There you have it

On December 31st, 2011, I sent my friend Molly a text:  I’m having a salad vision.

It looked like this:

(Minus the feet.)

Butter lettuce, toasted walnuts, fresh ricotta, and sautéed dates for our New Year’s Eve dinner that night. The list of ingredients is more or less the recipe today, so there you have it, but I do want to talk to you for just a moment about the dates. I can’t stop thinking about them.

The dates are where my salad vision began. Specifically, with the sautéed dates and yogurt that I ate for breakfast at Sitka and Spruce in Seattle last May. I’d been meaning to recreate the dish, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it, and it suddenly occurred to me that sautéed dates might be equally at home at dinner, maybe with cheese instead of yogurt, and some greens on the side. It would be a plated salad. We'd toss the lettuce with a vinegary dressing, sauté the dates in olive oil, and lay them over small heaps of ricotta. Molly was in, and in typical Molly fashion, she upped the ante. With butter. We should sauté the dates in butter. Sing it, Molly.

Sautéing dates is a beautiful, beautiful thing. You roll them in a pan of hot, foaming butter and, once coated, leave them alone. The skin against the pan starts to caramelize, and after about a minute or so, you flip them, and let the other side do the same.  Just out of the pan, they gleam.  They're deep mahogany where they’ve taken the most heat, more candy in places than fruit.  Like toffee-in-the-making at the hard-ball stage.

Dress the greens, top with walnuts; spoon the ricotta, top with dates. A vision. Yep.

Sautéed Dates with Ricotta and Butter Lettuce
Inspired by breakfast at Sitka and Spruce, with help from the one and only Molly B.

I’ve called out butter lettuce in the title of this recipe since that was my original plan, but in the end I used part butter lettuce and part red leaf lettuce. Get whatever looks good. Just steer clear of the boxed and bagged lettuces and you’ll be fine. You’re welcome to use your own favorite vinaigrette for the dressing. You want something with enough of a vinegary bite to balance the sweetness on the other side of the plate. Simple is best. I went with oil and vinegar with a squirt of Dijon mustard and a few grinds of black pepper – no herbs or spices.

2 c. fresh ricotta (store bought – go for the good stuff – or make your own)
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
12 Medjool dates
Maldon salt (optional)
2 medium heads of butter lettuce (or butter lettuce and red leaf lettuce, one head each)
1 c. walnuts

For the vinaigrette:
6 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil (plus a little more if you decide to tone down the vinegar)
3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
1 squirt (about ¼ tsp.) Dijon mustard (you can add more, if you want)
A few grinds of black pepper

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread the walnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast them for about 7 minutes, until fragrant. Set aside.

Remove the lettuce leaves from the heads, gently wash them in cold water, spin dry, then lay them out on towels and leave them to finish drying. (If your kitchen is very hot, it’s best to lay them out somewhere else to prevent the leaves from wilting.)

Shake up the vinaigrette in an empty jar, or whisk it together in a bowl. Start with 6 tablespoons of olive oil, then taste it. If it’s too vinegary for you, add more oil, one teaspoon at a time, until you get something you like.

Spoon about a third of a cup of ricotta onto each plate. You’ll want to put it over to one side to leave room for the lettuce.

Slice the ends off of the dates and pull out their pits. Melt the butter in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When the butter foams, add the dates. Let them sit undisturbed for about a minute, until their bottoms begin to caramelize and turn deep brown. Flip them, and leave them for another minute to do the same. Remove the dates to a plate when they’re done.

Toss the lettuce with the vinaigrette (less is more; you will most likely have extra dressing), and place a pile of leaves next to each heap of ricotta. Top the lettuce with the toasted walnuts and the cheese with the sautéed dates, two per plate. If you think of it, sprinkle a few flakes of Maldon salt on the dates. I meant to, but I forgot. Next time.

Serves 6.

Three

Today is January 7th, 2012, which means that Sweet Amandine is three. It’s been kind of insane, hasn’t it? There was the brain thing, the baby thing, a summer in Berlin, a new apartment and construction projects galore, so(!) much(!) butter and sugar and flour. Whew. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you.

January feels like an honest to goodness starting line this year. I’ve got a couple of new projects on the drawing board, and while I’m not exactly sure what comes next, I’m excited. 2012 will be a year for working hard on things I care about. I’m really looking forward to that.

We had some friends over on New Year’s Eve to cook and to eat. That’s Steph up there grinding the pepper for the fennel and Molly working on the gnocchi. The blur all the way on the right is me. I’m making ricotta. We started the evening at 5pm, and instead of putting together the entire meal at once, we prepared one course at a time, gathering around the table to eat whenever the next round was up. It’s my new favorite way to do dinner.

Molly and I figured out the menu over e-mail and texts all week long. We decided to keep it simple, and I’m glad. The salad was butter lettuce in a mustardy vinaigrette, toasted walnuts, ricotta, and sautéed dates. Then, while Molly dropped her gnocchi into the pot and prepared a brown butter sage sauce, I caramelized the fennel and tossed it with the dill and garlic that Steph had chopped.

It was the best night.

We finished with bourbon balls, pear tarte Tatin, and a dance party in the living room.

(Champagne, too, of course.)

And then we found out that on New Year’s Eve, we can see fireworks from our living room. 2012, you're full of surprises already.

No shortage of recipes to share with you tonight, as you can see, but it’s late, so I’m going to sign off for now. I’ll be back soon with one or two from this meal.

Happy 2012.

2-0-1-1

Ahhh, 2011, you’ve treated us well. A new apartment! A new human! And for the first year since 2007, no one cut open my head! Yahooooo! 2-0-1-1, you thought of everything. Then, to top it all off, you squeezed in some fudgy bourbon balls just under the wire. That’s bourbon and chocolate together in one boozy confection.

It’s been a very good year.

The recipe comes from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, the same cookbook that brought us that special snacking cake and rosemary-laced lemon bars, which practically makes these bourbon balls delicious by association. I added them to our Chanukah party spread last week, sent some off to my family in Ohio, then hurried right back into the kitchen to prepare a batch for New Year’s Eve. I thought you might want to make them for New Year’s Eve, too, though to be perfectly honest, I’m kicking myself for sharing the recipe with you only this afternoon. You can start these bourbon balls the night before, or even the day you plan to serve them if you can get the dough together with enough time to let it rest before rolling. The one- to two-day old balls will be very good. But I’ve found that they don’t really arrive until day four or five. That’s when their fudginess peaks. (The bourbon in these little buggers sneaks up on you, by the way, so watch out.)

A couple of things about this recipe surprised me. First, there’s the fact that you crunch up store-bought chocolate cookies in a food processor and use the crumbs as the base for the balls. In other words, you’re making what amounts to a cookie out of cookies. It's cookie cannibalism, people. Then comes the part where you have to leave the dough (can I even call it “dough?”) uncovered for hours to dry it out. That also felt strange, and especially so when I realized that the finished balls also do best when left out in the open. For days. But then you have yourself a plate of bourbon balls so dense and rich – almost chewy – that suddenly, the whole thing feels perfectly natural. Of course, that could be the bourbon talking.

I’m going to unplug next week to wrap up a work project and get some ducks in a row, but I’ll be back on January 7th with a recipe and some thoughts for 2012. Until then, Happy New Year, friends.

[Oh, and p.s. – When we moved last spring, we did so with the help of some good friends. No boxes, if you recall. We just picked up our stuff and carried it over to the apartment next door. Eli captured the whole apartment take-down on camera and stitched the shots together into a stop-action video. It’s a fun piece, and I thought you might like to see it… if only to see poor Eli trot across our empty living room with a 19-weeks-pregnant Jess on his back!]



Music: "Cripple Creek," Mike Seeger.

Fudgy Bourbon Balls
Adapted from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, by Melissa Clark

Melissa Clark recommends using Nabisco Famous wafers for the cookie crumbs, but any crisp chocolate cookie will do. Think Oreo cookie (minus the cream) or crisper. I used Mi-Del Chocolate Snaps. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen has a recipe for chocolate wafers that would work beautifully, if you’re into the whole bake a cookie to make a cookie routine.

2½ c. chocolate cookie crumbs
1¼ c. pecans
½ c. good bourbon or rum (I used Woodford Reserve)
1 c. confectioners’ sugar, plus additional for rolling
3 Tbsps. unsweetened cocoa powder, plus additional for rolling
1½ Tbsps. honey

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the cookie crumbs and the pecans until the nuts are finely ground.

In a separate bowl, stir together the bourbon and the rum, 1 cup confectioners’ sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa powder, and honey. Add the mixture to the food processor and pulse until just combined. Transfer the dough to a bowl, preferably a wide, shallow one to maximize air exposure, and let it rest, uncovered, at room temperature for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. You want the dough to try out a bit before rolling the balls.

Using one level teaspoonful of dough per ball, use your fingers to roll into balls. Roll some of the balls in confectioners’ sugar, and some of them in cocoa powder. The coatings will absorb into the balls over time, so if you want, you can sprinkle or re-roll in the sugar and cocoa just before serving.

Yield: A zillion bourbon balls, by which I mean about 100.

She made soup

The first few weeks after Mia was born were the soupiest weeks of my life. My mother made mushroom barley soup, my friends dropped by with lentil soup, more lentil soup, and minestrone, and when we ran out of all that, Eli defrosted a container of his mother’s chicken soup. We ate it with matzo balls, parsnips, carrots, and celery and then, when Mia was five and a half weeks old, my stepmother, Amy, came to town.

I wish I could remember more about that visit. According to my journal, that was the week when Mia started crying actual tears, and the week she first looked me straight in the eye and beamed, so that’s something. Amy did laundry – I remember that – and she hung out with Mia early one morning so that I could sleep for an hour or two. She cooked, of course: a pumpkin stuffed with everything good, some kind of chicken in wine, maybe a pasta dish. And because Amy knows what you want to eat most of all when you’ve just made a human, she made soup.

Soups, I should say. Four in the not even five days she was here. She started with pea soup, I think, then moved on to beef stew, which isn’t exactly soup, but I’m counting it anyway, then to kale and bean soup, which we’ll come back to in a second. On Amy’s last morning here, Eli, Mia, my father, and I drove up to the Newburyport Half Marathon (Eli ran, we cheered), and when we got back, she was gone. In her place, a tomato-based vegetable soup, still warm, sat waiting to be sealed and stowed. Poof! Amy knows how to make an exit.

I like soup, and this specific cluster of soups was especially good. I hate to play favorites, but -- as you've probably already guessed -- the kale and bean soup was a standout, for me. Amy sent me the recipe when she got home, and I’ve been making it on repeat ever since. Kale and bean soup is a homely soup with just a few simple ingredients: an onion, two garlic cloves, kale, a couple of cans of beans, and vegetable stock. You can toss in a Parmesan rind, too, if you have one. What got me excited about this soup is the way you lightly mash some of the beans when you add them to the pot so that they give their guts over to the broth. Now that I have an eye out for it, I realize that partial bean mashing is standard operating procedure for a lot of bean soups, but I had never done it before. One recipe that I came across last week says that mashing the beans “thickens” the soup, but I would describe the effect more as a “texturizing.” It reminds me a little of miso soup, the way the mashed beans cloud the broth.

I took a break from this soup over the last few days to focus my attention on latkes and all manner of sweets, but today, it’s making a comeback. I’m guessing that in these last days of 2011, we could all use a little soup. Enjoy.

Kale and Bean Soup
Adapted from The Columbus Dispatch

I’ve made a few changes to the recipe that Amy sent along. Instead of two cans of cannellini beans, I use one can of cannellini, and one can of chickpeas. I tried the chickpeas at Eli’s suggestion, and he was right. They make the soup feel richer. I’m not sure why. Are chickpea guts richer than cannellini guts? Maybe. At any rate, I think chickpeas have a more distinctive flavor than cannellini beans, so that might be it. I also added garlic into the mix. As for the kale, I usually prefer dinosaur kale (a.k.a. Lacinato kale, the kind with flat, dark leaves), but for this soup, I go with curly. It stands up better to the twenty-minute soak and steam in the pot. (Though if all you have is dinosaur, use it. It will be fine.)

1 lb. kale
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 14.5 oz. can each cannellini beans and chickpeas, drained and rinsed
4 c. water
2 c. vegetable broth
A Parmesan rind, if you have one
Shaved Parmesan for serving (I use a vegetable peeler to shave nice, wide ribbons.)
Salt and pepper

Rinse the kale and tear the leaves away from the stems. The original recipe says to cut the leaves into ½-inch strips, but I just tear them into small-ish pieces with my hands.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the chopped onion, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the sliced garlic, and push it around a little with the onions. When the aroma rises, add half of the beans, and mash them lightly in the pot. I find that a potato masher works best, but a fork will also do. Either way, hold onto the side of the pot with one (oven-mitted) hand while you mash to make sure that the pot doesn’t slide.

Add the water, the broth, and the Parmesan rind, if using, and bring to a boil. Stir in the kale and the remaining beans, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer, partially covered, until the kale is tender, about 20 minutes.

Ladle the soup into bowls, and drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil. Top with the shaved Parmesan and plenty of black pepper.

Serves 4.

Hi

We're having kale and bean soup for dinner, and my favorite squash salad from Plenty. How about you?

The good stuff

My friend, Mathias, knows a thing or two about coffee. When I found out that he was coming to stay with us for a few days in August, I bought a Chemex coffee maker in the hope that he would teach me how to use it. He did, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

I’m not much of a coffee drinker – probably why I never learned how to brew a proper cup – but I am a breakfast maker and eater, and when I have people over for pancakes or custard-filled corn bread, it’s nice to be able to offer them a cup of the good stuff. Much better than my previous modus operandi, which consisted of me apologetically nudging a French press and a bag of (cover your eyes, Mathias) pre-ground coffee in the direction of my guests, and having them make it themselves.

Earlier this week, Mathias published a coffee gear guide on his blog. It’s a great resource if, like me, you’re just starting out, so I wanted to share it with you.

Some other things to kick off the weekend:

:: Karrah Kwasnik’s photography. I met Karrah last night at a PechKucha Night in Portsmouth, where she presented her work. This woman does amazing things with film. Correction: Not film! She shoots in digital, prints the negatives on transparency paper, and makes the images using the Van Dyke Brown printing process. In other words, Karrah is even cooler than I thought.

:: Mr. W. Poor guy. (Thanks for this, Kasey.)

:: This beautiful essay by Marisa about her “imaginary mentor.” I think it’s important to have those.

See you next week.

PechaKucha Night: Everybody Eats

Hi, all.

I wanted to stop in today to tell you about a PechaKucha event happening tonight in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The theme of the event is food, and here’s how it works: Nine people who care about food will present for a few minutes about what they do. Each presenter is allowed 20 slides, and 20 seconds per slide to tell his or her story. (The slides advance automatically.) Tonight’s presenters are a fisherman, a sculptor, a photographer, a chef, an activist, a writer, a restaurant owner, a local food organizer, oh, and ME!

The story that I’ll be telling tonight is ours. It’s the story of this blog: how I got sick, lost my everyday, and how this space helped me find it again. How Sweet Amandine helped me find me again. I’ve never talked about this stuff out loud in public before, so I’m pretty nervous. Also, excited!

For the uninitiated: PechaKucha means “chit-chat” in Japanese, and events take place all over the world. The idea behind them is simply to get creative people together and talking. I’ve only ever been to one, but I can tell you that I left feeling inspired.

Tonight’s event will be held at Street 360, 801 Islington St. in Portsmouth, NH. Doors open at 6:00pm, and we’ll begin at 7:00pm. You can find more information about the event and my fellow presenters here.

I know it’s short notice, but if you happen to live in the area, it would be great to see you out there.

What the cookie tin wants

All right, enough with the parsnip and cabbage. Let’s have dessert.

Around this time every year, I go cookie hunting. (In fact, I just noticed that it was exactly one year ago to the day that I posted last year’s find. What are the chances of that?) I know I’m not the only one. We all have our tried and trues, but the cookie tin wants what the cookie tin wants, and come December, what it wants is something new. So we take to our cookbooks, our magazines, our piles of recipes, printed and clipped, and armed with sticky tabs, off we go. We’re never sure exactly what we’re looking for. We’ll know it when we see it.

The December cookie once traveled in packs (sometimes, it still does). Today, it most often flies solo, like the one I spotted yesterday among the beasts and fowl, vegetation, and other edibles of a new, already-beloved cookbook. There, in the glorious habitat of Dorie Greenspan’s Paris kitchen, I discovered a whole new species.

It’s called a croquant, and its identifying characteristics are difficult to describe. Imagine a cross between a macaroon (this variety) and a meringue. It’s sort of like that. Croquant means crunchy, and crunchy it is, though not in the typical way. To me, crunchy cookies mean sugar cookies, buttery slabs that snap when you bite in. The croquant takes crunchy in a different direction. “Airy” is not a word that I usually associate with cookies, especially not the crisp kind, but here, it works. That’s because of the way this cookie crumbles, which is not like a cookie at all. It crumbles more like a cracker, specifically, like those rice crackers with practically no ingredients. You know the ones. Croquants are similarly simple, with just four ingredients to speak of. When I was chopping the nuts, then stirring them in with the sugar, then the egg whites, then the flour, I had trouble picturing what a cookie empty of butter, and oil, and extracts, and leavening, would even look like. Well, it looks like this, people:

And it’s worth every bit of its nonexistent salt. The croquant is a rare bird, indeed.

::

p.s. If you're reading this via RSS or e-mail, I hope you'll click over to the site today. I've made some changes that I'm excited to share with you.

Croquants
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Around my French Table

One teaspoon of dough per cookie will look like a pitifully small amount, but don’t be alarmed. The dough spreads and puffs into a perfect two-to-three-bite cookie as it bakes. As you might imagine from the ingredient list, these cookies are quite sweet. That makes them very nice with a cup of unsweetened coffee or tea or, my favorite, warm milk.

About the nuts: I used a combination of unskinned hazelnuts and almonds, which Dorie Greenspan says is the most popular in these croquants. She also notes that the version she makes with salted cashews is her "house favorite." I'm thinking of making a batch with pecans or walnuts the next time around.

3½ ounces (about a cup) of nuts, barely chopped
1¼ c. sugar
2 large egg whites
½ c. plus 1 Tbsp. flour, sifted

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Put the nuts and the sugar in a medium mixing bowl and stir together with a rubber spatula. Stir in the egg whites, then the flour, to form a loose dough. Don’t worry if it looks more like a grainy batter than any cookie dough you’ve ever seen. It’s supposed to look that way.

Drop the dough by the teaspoonful onto the parchment-lined baking sheets. The dough will spread, so be sure to leave about 2 inches between each mound of dough. You can use your finger to round the edges of each one.

Bake the cookies for 8-10 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through, until they puff up, and the tops crackle and brown. I baked these cookies one sheet at a time. If you want to bake two sheets at once, swap the upper and lower sheets after the first 4-5 minutes so that your cookies will brown evenly.

Place the baking sheet on a cooling rack, and let the cookies stand for about 10 minutes, until you can easily peel them away from the parchment. Transfer the cookies to the cooling rack, and allow them to cool to room temperature. Repeat with the remaining dough. Use a cool baking sheet each time, or your dough will start to melt and spread before you even make it to the oven.

Store in a dry, covered container – not in a plastic bag or plastic wrap – or they will lose their crunch.

Dorie Greenspan says that this recipe makes 34 cookies. Using a level teaspoon of dough for each cookie and rather large bits of nuts, I had closer to 50.

I’m talking about parsnip

When I was a little girl, “Friday night dinner” was a thing, an event that began each week in the lobby of my grandparents’ apartment building. I got to find the buzzer on the board, number 815, and press it with my finger. Then, there was an elevator ride up, and my grandfather standing in the doorway of the last apartment on the left. My sister and I would charge down the long hallway. I haven’t thought about that for a long time, and it surprises me how clearly I remember the sound of our footfall on the carpet. “When I was a little girl” means something different to me now that Mia’s here.

My grandmother’s name was Marion. The last time I was home in Cleveland, I found a photo of her that was taken in the house where my mother grew up.

I never saw her kitchen like that, so cluttered with dishes, and pots, and appliances (and, uh, Grape Ade?), but I wish I had. She looks happy.

My grandmother was beautiful and liked to make herself more beautiful. Most days, she smelled faintly of hairspray and makeup, but on Friday nights, when I loved her most, she smelled like soup, brothy, salted, and sweet. I’m not sure if she would have appreciated my saying a thing like that. If she were here, I hope she would know what I mean. For those Friday night meals, my grandmother would sometimes make pea soup, and sometimes mushroom barley, but her fallback position was chicken soup. She made it almost every week.

I’m not going to tell you about my grandmother’s chicken soup today, though someday, I’d like to. Instead, I want to tell you about just one special component of it. At least I thought it was, when I was a kid. Special, and also a little bit weird. I’m talking about parsnip. By now, I’ve eaten parsnip every which way – roasted and braised, steamed and stewed – but back then, the only parsnip I’d ever met was the parsnip that turned up each week in that soup. It looked like carrot floating there in the pot, only white, and that felt exotic, to me. It tasted exotic, too, richer and greener and more fragrant than the other root vegetables I knew. I always asked for extra parsnip in my bowl.

The soup I have for us today features parsnip, along with more fresh parsley than I’ve ever seen in a single recipe. I’m used to measuring parsley by the tablespoon, or by the handful, at most. So if you’re like me, the sight of two cups of chopped parsley on your cutting board will mildly terrify you. You may even decide that, the first time around, you’ll add just a cup, and see how it goes, because two cups, two cups – that can’t be right. Like me, you’d be wrong. I’m not sure how it works, but in there with the parsnips and leeks (Oh, did I mention? There are also leeks.), two cups of parsley is perfect. All of that parsley has an added benefit, too: it turns the soup the loveliest shade of green. You’ll have to trust me on this one, since I’ve gone black and white on you, today. Or, you can click over to Elise’s site, where I found the recipe. She’s posted a gorgeous green glamour shot right here.

I made this soup twice the week before Thanksgiving to use up the last of the parsnips and leeks from this year’s farm share, and I’ll be making it again, soon. It takes only a few minutes to get everything into the pot, and just another few later on to purée it. It’s 100% vegetables, which means it's quite light, but rich enough that a friend of mine asked if it had any cream in it. All of which makes it a nice soup to have in your back pocket this time of year. You know, when your front pockets are full of cookies.

Parsnip Soup with Leeks and Parsley
Adapted from Simply Recipes

I mentioned the pretty green color of this soup, so I should warn you that it holds onto its green for only so long. It will still taste perfectly delicious on the second or third day after you make it, but it will lose some of its vibrance. Also, a word about parsnip prep: If the cores are hard and fibrous, remove them before chopping the rest of the parsnip. If the cores seem okay to you, you can leave them in.

2 Tbsp. butter
3 leeks, white and pale green parts only, sliced lengthwise, and then crosswise into ¼-inch slices
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1½-2 pounds parsnips, peeled and chopped
4 strips lemon peel, 1” x 2” each
1-2 tsp. salt
4 c. vegetable stock
2 c. water
2 c. finely chopped fresh Italian (flat leaf) parsley (plus a little more, if you want some for garnish)
1-2 Tbsp. lemon juice
Black pepper, to taste

Heat the butter in a 4 to 6 quart pot over a medium flame. When the butter foams, add the leeks, and toss to coat them with the butter. Once the leeks are sizzling, lower the heat and cover the pan. Cook until soft. Don’t let the leeks brown.

Add the parsnips and olive oil, and toss to coat. Sprinkle with salt, then add the stock, the water, and lemon peel. Bring to a boil, uncovered, then lower the heat, cover the pot, and cook at a low simmer until the parsnips are completely tender. It should take about 30 minutes.

Remove and discard the lemon peels. Add the parsley, and purée the soup until smooth with an immersion or stand blender. If using a stand blender, be careful! When blending hot liquids, never fill the blender more than halfway. I like to hold the cover of the blender closed with a dish towel, just to be safe.

Return the puréed soup to the pot, and stir in the lemon juice. Taste, and add more salt or black pepper, if needed. Garnish with the rest of the chopped parsley, a little olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper. Elise also suggests chopped chives. That sounds good, to me.

Serves 6.

How we gather

A baby lives with us now, which means that I get less sleeping time. Less sleeping time, though, means more thinking time, and that feels like a fair trade. Today, I’ve been thinking about how we gather.

My parents are divorced, so how we gather, the “we” that gathers, changes each year.

Last year, we joined my step-mom Amy’s family for Thanksgiving in Toledo, Ohio. These photos are from that trip. With guitars, and buckeyes, and elbows on the table is how we gathered there.

With borrowed sweatshirts, a football, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (he’s back!), and three kinds of pie.

Before the meal, we joined hands around the table. Each of us had to say out loud why we were thankful for the person on our left. I like that we gather that way. A person who loves me very much was standing on my right, and when her turn came, she said simply that she was thankful that I was here. I had had my fourth and final surgery five and a half months earlier, a surgery that we hadn’t expected, but that had felt like a finish line, of sorts. That’s why she said it, I know, because my being almost gone, but then here, was still on everyone’s mind. The thing is, it had only just recently stopped being always on my mind, so being thanked for being “here” felt hard. “Is that the bar, for me? Not dead?” I asked Eli before bed that night. I want to be more than just “here.”

We’re staying put in Cambridge this year for Thanksgiving. My mother is with us, and we’re going to my friend Julia’s parents’ house tomorrow. I’m bringing apple cake. Maybe something chocolate, too.

Happy Thanksgiving. See you next week, with soup.