Food & Love

I’ve been working on planning meals and eating beauty. This week went delightfully well apart from Wednesday - the day I felt absolutely exhausted and didn’t bother with much at all. I’ve discovered some things in just this week that I’d always known, but hadn’t really considered much recently.

1. So much of my desire to shape lovely meals is one of love. I am more than delighted to see my husband’s appreciation of the right food on the the right plate and here his excited appraisal of some new mingling of flavor. It’s such a joy, and we connect over plates and plates of good food, well arranged, in a way we don’t over rushed meals or even dinners out. This evening it was just delightful to linger over glasses of vino verde (my ever-affordable, and always amazing Gazela) mingled with Elderflower presse while Yarrow took her time enjoying dessert. The love that comes through food is something I’ll never really get over needing.
2. I love to allow Yarrow the joy of eating and drinking from the same dishes her parents use - it, I think, fits well with her personality, which is concerned and attentive at best; and it gives her such a sense of pride an accomplishment. That’s one reason she had her own Elderflower presse (mingled with water, not wine) in a cordial glass tonight, the other, obvious, reason is that cordial glasses look better paired with wine glasses than baby cups do..and looks are pretty important to me..probably too important.
3. The sense of rhythm that meals - all laid out and prepared in advance - give me is so nourishing to my spiritual life, which needs rhythm to thrive, and is often starved for it because, as much as I love cultivating rhythm, I’m just as likely to pull up everything I’ve started and reseed the entire thing..enthusiastic is the nicest word for it, but certainly not the only one. My meal rhythms have kept me focused, honest, and have started to bring some order too thoughts that have grown wild.

Tonight we had salads, butternut squash ravioli in arugula cream-sauce, and for dessert: nectarines and chocolate cream. It was delightful..and pretty easy, considering the salads were basically just lettuce, red onion, almonds, and the first radishes from our garden; and arugula is really going to need to be in pretty much everything for the next month, as we planted tons of it! The chocolate cream was easy as well, I was inspired by something in this month’s The Simple Things magazine, but I didn’t have any berries yet, and I didn’t think their Lemon Possett would go with nectarines, so I put a tablespoon of butter and an ounce of unsweetened chocolate in a pan to melt both, added about a cup of cream, one egg (but only because we have so many..I think it’d work beautifully without the egg) and about 1/3 cup Turbinado sugar. I stirred it with a fork the whole time (and if you add the egg -beat it first and don’t add it to hot cream!! Make sure the creams just been mixed in and the pan is off the burner!) and then, when everything was decently mixed and melted, and whipped it with my aero-latte..but if you just have a whisk that would work just as well. It thickened pretty nicely on the stove and had to be spooned into the serving glasses, then topped and decorated with nectarine slices. We loved it!

We’ll see how next week goes - I’m hoping to add some small soups the dinner menu, and get together enough scrap wood to bake a couple times this week. With all the rain, my oven’s been languishing a bit, and I’d really like to wake it up with some bread and cake and popovers!