Monday Night Dinner

Mild panic is my default state for party planning. We’re throwing a baby shower for a friend this weekend and I’ve been planning the menu for the past three weeks. It’s not that it takes three weeks to plan a menu for ten people, but that’s when I sent out the invitations and therefore that’s when I started obsessing about it. On the downside I’ve revised the menu about once a day for the past three weeks. On the upside, I’ve only made one grocery shopping list, and I’ve mostly refrained from writing my ‘To Do’ list for Saturday more than once. In fairness, when I redo my ‘To Do’ lists multiple times at least once is because even I can’t always read my handwriting. This just means I would never be invited to be part of a medieval scriptorium, not that I’m completely OCD. Read the rest of this entry »

It was my 10 year college Reunion this past weekend. I didn’t end up going for a variety of reasons that aren’t even remotely interesting, but it has made me terribly nostalgic for college. All things considered the food at Bryn Mawr was really pretty good. Oddly enough exactly the same food a mile down the road at Haverford was terrible. This can clearly be attributed to the distressing presence of testosterone on their campus, or possibly it was because they had one dining hall to feed 1200 students and we had three and a half.

The problem is that when you have 1200 women who’ve spent four years being taught to think critically about everything – Foucault, Bede, Virgil, Nietzsche – it starts to spill over into other parts of life. You’ll be innocently watching something on TV – Dawson’s Creek perhaps, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and all of a sudden you find yourself tilting your head sideways, narrowing your eyes slightly, and commenting on the post colonialist imagery of Ethan Allen commercials, or the negative gender expectations in Friendly’s ads, and of course the food in the dining halls. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of things to miss about living in Europe.

There’s the fact that in France and Italy even in the most run down bar with the sketchiest clientele, you are still guaranteed a good cup of coffee.

There’s the fact that even in Heathrow’s dingiest terminal at 6am (Terminal 4 – the one you fly out of to get to Malta – if you’re curious) you can still get an excellent fry up and tea made with boiling water poured over tea in the pot and then brought to the table. The sequence is important, because it’s in contrast to the dire American habit of bringing you a cup of microwaved water with a tea bag sitting next to it. You cannot achieve a good cup of tea this way, and one of the reasons that our favorite diner is our favorite diner is because they understand this. Also, they make really excellent sweet potato pancakes. Read the rest of this entry »

The things that I can and can’t find in my local grocery store never cease to bemuse me.  I went in search of frozen pearl onions this week because peeling fresh pearl onions is for the birds.  I did not anticipate that this would become a quest and would turn out to be the most complicated part of making Coq au Vin.  I blithely assumed that every grocery store would have 12 oz bags of frozen pearl onions.  Oh how wrong I was.

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I hate being sick.  This is not an earth shattering secret.  Everyone hates being sick.  I’m particularly bitter about this cold since it’s finally nice weather outside, and being sick when it’s sunny and warm always feels like adding insult to injury.   No, my deep dark secret is that I don’t like chicken soup.  I don’t really like any variation on chicken soup either.  I don’t like matzo ball soup.  I don’t like chicken & dumplings.  I feel like such a bad sick person. Read the rest of this entry »