Sunday, December 20, 2015

Sunday before Christmas

If I look back on this day, three things stand out: wrapping, searching for my semolina and dinner.

Let me explain.

I needed a day where I could catch up and be on course for the upcoming holiday weekend. And I got it. Ed and I made vague plans to visit abandoned cats (don't ask), and perhaps to go bowling with a machine-producing co-conspirator who is in town. At breakfast, we talked, too, of taking a walk.



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All talk, no action.

You can understand. There was house cleaning. And I did wrap things and in doing it, I wondered if Christmas gift giving got such a boost in times of modernity because of the pretty paper.


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I had also intended to get a head start on pasta making and I was all set for it, but then I could not find my semolina. Ricarda and I made pasta using 1/3 semolina, 2/3 pasta flour (whatever that is). And I put semolina in my grocery cart, I'm sure of it. Or, did I put it in someone else's cart?

I turned my pantry upside down.

No luck.

The pasta will have to wait. I turn my attention to dinner for tonight -- a wonderful chicken in wine vinegar dish that David Liebovitz beautifully adapted from an old Patricia Wells favorite.

I have important guests coming!

Ed's colleague is here of course, but too, if it's Sunday, it must be young family evening -- a first one in many weeks.

And when Snowdrop comes into the farmhouse she just beams and beams at the familiarity of it all. She dashes to her play area and grabs her beloved penguin and just sits there, taking in all that's part of her world here.


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Ed comes in and they do their own happy little dance...


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And then we all sit down to eat...


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And Snowdrop has her first ear of corn and she loves it, which is so poignant for me because I remember giving the first ear of corn to my youngest daughter when she was also just shy of being a year old.


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Enough to make anyone smile, no?