{"id":1783,"date":"2014-02-09T20:11:17","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T01:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/?p=1783"},"modified":"2014-02-09T20:11:17","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T01:11:17","slug":"busy-kitchen-on-stowe-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/2014\/02\/09\/busy-kitchen-on-stowe-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"Busy Kitchen on Stowe Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This has been a banner week of cooking on Stowe Lane.\u00a0 After a wonderful pre-birthday celebration with my family last Sunday the weather turned even more frigid, icy and just plain I am winter and you\u2019re not the boss of me\u2026you\u2019ll take what I dish out (no pun intended) and suffer through until Spring.<\/p>\n

Plans of going out to dinner with the Aunt M\u2019s was not going to happen, which I was a bit relieved about because they already spent way too much on gifts\u2026don\u2019t ask how I know, I just know.\u00a0 I don\u2019t\u00a0 haul myself about in crappy weather anymore, I\u2019ve got a laptop and a cell phone I can work anywhere, so I looked in the freezer and pulled out a pork tenderloin, mixed mushrooms, green beans, and hit the pantry for some polenta and stock.\u00a0 You\u2019ll come by me for dinner, famous last words.\u00a0 If I planned on having a tombstone those words might just do.\u00a0 It\u2019s such a joy when they burst through the door ready to eat.\u00a0 We laughed and ate and laughed some more and they only need go out for a minute to get home.\u00a0 The perfect birthday.<\/p>\n

I am a fan of Judith Jones who published a wonderful book called, \u201cThe Pleasures of Cooking for One\u201d that I read over and over.\u00a0 Yes I\u2019m one of those people who can stay up to read a cookbook like a novel till the glasses fall to the end of my nose and I\u2019m asleep.\u00a0 It\u2019s a treasure, in it she states, \u201cCooking for yourself is particularly creative because you are inspired by what\u2019s in your fridge or freezer or garden or nearby market.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to follow a recipe slavishly; planning how to make three quite different dishes from, say tenderloin of pork\u2026..\u201d So before you ask why I had pork tenderloin in my freezer, it was perfectly legit. \u00a0\u00a0As were the individually portioned baby lamb chops that were destined for later in the week. Just sayin.<\/p>\n

Dinner with my friends David and Jan is always amazing, this time at their home.\u00a0 We commence the revelry as soon as one or the other of us enters the door.\u00a0 Jan is not the cook with abandon kind of girl that I am, strict with the recipe and\u00a0planner of menus, she\u00a0has confessed that she never cooks without a recipe.\u00a0 And of course, her meals are always delish!\u00a0 It\u2019s the added ingredients of love and laughter that round out the flavors.<\/p>\n

Now for those baby lamb chops, baked potato, spinach souffl\u00e9 with frizzled onions and a beautiful cabernet.\u00a0 The therapeutic value of going through the seasoning, the grilling (making sure the fan is on high and the kitchen candle is lit or the fire department might be joining me) coating the potato with olive oil and salting, the souffl\u00e9 was a cheat (thank you Stouffer\u2019s) but the garnishes were all lovingly crafted by me, for me.\u00a0 A meal like that must be eaten at the table complete with cloth napkin.\u00a0 Do not keep rolling your eyes\u2026bits of all these meals would turn themselves miraculously into something else during the week.<\/p>\n

Best and busiest of the days was cooking with my friend Louise.\u00a0 We have been trying to do this for years.\u00a0 She lives in the Midwest and travels east with some frequency but the timing has never been right until this weekend.\u00a0\u00a0 I put a pot of sauce on Saturday morning and the smell was heavenly, it\u2019s been awhile since I pulled out Gramma\u2019s sauce pot.\u00a0 It\u2019s a true antique with all the bangs and brown spots to prove it.\u00a0 Louise did confess to some sauce pot envy.\u00a0 Frankly, I can\u2019t imagine who\u2019s going to make the sauce when I\u2019m gone so she might just wind up with it.\u00a0 I made the pasta dough and when she arrived we got to work on the ravioli, she made the filling while I ran the dough through the pasta machine.\u00a0 Once it was thin thin thin, she began to fill and cut the ravioli while I pulled out Aunt Millie\u2019s pot to start the water boiling (yes more vintage pot envy).\u00a0 My kitchen is small and I can do a pretty good dance when I\u2019m in there alone but I have to say we had just as good a choreography going with code words like scoot left, behind you, scoot right.\u00a0 Somehow it worked and we thoroughly enjoyed it.\u00a0 Our friend Evi and her family joined us for dinner and we sat around the table eating, laughing, drinking and telling stories for hours. \u00a0Truly this was my idea of a perfect evening.<\/p>\n

At the end of the night when everyone had gone and the dishes were done I processed the pictures I took and posted them on Facebook.\u00a0 One of my friends summed it up perfectly:<\/p>\n

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Great chronological pics of the life and love of a ravioli.\u00a0 (there is something very satisfying about the final pot being stacked).\u00a0 Molto soddisfacente signorita Loconti.<\/em><\/div>\n
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Indeed there was much satisfaction in this night of cooking and laughing with friends.\u00a0 I know like I know I could do it again and again and again.<\/p>\n

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No one who cooks, cooks alone.\u00a0 Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.\u00a0\u00a0 Laurie Colwin<\/b><\/p>\n

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This has been a banner week of cooking on Stowe Lane.\u00a0 After a wonderful pre-birthday celebration with my family last Sunday the weather turned even more frigid, icy and just plain I am winter and you\u2019re not the boss of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pause-points"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27hQ5-sL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1783"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1794,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1783\/revisions\/1794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}