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| Jordan and Jacob ready for Breakfast at Brennan's Life is hard! |
My
Fort Worth family will be home today after several days in New Orleans for the
Sugar Bowl. Christian is a Baylor alum and remains hugely involved, so I know
he’ll be happy about last night’s game. But of course I have my reservations
about them having gone to a bowl game with the omicron variant so infectious,
though Jordan assured me proof of vaccination was required for entrance to the
stadium. I don’t see that as foolproof. (A friend last night persisted in
saying they were at a superspreader.) Still, they will quarantine away from me
for the five days the CDC recommends, and I will ask them to follow CDC
guidelines and wear masks for an additional five days.
Sophie
and I are just fine and were warm enough and almost cozy last night. She keeps
wanting to go outside and doesn’t understand when I tell her it’s very cold out
there. But she comes back in quickly, which means a lot of up and down for me.
While
the Burtons are gone, I’ve been fixing myself things I love and they won’t
eat—salmon cakes, a baked egg with spinach, ham salad. And I’ll continue
cooking just for myself for the next week. It’s not a problem, because I have a
list of menu items for just such an occasion—egg salad, tuna casserole, quick
spanakopita (Greek friends would think it a travesty), and various leftovers in
the freezer.
In
addition, friends must think I’m wasting away for they brought me wonderful
meals. Neighbor Mary sent over an entire generous serving of their New Year’s
Day luncheon—ribs from a crown roast of pork with gravy, homemade applesauce,
sauerkraut (I love it!), and two kinds of cake. It will be my Sunday dinner
tonight, though I know there will be leftovers of the leftovers. And longtime
friend Kathie arrived last night with a quart jar of homemade split pea soup.
She knows I love it and my family won’t touch it. Christian will want some of
my black-eyed peas and cornbread, however. I’m not sure how we’ll work things
out to pass from house to cottage and the other way without exposure, but we
will.
I have
work on my desk, as always, but I’m also reading an interesting book: Laura
Shapiro’s What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their
Stories. Her choice of women is eclectic to say the least, and I wonder if
it was not dictated more by materials available to her than by her thesis. At
times I thought she chose her thesis and fit the women into it, rather than
letting the thesis grow organically out of her findings. Still it is
interesting reading. The women are Dorothy Wordsworth (poet William’s fragile
sister), Rosa Lewis (turn-of-the-century chef and owner of The Cavendish Hotel
in London), Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym, and Helen Gurley Brown.
So far I’ve read the Wordsworth piece (interesting but I’m not a follower of
the romantic poets so it was of minimal interest). Then I skipped to Helen
Gurley Brown, who I knew next-to-nothing about except Cosmopolitan. My
goodness! She was incredibly shallow. The most important things to her seemed
to be marrying a rich husband and staying thin. Her food choices were
inconsistent and sometimes silly. Now I’m reading about Eleanor Roosevelt whose
personal life always makes me sad. I have no interest in Pym and certainly not
Braun, so I’ll skip them, but Rosa Lewis intrigues me.
The
most interesting piece so far is the afterword in which Shapiro talks about her
own food challenges. As a new bride (and a vegetarian), she was whisked off to
a year in India where her husband was studying, and she suddenly realized she
was responsible for every meal. It wasn’t India that was the challenge, she
writes, it was marriage. Her tone is light, her observations astute, and it was
fun to read, if not wholly enlightening about food.
Happy
eating, happy reading! Two things that make life really good—and today they‘re
both mine! Yours too, I hope.
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