My new idea for a Career: Perennial Dinner Guest! At least, that’s what I was this weekend. It’s pretty fun on a volunteer basis, so just think how much I’d like to get paid to do it.
So, Saturday night was a another Fish Fin Dinner at the home of the lovely Mark. This is the third one of these I’ve been to, and as usual, Mark didn’t disappoint. There was music, candles, flowers, caramelized onions for an appetizer, about eight bottles of wine, and very nicely dressed young people. Want to know the menu? At most other dinner-party-like things I go to, you have “what we’re eating.” Not so with Mark. When Mark cooks you dinner, you have a menu. It went something like this:
HORS D’OEUVRES
Bits of bread with brie and garlic and caramelized onions on them, in various configurations.
Rosemary snaps. Like ginger snaps, but with rosemary.
Also, Prosecco. Chiara had half a glass of this and enjoyed it very much. She is thinking she will buy her own bottle and drink it home alone on a Friday night, with her hair in curlers and with Ella Fitzgerald on the hi-fi.
FIRST COURSE
Red-wine risotto with pine-nuts. Chiara didn’t know you could make risotto with red wine, but turns out you can. Engagingly purple.
Bits of rabbit stuffed with beef and some sort of omlette-y thingy with parsley.
MAIN COURSE
Cassoulet, made with more rabbit (apparently Mark had an “incident” at the butcher’s that didn’t go quite as planned, as his rabbits were shredded up a bit more than to his liking, hence the stew aspect of the evening) and fava beans.
DESSERT
Fasten your seatbelts, here. Chocolate moussey-thing with home-candied orange peel. Homemade madelines with powdered sugar, the extras of which were conveniently on the kitchen counter, on the way back from the bathroom, allowing Chiara easy access too one or two more for the road. Also, homemade chocolate leaves powdered with gold. Golden leaves. Also, homemade truffles. I have to give Mark’s friend Tiffany props for the dessert, as she made it all, because it was truly splendiferous and a perfect cap to the menu. I felt extremely fat afterwards, but I did not car. Chocolate leaves covered in gold, I’m telling you. Gold. Chocolate and gold, together in the one perfect dessert.
So there was good eatin’ to be had. The conversation was good too…but how can I say this? Does anyone else think it’s weird that Carl and I were the oldest people there (at 28 and 28) and yet we were the only people not talking about taxes and mortgages and babies and good wine years and remodeling houses? I mean, nothing wrong with any of those topics, clearly. I have talked, myself, on several of those right here on this journal. Everyone was so earnest and clean-cut and ambitious and well-meaning, and again, sometimes I’m those things too, but Saturday I sort of felt like casually mentioning that Carl is actually my pimp. Or something. I’m wearing a sweater tonight because of track marks! Woo! I’m trashy and flashy! Mostly I confined my remarks to things like “ I’m not going to my ten year reunion, but if I were, I would go dressed as a crack whore.”
Sunday I was invited to dinner by a new girl at my office. She’s a post-doc here from Spain for three months. The first day she came in she was really nervous and I said a couple of words in my own horrendous Spanish to her, and she just lit up. She and her adorable boyfriend came to our office party last weekend and I talked to them for a while there and then last week I got the invite. I was a little ambivalent about it: Sunday evening, as everyone knows, being devoted to doing laundry and staring longingly out the window, wishing you didn’t have to go to work the next day. I spent all of yesterday basically cleaning my house and getting the last of the Burning Man detritus (mostly) cleared away, and was not super excited about going out. I had just gone out. And you know I went out Thursday as well. So it was with the small sigh of the constantly in demand that I showered and applied product and hustled into the car.
Ana is staying with a pretty famous psychologist. If you were a therapist geek you would know this woman’s name. I’m not a therapist anymore, but I still knew who this person was, and I was a bit star-struck. Sort of. It was very nice of her to open her house to Ana and Ana’s boyfriend Santi (short for Santiago, how great is that?), but I was a little weirded out by her for various reasons. However, Spanish tortilla and shish kebabs soothe a variety of ills, so it was all good. I think Ana is incredibly brave to come to another country for three months when she doesn’t speak the language as well as she’d like. I am jealous. I want to do that too. I think we’re going to have lunch together and spend half the time talking in Spanish and the other half in English, so we can both improve. That would be cool. I’ve never taken a Spanish class so I tend to talk like a fool, so I’m looking forward to the chance to fix a couple of things. Like ser/estar. Two separate verbs for to be. Tricky. I can use the help. I ended up being really glad I went, after all. Seriously, have you ever had Spanish tortilla? Do you know how good it is?
This coming weekend I have folks coming in from out of town, as well as a trip to the Korean Spa, and then…then I think I don’t have anything planned for the weekend after that. The weekend after that is JournalCon, and let me tell you I grow more nervous and excited by the hour, thinking of that one. But yeah, the weekend after this coming one, but before J Con, I’m free. You know, just in case you want to invite me to dinner or something.