coda to our evening back home

--February 18th, 2006--


I for­got how nice it is to have a lit­tle girl spend the night with Avery!  The sound of lit­tle voices say­ing, “now let’s pre­tend…” and a com­pletely torn-apart bed­room because secretly they’ve arranged their sleep­ing quar­ters on the floor of the guest room, and the com­plex arrange­ments of spe­cial bears, blan­kets, being bul­lied to brush their teeth.  Now they’ve been tucked in and sung to and kissed good­night and we can still hear them chat­ter­ing away.  John says that as he passed their room he heard, “Shh, my daddy’s com­ing.”  Who knows.

And I for­got to say that when I put my chicken in the oven, I sur­rounded it with lit­tle cherry toma­toes and wedges of fen­nel.  Because then, all you have to do after you eat your lus­cious roast chicken is to throw the entire con­tents (which means all the parts of the chicken you didn’t carve for din­ner, plus the juices and toma­toes, and every­thing) of the foil-lined dish into a stock­pot, cover it with water, and sim­mer high for a good two hours.  Again, you do noth­ing!  Just wait.  If you pass by and the lit­tle bones are stick­ing up out of the water, add water.  I have always loved the Lau­rie Col­win (my favorite writer of all time) story of a boyfriend who, while cook­ing together, asked her what to do with the soup next. When she told him to ‘add water to cover,’ he asked, “What cover?”  Just goes to show, one person’s basic bit of knowl­edge is another person’s coded mes­sage.  So I just put the stock­pot out the door of our lit­tle gar­den entrance, smelling like absolute ambrosia.  Tomor­row morn­ing I can skim the fat off, heat it again, pour it through a sieve into another pot, add rice, and have dinner.

OK, the girls are slow­ing down and so am I.  Good night.

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