Trying something new.

The other day I decided to try and make a leg of lamb. I have never eaten leg of lamb, much less made it, but I thought I'd give it a shot. A bit of an expensive folly, perhaps, but what is life if not an adventure. I also decided to have roasted fennel (from the farmer's market), even though I've never eaten that before. And I made carrottes vichy (spelled something like that--cooked carrots) and good bread and good wine. I bought a lemon bar for dessert. (My husband said, who are you and what have you done with my wife--I don't go much for lemon.)

At any rate, I'm so glad I tried something new. I'm not sure that any of the above will be my new favorite thing (or trump good bread and good wine) but a small victory was the look on the baby's face when she tried fennel and the 3 year old asking for more meat so he could be like T-Rex. The elegant part was eating it in our formal dining room with my great aunt's china and candlelight. To new adventures!

For here or to go?

I could take the easy route and simply say, see Rear Window for an example of how to get take out food.

That's probably too short a blog entry.

A longer entry: The impossibly glamorous Grace Kelly has the waiter from "21" bring up a complete dinner to Jimmy Stewart's apartment in a taxi cab. The food is then placed on proper plates and wheeled in to the wheelchair bound Stewart. Of course it's lobster or some such rich food. At any rate, it's all terribly elegant and a far cry from the predigested fast food that's out there now served on greasy paper and plastic forks. It's interesting to me how so much of life is in the presentation.

If not now...

Tonight we had baked pasta with salad for dinner, and melon for dessert. I mention this because it's a rather every day type meal, at least for us. On a whim, however, I served it on our "good" china, i.e. the beautiful china we received as a wedding present, which we have not used since Christmas. I put a garden rose in a jar on the table and used cloth napkins, a cloth tablecloth, and pretty wine glasses.

I'm glad I did.

For me, it's nicer (and yes, more elegant) to have dinner on a real table cloth, with real dishes, real food, and cloth napkins. This is real life, of course, so it's not perfect. But it's easier to keep your good humor (or recover it) while watching the two year old attempt to use a big fork on a thin china plate and sip milk from a real glass instead of a sippy cup. (He used Tom's childhood drinking cup, which was a chipped beef jar. We found it in the wood pile outside.) But if he doesn't get used to eating properly at the table when he's young, then when?

On bread

A sure-fire pick-me-up when I was lonely during the time that I lived in Spain was to go shopping. This was because I could be social and talk to people and not stay in my apartment. Also, it was easy to speak shopping language (it's just pleasantries and numbers and money--easy things to talk about in Spanish). A favorite kiosk was the bread stall, mostly because the old man who sold bread, who was about as crusty as the bread, called me guapa. Every time.

But the bread...

In Spain, the bread is exceedingly fresh and uniform throughout the country. It's just plain good fresh white bread. (My Swiss friend Sonja--there you are again, dear--thought that the bread had better variety in Switzerland and after visiting her there, I'd have to agree. But I digress.) In Spain, like in other Mediterranean countries, It's not eaten with butter, except at breakfast. It doesn't last more than a day. (A good way to eat leftovers is to grate a tomato and add olive oil and salt and pepper and spread it on toasted bread.) But it's elegant.

One of my first impressions of Spain was eating lunch with an elegant Spanish woman, who ate continental style (fork in left hand, knife in right), and put her small portion of bread on the table beside the plate.

Around here, we're bread snobs. La Brea does the job. So does the bread machine. So, add bread to the list of essentials, but only if it's the good stuff.

Complex tastes

When I was pregnant with my son, it seemed that I reverted to childhood and craved macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and fruit punch.

Now that's over (thankfully), I'm finding that my current favorites are complex tastes: dark dark dark chocolate, red wine, good strong coffee, blue cheese, and of course, champagne! I suppose all of these are elegant?

On the dangers of coffee to go

When I was in law school, my friend and I agreed that we were uncivilized because we drank our coffee in cups with a lid. Civilized people drank their coffee in cups with a saucer. She gave me a darling white cup and saucer upon our graduation from law school as a present.

Fast forward a decade. I have two small children and despite the fact that I attempt to allow an extra fifteen minutes for everything that I do...well, in the morning I'm still running late and frequently attempt to bring coffee to go in the car. Bad idea. It almost always spills. It's fallen off of the car roof while I opened the door, spilled on my seat, spilled on the passenger seat, spilled on my suit. When I do manage to not spill all of it, then there is the driving and slurping, which is more like injecting caffeine rather than having breakfast. And don't get me started on the paper to go cups from the coffee shop... All in all, not elegant.

How to have a picnic

There are many ways to have an elegant picnic. Here are two.

If you are Grace Kelly:

You drive to a lookout point in the South of France in a convertible and nibble on fried chicken. You drink cold beer, pouring it in a small glass. Your companion is Cary Grant. See To Catch A Thief.

If you are not Grace Kelly:

You unearth a big blanket and place it on the front lawn. You eat good sandwiches and Rainier cherries with your children and spouse and unsuccessfully look for clouds in the sky.

On not being boring

My Swiss friend Sonja came to visit earlier this year and made me strawberries macerated with freshly ground black pepper. (Note to Dad: "macerated" means that the berries are softened by something, normally sugar, which causes them to release their juices.) Although unusual, black pepper made it an unexpectedly elegant dessert, especially with good vanilla ice cream. It brought out the redness and sweetness of the strawberries. Although you noticed the pepper as unusual, it was nevertheless harmonious. On a nice evening, with nice company, it was quite memorable. It certainly wasn't boring.

I believe this idea translates into other areas of life, for example clothing. The normal advice is to wear classic colors and shapes to be elegant. Good advice, but it can be boring. A challenge is to come up with the sartorial equivalent of black pepper on strawberries. Perhaps it's a gentleman wearing a seersucker suit on a hot day. Unusual, yet harmonious and unexpected all at the same time. And frequently memorable.