At the Kitchen Table
Here's hoping that you've been having a good weekend, and that you've been able to stand back a bit from everyday affairs. Kathleen and I have been reconstituting ourselves. We were going to watch The Morning After last night, after reading a bit after an ordered-in Chinese dinner, but Kathleen drifted off during the reading part, which I extended for several hours, eventually falling asleep in my chair over Running With Scissors, which is a grand read. I finished the book this afternoon, right before tackling The Economist. Every week, I try to extract one hard nugget of interest from The formidable Economist, and here is this week's: a French university known as Toulouse I offers the fifth-ranked business program in the world, after Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago and Stanford. Who'd 'a' thunk it.
During the week, the lineup just fell into place, and I now know what sort of piece I'll present on any given day of the week. Sunday's feature (which is what you're reading) has a rather weasely title, one that permits me to talk about what I've been doing in the kitchen lately, or to pretend that I'm sharing a cup of tea with you at the kitchen table, shooting the breeze. The table is very virtual. My kitchen is not big enough to hold a table. It doesn't really hold two people, not if they're trying to get anything done.
Portico - the Web site that I've been running since 2000 - has had a cooking branch, Culinarion, for most of that time, but for a spell I took it down. Cooking just wasn't a specialty of mine, and my interest in food has taken a nosedive since the turn of the century. Still, one has to eat, and, having been ambitious in the kitchen from my twenties to my late forties, I can make a variety of dishes without looking at a recipe or, for the matter of that, thinking. And the mail that I get from readers of Portico - as distinct from comments at the Daily Blague - exceeds all other mail in quantity, if not in length. The purpose of "Kitchen Table" is to get me to contribute to Culinarion more regularly.
We are sometimes four for dinner on Monday, when M le Neveu and Mlle NOLA join us. (Often, thanks to her hours, Kathleen can't make it.) M le Neveu is always happy to see steak of some kind or another, and when my mind has been elsewhere, that's a blessing, because steak requires minimal preparation. But for tomorrow night's dinner, I think that I am going to try a boeuf bourgignon. Or perhaps a coq au vin. Either dish is best when made a day ahead of time, but I don't have a proper wine in the house at the moment, so whichever it is that I make, it will have to wait for tomorrow. I may try something different, from Classic Home Cooking, of which I've just obtained the new edition. Whatever I do, you'll read about it here next Sunday.
