Sunday, September 14, 2008

A pleasant day

Yesterday I decided to make grissini again, as they are relatively quick to make and fun to eat. Then I decided that, since woman does not live by breadsticks alone, I should make soup to go with them. Rachael, a girl who does not like 96% of all food, and can detect the slightest taint of some unloved item in her dinner, does not care for soup particularly – unless there is lots of bread to sop it up with. Well, there would be grissini – so the decision was – what soup to make. When a baby, she loved spinach soup, so I decided to make that. I recalled that the très yummy recipe I had used was Julia Child and took all day, while Rebecca had one that was equally good and did not take long at all. However, I had Julia Child and did not have Rebecca’s. Now I am wondering why I thought that Julia’s was so much work, as, while certainly not “kwik ‘n easy,” it was not that much trouble to make either. Dinner was coming along nicely, when I decided to invite the aunties who always have dinner together after church on Saturdays. I reached them as they were about to leave, and since they had been planning to order pizza, they were quite pleased to come. Then, since my aunt Pauline always expects dessert, and since they are old ladies (relative to Rachael, I mean, )I decided to make prune whip – well known as an old lady favorite, and a favorite of mine. Not a favorite of Rebecca, I might add. In fact, she sneers and jokes about folks who eat prune whip, so I always feel a bit rebellious when I make it. (Along with the delightful flavor and texure of prunes, an added frisson!) When they arrived, I was in a bit of a culinary frenzy, and forgot to take a picture, so here is the aftermath of the dinner – teacups. We had a lot of fun, I thought, and since it was a last minute invitation, there was not the usually pre-company anxiety on my part.
Later I plopped into bed, very tired, and when I woke up as Rachael was going to bed, I realized that the characters in book I had just been reading, Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” had were having some sort of complex internet intrigue. “How odd,” I thought. “And in nineteenth century Russia!” Then I realized that I had continued reading in my dreams and would have to reread the last bit this evening, as, of course, there was no internet in nineteenth century Russia.

1 comment:

bex said...

I think my soup is Julia too, from The Way to Cook. It's made similarly to my carrot soup, the one you mistakenly think is like minestrone.