dinner

Careful what you make in your early adult years because, unwittingly, it may become your signature dish for decades -- up until your retirement age and maybe even beyond.

So that I never knew, when I first made breaded chicken cutlets for the little tykes, that I would be making them still now (can you make crunchy chicken, please?). Or that the craze for gnocchi would pass, but risotto would remain a coveted dish forever. Or that the FBI cake (chocolate with whipped cream) would be the go-to birthday cake for years, until it came to be replaced by the chocolate orange almond cake. Or that a party staple would be the Greek shrimp salad with couscous (Gourmet Magazine, 1991). These are not complicated foods -- that's a prerequisite. You don't go back to your huge creative efforts again and again. Mille feuille -- only once. But the good, fresh and honest stuff -- they can be yours for life.

And so if I know my older girl and her husband will be joining my two friends, and Ed and myself for dinner on the porch, I'll reach for that great do ahead Greek shrimp dish, so that within a couple of hours I can have a meal ready, requiring nothing more of me once everyone arrives and takes their place on the porch, but to sit down and join them.





How many such beautiful evenings do we get in the course of a summer? When swallows, then bats swoop down like fighter jets in the darkening sky (depleting the mosquito population for the next day)? When every last crumb of rhubarb cake disappears, because you've stayed out so long that you get hungry all over again?

Early in the evening, we take a photo on a timer, my two friends and I. We've done many such photos of the three over the years. Here it is, this year's edition. To be updated, one hopes, in the years ahead. On the porch maybe, just before a summer supper of Greek shrimp salad.