Weekend Update (Sunday Edition): Compleat
Here’s hoping that you had a happy Easter, if Easter was on your calendar. For us, the holiday sometimes coincides, within a week or less, with Kathleen’s birthday — also the birthday of the terrific husband of a Brearley classmate, whose own birthday falls about a week earlier. The cluster of birthdays makes a springtime party look like a very good idea. And the end of Lent is a favorable development for menu planning.
And it was a lovely party, if I do say so myself. I kept things simple: two classic ragoûts (a navarin printanier and a blanquette de veau, the latter with the Upper West Side inflection of a dose of dill) and a cake from Greenberg’s. I also made a trio of hors d’oeuvres, which in the event nobody touched, knowing that dinner would probably not leave anybody hungry. Still, it was about time that I made tapenade again, and it was good to taste a more recent addition to the repertoire, salpicon de crevettes. As for the third, it had been so long since I made what Kathleen calls “ham roll-ups” that I might as well never have made them before. More about them some other time. As I say, nobody touched them, except for Kathleen and me.
Giving a party, though — it had been a while. I honestly can’t recall the last time that I prepared anything more ambitious than a dinner for four. (A steak dinner at that.) Not that I’d forgotten how; I got to the “riding a bicyle” stage in the kitchen about fifteen years ago. It was, rather, a question of how to fit the cooking in with my ramped-up ambitions here.
So I gave myself a day off. Today. I went to the movies with Quatorze. We saw Faubourg 36, a French Mrs Henderson Presents that exacted an additonal gallon of happy tears. We had lunch at the Chinatown Brasserie. Then we went to the Strand, so that I could buy a hard-to-get exhibition catalogue. That’s where I left my glen plaid cap. Quatorze, who lives nearby, went back later, to try to retrieve it, but it was too late. At home, I sat in front of an open window while I caught up with feeds. This added a sore throat to my worries.
Feeling tired now, at the age of sixty-one, is not what feeling tired used to be. Now, it’s frightening — physically. It comes with a vivid sensory image of being buried alive, not in a coffin, but in deep fatigue. Fatigue so chronic that it becomes invisible. I don’t feel tired in this mode; I just get very stupid. I absent-mindedly leave my cap at the Strand. A bit more tired, and I’d absent-mindedly walk in front of a bus.
There are no buses in the apartment, though, so fatality is unlikely. Amazingly, I haven’t dropped anything during cleanup. The apartment is almost back to normal. Tomorrow’s Daily Office is up. There’s a little bit of navarin left over. But I’ve saved the best news for last: now that Lent is over, Kathleen can eat as many of Greenberg’s chocolate cookies as she likes. She can even eat just one!