Three Beautiful Things 05/27/17: Kitchen Bliss, Dinner at the Diazes, *Jeeves and Wooster*

1.  Around noon, I snapped into action in the kitchen to prepare dinner for our visit to the Diazes later in the day. I fixed the vegetarian stir fry I made about a week ago and it requires all kinds of stages, listed here in no particular order: cutting tofu into triangles and draining it; dredging the tofu in cornstarch; chopping eggplant and making carrot slivers; cooking a big pot of rice; making a salty sugary glaze for the tofu; making an oyster saucy sauce for the stir fry; roasting sesame seeds and raw peanuts; grating ginger and mincing garlic; fixing a large measuring cup of Better than Bouillion vegetable broth; and, eventually, stir frying everything and combining it all with the sauce. Simultaneously, I fried chicken thighs after dredging them in flour and salt and pepper, so the grandchildren could have a dinner they would enjoy. They haven't quite embraced stir fry yet!

This stir fry recipe, "No-Meat Stir Fries" appears in a special 2017 issue of Cook's Illustrated entitled All-Time Best Asian Recipes, but I can't find the recipe anywhere online. Otherwise I'd post it.

2. The Diaz household buzzed with activity. Jack, Olivia, David, and Ana were outside, inside, chasing each other, and playing with Hudley, Alejandro's mellow bulldog who is staying at the Diazes until the end of the week. We adults fell into conversation, got dinner warmed up and plated, and kept an eye on the swirl of the children's play. Eventually, the children settled into the TV room and watched The Lego Batman Movie and the adults lounged in the living room and conversations blossomed around a wide range of subjects: children's books, orchestras, aging, self-image, and all kinds of other things.

3. The Deke and I often relax in the evening by listening on YouTube over and over and over and over again to our favorite sketches from Bits of Fry and Laurie. Last night and tonight, we expanded our Steven Fry and Hugh Laurie world. I began playing episodes of Jeeves and Wooster, found on YouTube, and, in the privacy of my own memories, got nostalgic about the summer of 1992 when I read a ton of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeve's stories and when, after all this reading,  I saw many episodes of the BBC series over at the Trevaskis house, marveling at the doltishness of Bertie and the genius of Jeeves.