paris with Stanley Tucci  Paul Child?

• Only it wasn't Julia Child's "BB", but a blend  of her's and my mother's beef stew. Julia's  recipe is incredible but has about ten steps more than I can possibly commit to. 

• So I stole the best parts, like adding bacon, liberal amounts of Cabernet, and more herbs. I stuck to browning the meat in the flour and not by itself and THEN in the flour. I did add some of the butter she suggests, but I also added small potatoes and a lot more carrots and peas.  

• We still have a little left - would you  like some?

• Tonight, I came home and made lentil soup. I remembered that I still had some bacon, so while the lentils were doing a fast boil, I sauteed the bacon with sliced carrots, diced celery, and garlic. If only Mr Pom hadn't had the rest of the Cabernet to drink, it would have made a fine addition.

• And the geese are flying overhead each morning and night. Their raucous honks remind me of our first home, which was up the street from a lovely small lake. Someday I'll write about the gentle neighborhood we lived in with our little kids and our large vegetable garden and huge maple tree that blazed crimson each fall. 

• I bought some sugar pumpkins at the supermarket and cut a bunch of hydrangeas to dry.

• I am unseasonably wishing to make Thanksgiving dinner. Already. Or at least a turkey on the grill. With mashed potatoes and stuffing. Oh, and of course, an apple pie. 

• I suddenly feel the need to buy shocks of hay and dried corn.

Let the games begin!

10 Reasons Why I Couldn't Write a Post

 

1.     I had to look up 5 cases for court tomorrow and the connection from home is SO slow.

2.    Mr. Pom and I had an argument  about where to put the giant dog crates.

3.    The giant dogs wanted to be petted.

4.     The giant dogs wanted to have a fabric doughtnut-like Frisbee thrown in the house a 100 times for them to fetch.

5.    The giant Bella Sera dog needed to be held in my ;ap and petted like a lap dog because she never gets the primary attention away from her son, The Prince of Dogs.

6.    MM needed someone to unload to about his new job.

7.    Mr. Pom needed someone to unload to about his new job.

8.    I needed someone to unload to about my job. 

9.    The mail had the following new catalogues: Anthropologie, Ann Taylor Loft, Fossil,

and Talbots.

10.    The Teen had to register for the SATs tonight and I had to remind her. Again. And again. And again.

I rest my case. And this post.

Slowly I Turn

My family says I walk too slowly.

In fact, my husband says that I walk more slowly than anyone he has ever met.

Last weekend, the three of us were walking along a street in Baltimore. The Teen and I were talking and just looking around and Mr. Pom was a few steps ahead. Every five feet, he'd stop and turn and wait for us to catch up those few steps and then begin again. After about three times of this, I said, "Stop! You're making me nervous!". He laughed. I just can't go fast enough for him.

In general, that seems to be our new marital pattern. Mr. Pom is the most responsible person that I have ever met. He knows exactly what he has to do in the day, whether it is for work, chores, or dogs, and he cannot relax until he has done them all. 

At which point, he collapses into a baseball or nap coma.

He is in his element right now. We are negotiating on buying a cottage on the cape; we are designing a bathroom redo; we are looking for a new car because my lease is up; we are moving children to and fro; we are looking at colleges with The Teen.

But me.

Oh, I am less and less a responsible person. I do like to laze in bed most days, which is absolutely impossible between work and dogs.

I like to spend long hours reading, or sitting on the porch and staring at the trees. Or figuring out what I have to figure out. Whatever that might be.

It's hard to carve time for myself these days. I will admit that to all of you.

So when he finally forces me off the couch and out to walk the dogs, I dawdle. I breathe. I look around. And I take a lot of pictures.

And pictures require stopping, looking, composing, framing, and snapping.

 

For example, if you walk quickly, you may notice that you are walking on a very lovely street (notice Mr. Pom and The Teen half a block ahead of me),

 

but will you see this tree full of hearts?

 

Or realize that if you could wave the cars away, this New York City block hasn't changed since the 19th century?

And if you weren't half a block behind your family, they never would allow you to run up these steps and and touch this century old wood and wonder if Edith Wharton's skirts ever brushed this portal.

 

Sometimes, you have to pause to take it all in. To admire the architecture, the history, and the beauty of the place.

 

And wonder how the heck they got it in there??

 

If you need me today, I will be out.

 

Taking very slow walks, looking for trees that need to be seen, touched, and photographed before their leaves fall, before the snow covers the patina of lichens and bark that so slowly accumulated over years and years.

New Beginnings

The first day of school - I have butterflies and I'm not even in school and The Teen doesn't start until Friday. But how I love new beginnings and this fall so many doors are opening for us and beckoning us to enter and begin a new journey.

Simple things, like The Teen learning how to navigate the train and taxi into the city and being able to go in on her own when she has art assignments to visit galleries or just hang out with friends.

My oldest niece began college this year and I will miss her smiling face at Starbucks in the early morning when she queued up for coffee before her Chinese class. We had a lot of laughs when we got to videochat on the laptop with her and her family when they were here last week.

Speaking of laughs, you have to laugh when your college graduate is calling you non-stop after his first full day of work, full of questions like "how many dependents do I declare" (gosh, none except yourself that we know of) and "what the heck is an HMO?" and "OMG! I don't get paid for three weeks!"  A first job really is much more than the sum of its parts.

Here in Pomegranate world we are tidying up the garden, noticing how much energy Bella Sera has now that the heat is gone (black dogs don't do well in the sun), and have already shifted into more complex meals than a piece of grilled fish and roasted asparagus.

I brought home ten pounds of Roma tomatoes and made marinara on Sunday, so we are trying out a new imported pasta from Italy with my gravy and fresh ricotta cheese from the deli. I will mix in the remains of the baked eggplant and sprinkle it all with fresh Parmigiano cheese and the last of the basil from the garden. Sister #5 couldn't sleep last night so she got up and made tomatoes roasted with garlic, which they are having over pasta tonight. Must be something in the air, this craving for pasta and tomato!

Uh oh - the pooches are home from their run in the park with The Teen. Gotta go get their dinner on, or uh, out of the dog food container. They are so cute. The dog food is in the back pantry whenever one of us goes down the basement, they stand expectantly by the pantry door, tails wagging in anticipation in case we should happen to emerge with a bowl of dog food in our hands.  If it is time to eat, when I walk out with the bowls of food, Bella Sera quickly lips her lips and Cucciolo turns on a dime and flies into his crate, where he is fed.

If only my kids were so trained.

Laboring Not

A lovely Cape Cod cottage...and no, not ours.

I feel like I haven't sat down and had a proper chat with you for the entire  summer!

The Pomegranates have been on the run since early May, when our summer of milestone events began with Mystery Man's graduation, my cousin's 40th birthday party, MM's graduation party, frequent trips to the Cape to look for houses, trips back and forth to Maryland to transport The Teen to and from her summer art program,  our Cape vacation with all the kids, including The Princess, and other family, began the process of having a bathroom redone, more family gatherings to say good bye to MM, and now we have just gotten home from moving him  to his new place in Maryland for his first job as a mechanical engineer. 

I may be forgetting something.

It has been a joyous, busy summer that has moved at the speed of light.  I am ready, more than ready, for the nesting of fall. It is time to put away the summer chairs, the spring decorations, and start cooking stews and making pies.  Shortly, we will begin taking some weekends away, though, to take The Teen to look at colleges.  We also hope to visit MM every few weeks, and if all goes well - we are only half way there - we will be traveling to the Cape.

So this Labor Day, I am not laboring in any way. We are hanging out at home, eating all sorts of food that we brought back from an incredible Farmer's Market (more about that later), puttering in the garden, catching up on the laundry, mowing the lawn, putting away the seashell  tablecloth in the dining room, and The Teen is finishing up a summer's worth of art projects.

Now we are going to watch The Haunting In Connecticut. The only way we can watch scary movies in this house is in the middle of a very sunny day, with the dogs noisily chewing bones, and everyone in the same room. We are eating foccaccia covered with green and black olives and dipped into the marinara sauce I made from 10 pounds of Roma tomatoes from Maryland.

We miss our big kids and we feel a big ache in our hearts, but we know that are doing exactly what they are supposed to be and we hope we've given them strong wings with which to fly.

In the meantime, we will distract ourselves by scaring the bejeebers out of ourselvs and get ready for fall.

Tell me how you are spending this honeyed last day of summer vacation.

Silver Palate

I was very sad to learn that Sheila Lukins, the co-author of The Silver Palate Cookbooks, passed away this weekend at 66 years of age.  I treasure my Silver Palate Cookbooks as they were my introduction to A Romantic Life. 

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I never learned to cook more than scrambled eggs at home and when I moved out and had to learn to cook, I usually just picked up the phone and called my mother or my aunt and asked "how-to's" as in how to make meatloaf, lasagna, chicken cutlets, beef stew, mashed potatoes, in other words, basic home cooking.

My aunt gave me handwritten recipes on her personalized  cards and my mom gave me The Joy of Cooking and The Better Homes and Garden Cookbook, which were good workhorses that taught me how many minutes to broil a steak or hardboil an egg, or how to make 7 minute frosting, how to sautee and why to leave the oven door cracked open when you used the broiler.

In the 80's, cooking shows were either stodgy affairs or very silly, like The Galloping Gourmet, though I did enjoy The Frugal Gourmet and still make his baked, carmelized eggplant (though his earnest Christian cooking became rather suspect after he was accused of being a pedophile...).  Julia Child seemed so beyond my capabilities that I don't recall watching her very often.

The Joy of Cooking was Donna Reed, all sensible meals and pearls with shirtwaist dresses. It taught the basics you needed to know to sustain a family - maintenance cooking - with lots of fancy dishes that earned their street cred in the gelatin-obsessed 50's. It was your mother's Bible.

The Silver Palate was young, sophisticated,  upwardly mobile, international gourmet food. No Donna Reed opened the door to the Upper East Side brownstone I imagined the authors lived in, complete with a marble pedestal dining room table surrounded by lucite chairs and a house in the Hamptons furnished with stripped pine and linen slipcovers. It was like borrowing the recipe cards from your old college roomate who had married well (rich) and  invited you to her house in Bedford as the spare couple to round out a dinner party. 

It was the most romantic cookbook I'd ever seen. It was nothing like the dusty, serious books that lined the pantry shelves at my mother's house. I carried it around for months, leaving it on my night table to dip into as the seasons progressed, turning to it each fall to select the recipes I would make for Thanksgiving, reading the sidebar notes about entertaining and being a hostess and making "little bites" like cheese straws and olives.

No stodgy chapters entitled "meats" and "vegetables for them. Instead it was divided into marvelous categories like "Opening Nights"; "The Splurge of Spring"; and "Easy Living"; "Comforting Conclusions" .  And the recipes - brie in phyllo!  Chestnut and potato puree! Spaghetti with oil and garlic! Creme brulee! Bread pudding! Bacon bites! Chicken stuffed with garlic and lemons! Ratatouille with 25 cloves of garlic!  Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting! And of course, Chicken Marbella - chicken, vinegar, prunes, olives, wine, and brown sugar?? Yum!

And the ingredients - raspberry vinegar? Champagne mustard? Chanterelles? Curry? Kiwis? Mango chutney?

Oh! Youth! Fantasy! Fat and calories!! Were we ever that innocent and fresh- faced as gourmands again?

It was my first lifestyle cookbook - promising  that an enjoyable, easy, romantic life was just a matter of mastering a new dish like butternut squash soup or chicken with figs. 

No boring illustrations of cuts of meat or scientific photos of candy thermometers here. Instead charming pen and ink illustrations grace the pages.

My favorite recipe quickly became "Pasta Primavera ", which I made with fresh peas, mushrooms, and a sprinkling of pignoli nuts.  My book opens automatically like a part in the hair to the Chestnut Apple stuffing that became my signature Thanksgiving dish.  Christmas morning featured French toast with caramel pecan sauce and bacon broiled in brown sugar.  I adored the apple and onion tart and longed for the day when I could find a heart mold to make my beloved Couer de Creme for Valentine's Day.

Stained with grease, splattered with wine, dog-eared, and swollen with age, the Silver Palate Cookbooks are the palimpsets of my wide-eyed formative years of A Romantic Life of entertaining friends and family, first holidays, first dinner parties, and making life a festive, domestic pleasure.

Thank you, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso for your elegant and accessible recipes that inspired me to believe that I might once attend an after-opera supper or a Christmas ball, a picnic to celebrate the blooming of the daffodils, or a day at the races. Blessings to you for introducing me to the unlikely pairings of prunes and chicken, of using 25 cloves of garlic (to the horror of The Empress), and sending me on a search that ultimately led to learning to make my own mock creme fraiche (lemon juice and yogurt, if I remember correctly.)

After all, how could I not fall in love with cookbooks that not only presented delicious recipes, but quoted Virginia Woolf:

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

Salud!