1. I cracked open Bruce Chatwin's book, The Songlines, today and just got started reading it. I first heard about this book when I was employed at the U of Oregon Knight Library back in 1987-88. It's always been lurking in the back of my mind and Scott Shirk helped bring it to the front of my mind when he gave me a copy as a gift. I'm reading books as different from one another as I can, trying to expand my horizons, and, so far, The Songlines fits into my mission -- reading a book about Aborigines in Australia is definitely different from having read the novel, The Underground, a story set in the Silver Valley at the time of the Sunshine Mine Fire.
2. I made a quick trip to Yoke's and the liquor store to buy things Debbie needed for the Romaine wedge salad she made for family dinner and to buy Maker's Mark and Rose's Simple Syrup so I could mix Old Fashioneds for family dinner cocktails. Last week, I finished reading Stanley Tucci's book, Taste, and he includes a simple recipe for the Old Fashioned, one of his favorite cocktails. I followed it. All I had to do was put a teaspoon of simple syrup in a cocktail glass, shake some Angostura bitters in the syrup, pour in a couple shots of Maker's Mark, add ice, stir it for a minute or so, and then drop a Luxardo Gourmet Maraschino Cherry in the glass as garnish.
It was fun to imagine enjoying an Old Fashioned with Stanley Tucci. I thought garnishing the drink with a Luxardo Cherry made a huge impact on the cocktail's flavor. We all enjoyed our drinks a lot.
3. A while back, Carol and Paul asked that we have family dinner on Monday nights. So it was a happy coincidence that our dinner tonight fell on Valentine's Day. I am (and have been for years) a bit of a Valentine's Day grinch, so I don't really know what a good Valentine's Day dinner is.
Christy, however, loves Valentine's Day and she was in charge of dinner tonight, so I'm assuming that our superb dinner tonight was a fit for the holiday!
We started with the Old Fashioneds and Christy also made a fascinating appetizer called Everything Bagel Cumcumber Bits and it was, indeed, like eating an everything bagel with cream cheese on top of cucumber slice -- it was imaginative and delicious.
For our dinner, Debbie fixed a splendid and fresh Romain lettuce Wedge Salad. Christy prepared Greek Orzo to accompany the salmon she baked. The orzo and salmon were citrusy, thanks to generous amounts of lemon and lime, and also seasoned with a variety of herbs. Molly contributed a very tasty loaf of excellent bread. We drank some champagne with dinner (was that for Valentine's Day? 😅) and red wine was also available.
Carol presented a superb Mexican Chocolate Tart with whipped cream for dessert, providing a grand finale to an excellent dinner.
After dinner, we fell into conversation about great aunts and uncles on Dad's side of the family and told stories about Dit, Pink, Hattie, Esta, Esther, Mabel, and others. I really enjoyed that Christy and Carol didn't know, until I told the story this evening, that back in 1976 our Great Aunt Hattie hopped on a Greyhound bus in Tennessee and traveled to Spokane to see her sister, our Grandma Woolum. Aunt Hattie was a longtime Southern Democrat and a very proper Episcopalian. Georgia's Jimmy Carter was the Democrat's nominee for president in 1976. Aunt Hattie was very proud of Jimmy Carter's achievement and learned that he had given an interview in a magazine she'd never heard of, Playboy. Somewhere en route to Spokane, she bought a copy of the magazine.
She read the interview.
The magazine's other content scandalized her and she assured us forcefully and in no uncertain terms, once she arrived in Spokane, that the first chance she got at a stop on the bus's route, she threw that awful magazine with all those awful pictures in a trash can.
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