A strange weekend

A spatch-cocked chicken with vegetables
The vegetables cook in chicken grease and are delectable

North Texas was at its absolute best tonight. A lovely evening, with just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away and make you forget the temperature was in the high ‘80s. The breeze ruffled the trees, the garden is beginning to grow, the pentas are showing first blooms. Neighbors Greg and Jaimie Smith came for happy hour, and we all forgot about itme—spent two hours having such a good visit.

Greg once was my lawn and garden guru, and he gave me hints tonight—like deadhead the coleus and mow those ornamental grasses that aren’t at all ornamental. We talked of kids and grandkids and college and fear, of schoolrooms (Jaimie is a retired teacher and was consulting in a small-town district this week—a hard week, she said). We talked of aging, though they are almost a generation younger than me, and we talked of dogs and cats because we are all animal lovers. I relish evenings like this. I gave them crab canapes from the freezer.

Usually I cook a lot on weekends, but this has been a strange weekend. The Charles Schwab Invitational PGA tournament is in town at Colonial Country Club—our end of town. Jordan and Christian and Jacob have been there all day for three or four days, so I filled my social calendar with others. Jordan was home Thursday, and on Friday Jean came to eat chicken salad and fresh green beans with me.

I had cooked a terrific sheet pan chicken for the family Thursday night. I am in love with this recipe. I thought I had written about it on my Gourmet on a Hot Plate blog, but tonight I couldn’t find it, so it will be up online Thursday this coming week. But let me just say that I am a huge fan of sweet onion sauteed—in butter, in chicken drippings, in whatever. I’d probably love them cooked in water. Watch for that recipe because it’s too good to miss.

Last night I made chicken salad out of what was left of the spatch-cocked chicken. It was traditional, simple chicken salad—chicken, green onions, celery, salt and pepper, lemon juice, and mayonnaise. Jean enjoyed it, and I have to say it was delicious. I am not a fan of grapes and nuts in chicken salad. And there’s just enough left for me to have some tonight.

I am trying hard to blog about something other than the Uvalde massacre—and that last word fits what it is. That tragedy has occupied my thoughts this past week, and it’s hard for me to think beyond all the things I want to say. I am both grieved and furious, but I figure I can’t wear readers out with that. I know my own anger—at the needless loss of life, the law enforcement failure, the doublespeak of Governor Abbott will not go away soon, nor do I want it to. I want to keep my anger up—and yours—and that of all reasonable people of voting age, because I desperately want the Democratic Party to score a lot of victories in the mid-terms. Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will triumph—in light of the abortion wars and the Uvalde school shooting, it’s time to throw conventional wisdom to the winds.

Meantime, here are a couple of literary diversions. I guess this is still political, but it’s such a delicious story. In a collaboration between author Margaret Atwood and Penguin Randon House publishers, there is now a flameproof copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. A wonderful picture shows Atwood aiming a flame thrower at the book which remains untouched. So much for the rabid book banners and book burners who infest our culture. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a dystopian future where the seventeenth-century Puritanical restrictions on society pale in comparison. It is where we are headed with abortion bans, likely to be followed by bans on contraception, interracial marriage, trans marriage, etc. All those personal freedoms, gone.

On a somewhat lighter note, although murder is never a lighthearted subject: a romance novelist has been convicted of murdering her husband. The kicker? She wrote a column several years ago on “How to Murder Your Husband.” It’s a case of fiction becoming reality, but in her case, the dry run didn’t work out. Will the wacky world never cease to provide us with bizarre humor?

Peace to all. This is a difficult time, but I am still sure we will get through it, and democracy will triumph.