Dinner party

I have a rule.  No repeats.  At least not in terms of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  I am behind many of the other BBA Challenge bakers and since each attempted loaf of bread imprisons me for at least the better part of a day, I am on a mission to keep moving forward. 

I have broken that rule only once—when the Portuguese Sweet Bread recipe chewed me up and spit me out and I was determined to have better results.  But my second loaf was not markedly better than the first, thus enforcing my conviction to keep moving forward.

No repeats.  But I have another rule too.  It goes something like this: The Barefoot Contessa knows what she is talking about. 

This weekend I spent time planning for some guests at dinner and was trying to keep it simple.  It is so easy to fall into the trap of wanting to impress.  So, as I often do when such occasions arise, I closed the Google “winter dinner party menu ideas” search screen on my laptop and asked myself, “What would Ina do?”

Ina Garten, The Barefoot Contessa, warns regularly against dinner party planning that keeps you locked in the kitchen while your guests are partying and also advices that what people really enjoy is comfort, not fancy:

“This isn’t the time to test that intriguing recipe from the latest Gourmet; this is the time for something tried-and-true that will make people smile.” 

Ina Garten’s philosophy about entertaining helped me reign in my visions of grandeur.

I considered my goals for the evening with our guests and came up with these: enjoying the company of friends without all of us having to pay for babysitters, pretending to be grown-ups with social lives, breaking the pattern of weekend evenings sitting in front of a Netflix, shoving at Dave on our too small couch.

Channeling Ina and holding fast to my hopes for our dinner party, I found myself in conflict.  The simple menu I was envisioning would include a fail-safe roasted chicken, a salad brought by our guests and some homemade bread.

Homemade bread!  It is baked in advance, freeing me from the kitchen. And it is an ultimate in the comfort food arena.  Ina would be so proud.

Sometimes in order to be true to one of your personal policies, you have to breach another. You have probably already done the arithmetic here.  My conviction to keep it simple was going to force me to repeat a bread recipe.  I opened my baking text to Pain de Campagne, a bread I tried first a few weeks ago and loved.

I feel a little sad that the battle this weekend in the kitchen, the encounter between Peter Reinhardt and his distant, aspiring  apprentice (me), the skirmish between said aspiring apprentice and her Kitchen Aid mixer, who has been rebelling against this challenge at every possible opportunity, that none of this brought me closer to my goal of baking my way through this cookbook.

But I feel good that I could perceive that of my two principles one stood higher, held more value, offered more reward.

As I am typing now I am realizing that I never posted a description of my first attempt with the Pain de Campagne.  I will get it to you this week.  For the time being, what are your favorite dinner party ideas? Remember, we are keeping it simple!

Here is the roasted chicken (I omit the dried plums): Apricot Glazed Roasted Chicken with Dried Plums and Sage.

Unhurried

Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled. –Harry R. Lewis

A little over two years ago when I had just gone back to work—back to work as in a salaried, scheduled, signed-on-the-dotted-line position in a school—I arrived home to find my favorite parenting magazine in the mailbox.  Anticipating a cup of coffee and some gentle mental stimulation, I carried the issue of Wondertime into our apartment and dropped it on the kitchen table.  One of the titles on the cover caught my eye and my heart sank:

The Unhurried Child

I am not exaggerating when I say that it took more than a year for me to open the pages of the magazine and confront that article.  I carried the issue back and forth to the gym for a few months but never took it out of the bag.  With the best intentions, I tossed it into my carry-on bag every time I flew, into my backpack for every weekend away, into my tote every time I headed to a coffee shop for an hour or two of reading time.  I moved it around the apartment, from the pile of reading material on the coffee table to the decorative piles and baskets of magazines and books on various other pieces of furniture. 

I wanted to read that article, I really did. I was certain that the ideas contained within would fit with my hopes and goals for our family.  But when it came to actually opening the pages and moving my eyes over the words, of absorbing the ideas and challenges found in The Unhurried Child, I was a complete coward. 

I was like an addict, unwilling and incapable of looking myself in the mirror.  Somehow I knew that opening up to those pages would put me face-to-face with the questions that would have been eating at my heart if I had not been so adept at forcing them back down below the surface. 

Was I living a hurried life and raising a hurried child? 

Probably.  When I finally read the article, Catherine Newman’s description of our practice of hurrying children through the day, through even their leisure time, hit close to home.  While I have never felt like we were overly scheduled, having more than two commitments a day when you have young children sets anyone up for those moments of hurrying and nagging, of interrupting the child’s play and process, of valuing the clock and its numbers over almost all else.

I knew that this reading would force me to evaluate my choices.  And it did.  It was a more gentle push than I expected (Thank you for that, Catherine). This reading and a series of events and longings and discussions and other readings have lead me to the place I am in this year, a place of working with intention at limiting our obligations and providing more time for WJ and for our family that is free from the pressing need to move on to the next thing.

But it is not easy and I am often weak.  I am sitting here looking at a pile of registration forms for extracurricular activities for the winter sessions and I am overwhelmed. It seems very easy to make the wrong decisions.  I know that I do not want to break our commitment to going slow but the possibility of missing out on something sits like a miniature me in a red devil unitard on my left shoulder.  And I am fretting.

What would WJ really enjoy doing with the time we have?  How much is too much for a five-year-old?  How much is too much for our family?  Which of these activities are ones that will feed a passion growing in our child?  Which will meet the needs he has, strengthen those places where he needs to grow?

Piano, drama, soccer, karate, dance, swimming…  I’ll let you know what we decide.  I am hoping with a great hope that our choices will be made with slow and unhurried in mind.

How do you decide?  What guidelines do you keep when choosing activities for yourselves and your children?

Half spent

It was with a great and deep sigh of relief that I squeezed into the pew on Christmas Eve.  Surrounded by three generations of my own, I clutched a candle and settled in to listen to the lessons and to sing the carols and to watch for the Light coming into the night.

Concentrating on the words of the carols especially, after this prompting by Emily at Chatting At the Sky, I was struck by a phrase from an old, old hymn. As we sang the end of the first verse of Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, these words tiptoed into my ear, “…amid the cold of winter, when half spent was the night.”  

I was feeling that way.  Like the night was half spent. 

The first part of the night was busy.  It was harder than it needed to be, no doubt, despite our efforts to keep it under control.  We spent our Advent weeks, trimming and trimming, both trimming in preparation for the celebrations—the tree, our home, our hearts—and also trimming in the sense of cutting back and limiting. 

The culmination of this preparation was the annual trip to the airport.  As we drove out of town, I felt accomplished in our well packed but not overfull bags, in our timeliness and preparedness, in our settled spirits. 

But the hand patting my back in eager congratulations was my own and this is the point in most stories when the heroine meets the challenge that shows her air of achievement to be just that. 

My particular challenge was a baggage checking line that stretched the length of the airport and back again.  WJ and I arrived at the airport more than two hours before our scheduled departure.  And we missed our flight.  The four Continental employees working the kiosks could not keep up. 

Standby became our word for the day and we stood and sat and walked and waited in Terminal A as flights arrived and left again without making room for us.  It was ten hours and at least twice as many games of Go Fish before we called it quits and summoned Dave for a ride back home.  He arrived quickly, a true knight in shining armor, with a plan to drive the sixteen hours to my parents’ home.

We grabbed his bags from our apartment and a few spare items for WJ and myself, as our suitcases had miraculously made the flight that we had missed and had arrived in the Midwest well before lunch, and the family set out together for a different kind of adventure than the one we had planned.

Half spent was the night.  Half spent was the night and half spent, I felt, was all I had to offer when I squeezed into that pew on Christmas Eve.  But that is the thing about Christmas.  The baby is not born at the beginning of the story or at the end.  The Light doesn’t enter as the heroine slips the completed Christmas cards into the mailbox just in time to pass out homemade cookies and whiz through airport security.  Nor does the baby come into the picture when the trimming and the driving and the washing up of a carsick child in a roadside restroom have left everyone completely depleted.  Christmastide is a midway point, coming after some waiting, some successes and failures, but well before all hope is lost.

So I breathed a sigh of relief as we all leaned against each other amid the cold on Christmas Eve.  Relief that I have made it this far and relief that there is more to come.  As we lit our candles and lifted them high in the dark of the nighttime church, I welcomed the Good News. 

Happy New Year, by the way, and thank you for reading the first part of our story of slowing down.  I hope you will be taking things slow with us as this year progresses.  It is only half spent.