I found my dream vacation!

 

Julia Child's French kitchen
Photo by Airbnb

I hope you noticed I’ve been absent, silent, gone for a couple of days. I plead an avalanche that hit my desk plus lots of company. By evening, which is the time I usually write my blog posts, I was too tired. No functioning brain. But now I’m ready to chuck it all and take a vacation I never dreamed was possible. Me, who doesn’t really like to fly and never felt as drawn to France as I do to Scotland.

What changed it? A chance to rent Julia Child’s cottage, La Pitchoune, (the little one) in the south of France. Julia’s kitchen with its famous pegboard is intact and functioning—you can cook dinner if you want. The three-bedroom, three-bath cottage also comes with an outdoor kitchen, a charming patio, a saltwater pool, and lush gardens.

Of course, this Airbnb is a bit expensive: $703 a night is within reason (after all, it sleep six), but if you want an all-day cooking class—shopping, wine pairing, and instructions for preparing one of her legendary, multi-course dinners—add $1500 to the bill. If you’d rather watch than cook, you can hire a personal chef for $500 (not including ingredients and wine). And then there’s airfare to France.

Would you all please buy a lot of books so I can go. Maybe I’d take my daughters. For the nonce, I have something wonderful to dream about.

Meantime back in Fort Worth where my feet are firmly planted on the ground, it has been a busy but happy few days. A load of work landed on my desk, starting with the neighborhood newsletter. I always encourage people to submit before the deadline, and this month they did, with the result that a lot of copy landed on my computer late Sunday night, which was technically before Monday’s deadline. Today I sent a whopping 28-page issue to the printer. Sunday also brought a critique of Irene in Danger from my mentor/friend that sent me off on some rewriting, and now I’m giving it one last proof before putting it into production. Hope to publish early in November. I may be fooling myself, but reading it again this time, I like it better than I ever thought I would.

Being busy makes me happy, but so does visiting with friends, new and old, and I have had some treats along that line. Saturday night Linda, a friend I’ve known for at least thirty-five years, came for supper. For most of those years, we have lived at least thirty miles apart, and when we did live in the same city briefly, early on when we were, ahem, much younger, we weren’t really that close. It’s been a friendship that has strengthened and grown over the years. Now, she’s about to move to Taos, though she assures me she will keep a presence in Texas. I hope so.

Linda has long been a person who appreciates both my mysteries—she says I have a devious mind—and my cooking experiments. I fixed a 1905 Columbia Salad for us. It’s the signature salad, tossed at tableside, of the Columbia restaurant in Tampa that opened in 1905. The dressing is hearty, to say the least—next time I may cut back on the oregano a bit. But the salad is rich with ham, Swiss cheese, head lettuce, Parmesan, and grated Romano—I used pecorino, as I always do. And I left out the pimiento-stuffed Kalamata olives—catering to my own taste (or dislikes). For dessert, I broiled nectarine halves with brown sugar (too much), blueberries, and a pat of butter. As she fought to separate the fruit from its stone, Linda muttered, “My grandmother would say these are not cling free.” We didn’t have halves—we had sort of hash. Linda said she loved it; I thought it too sweet. Another time I’d cut way back on the sugar.

Last night I went from old to new—a relatively new friend came for happy hour and stayed for supper, because I enticed her with a composed salad of canned salmon, pickled cucumbers, hearts of palm, hard-boiled egg, and tomato (darn! I forgot the avocado languishing in the fridge). It’s a salad that my mom and I used to make, and it carried me back to my childhood. My guest enjoyed it. She and I can go in a nanosecond from “So how’s your world” to some really involved discussions, which we both enjoy and which involve lots of laughter. A thoroughly pleasant evening.

Tonight was happy hour with the neighbors, which is always fun, and then Christian grilled us lamb burgers that we had with tzatziki sauce I had in the fridge and a salad dressed with a mixture of the dressings in the fridge, including the 1905 salad one. The meal was heavy with oregano but so good.

And now, dear friends, I’m back to proof reading. But I expect my dreams tonight to be of cooking a gibelotte in Julia’s kitchen.

 

 

 

Waste not, want not

 

White chili with turkey

I did something this year I haven’t done in a long time. In a fit of domesticity, I simmered the turkey carcass, at least as much of it as would fit in my biggest pot. (Remember tiny kitchen.) I had to give up on the breastbone. It was simply too big.

Jordan and Christian didn’t want to “mess” with it—his words. But it has been simmering in their kitchen for two nights now. On Saturday, I added the last of a bit of celery, a cut onion that had been in the fridge I don’t know how long, and some of the baby carrots Jordan puts in Jacob’s salad. Started it in the cottage but had a problem—my hot plate automatically shuts off every 30 minutes. Cooking something all day is an exercise in getting up and restarting the thing. Cooking it overnight is impossible. So the pot went into the house and simmered for two nights. This morning, Jordan asked what to do with it and I asked her to bring it out to me.

When I simmer a turkey, I don’t want the meat and vegetables that have cooked that long. To me, they get soggy and tasteless, so I strained them out and got three good-sized icebox containers and two small ones of a rich, good broth. But as I discarded those scraps of meat, I thought guiltily about people for whom that would be a feast. For many of us, this is a season of plenty, and we tend to put out of our minds those that may hunger. I’m not sure what form of outreach will come from that aha! moment on my part. Certainly not to save those scraps for someone or some animal, but perhaps an extra donation to the Food Bank or through my church to the Presbyterian Night Shelter. But that waste really hit home with me, and I’ll act on it.

It was surely a weekend of plenty around here. We took a break from turkey and had a fresh salmon filet Saturday and real beef bourguignon last night—you know, made with sirloin rather than hamburger. Jordan wanted to make an occasion out of the first night of Advent, so we splurged on dinner. But she discovered that prep work for the bourguignon was more than she expected. The final result was worth it. Today at lunch I made the leftover salmon into a delicious salad that Jordan and I shared. Tonight it’s back to turkey—in white chili.

Food seems to surround us at this time of the year. I have the makings of cranberry/apricot chutney and cranberry cake. I’ll try to talk Jordan into another cheeseball. Before we know it, it will be time to think about Christmas dinner. Jordan is already talking about plans. Apparently, there is one of the coveted Greenwood smoked turkeys in the freezer—gotten just before the turkey plant burned. So I don’t know if we’ll have a roast turkey also or a small ham or what.

Not at all related to turkeys, but I want to give a shout-out to my colleague Judith Copek, whose mystery, Murder in the Northwoods, debuts tomorrow as a Kindle e-book. The opening line of the blurb is terrific: “She’s into high tech. He’s into homicide.” Can’t you just hear the tension, danger and romance both, crackling? Judy has been hit with a triple whammy of health problems, one of which is shingles. Having just survived a bout with shingles, I send her all my sympathy, and I know she may not be up to marketing her book widely. So I want to help. Check it out here: Murder in the North Woods - Kindle edition by Copek, Judith. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Happy reading. It’s a cold night. Perfect for getting lost in a Northwoods mystery. While the woods are cold and dangerous, you can be cozy and safe reading about it at home.