Availability: Friday, May 17 – Sunday, May 19 – TONIGHT!

Comfort comes, like the poet’s fog sometimes, on little cat feet. It’s gentle, sometimes small and soft, and chords are struck inside of us that feel right and good. Often we don’t know that we need it; we weren’t searching for it. It just finds us. And that is a lovely thing.

In State of Wonder, Ann Patchett writes:

…Marina remembered a funeral her father had taken her to as a child, thousands of lights in paper cups floating down the Ganges, the people crowded onto the banks, walking into the water, cutting through the night air filled with incense and smoke. She could smell the rot of the water beneath the blanket of flowers. At the time the spectacle had frightened her so badly she buried her face in her father’s shirt and kept it there for the rest of the night, but now she was grateful for the little she had seen. It didn’t explain what was spread out before her but it reminded her of all the things she didn’t understand… (p. 186)

My mother was the sister known for her baking, but after she died, the youngest of the sisters, Aunt Sara, became the go-to gal for goodies. She’d experiment with new recipes and fly around the kitchen, “slopping here and there,” according to her 8-year-older sister, our Aunt Bernice, (who was anything BUT messy; my land, she washed her trash) and what Aunt Sara came up with was always a winner. I don’t remember how old our girls were when she had to stop making them – but I believe she made individual eggs for each of the family members up until the girls were grown. Adding them all up, I’d say she made a ton of Easter eggs over the years.

In our house each egg was carefully guarded till they were gone. Mine was usually gone the first day. (I’ve been like this since early childhood, when I’d eat my entire chocolate bunny all at once and then would plot about how to get some of my sister’s, since she would eat a bit at a time – to torture me, I always thought. When our girls were babies, I’d fix them a basket with chocolate rabbits, knowing full well from the get-go who was going to eat those bite-sized baby bunnies. I do love a good bunny.) The Sally Forth comic strip was always my favorite, since Sally would always sneak into her daughter’s Easter basket and bite the ears off, just like I always wanted to do. It didn’t take our girls long to figure out that their chocolate had to be guarded, so each of Aunt Sara’s eggs were labeled and stored in separate places in the fridge. (I sometimes would sneak very, very thin slices from David’s egg, since I didn’t think he’d notice, and he generally didn’t.)

Anyway, all this is to say that I firmly believe Easter eggs personify something really big and wonderful and that they’re full of love. So that’s why today’s guests, a mom and her daughter, will have 2 on the table waiting for them. Their names are written on them, in case one of them has the same penchant for pinching as I do…..

Easter Eggs

1 stick butter
1 1/2 c creamy peanut butter
4 oz softened cream cheese
4 c confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Mix, shape, chill, then coat with melted choc which has about a tsp of paraffin melted in.

Roasted Mushroom and Blue Cheese Hummus

2 lbs button mushrooms
1/2 c olive oil
S & P
20 – 30 garlic cloves, sliced (I used minced garlic in a jar. It’s just fine.)
1 15.5 oz can garbanzo beans
1 1/2 lbs blue cheese, crumbled
1 bunch scallions, chopped (I used a Vidalia onion, grated, b/c I never have scallions.)
3 T fresh thyme
2 T fresh tarragon

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Coat mushrooms with half of the olive oil and season with S & P. Roast until mushrooms are reduced in size by about a third, approximately 25 min’s. Cool.

Over high heat saute garlic in remaining olive oil till edges just start to brown. Cool.

Puree all ingredients in food processor or a blender.

10 – 12 servings (I quartered the recipe; it yielded about a cup of yumminess.)

** If you’re frying something wonderful in a skillet and there are some drippings left – (today I had just fried the Farmhouse Veggie Burgers) – just use this pan to swish the bread around in for the croutons or crostini. You might need to add some more olive oil, but it gives some added flavor. Hmmm…I wouldn’t use a fried chicken skillet, though…

Decorated Sugar Cookie Recipe (The Cookie Cutter Company)

1 1/2 cups butter, softened
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 medium eggs
5 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Cream butter and sugar; add eggs and extract. Stir in remaining ingredients. Chill dough for 2 hours. Roll out 1/4″ thick. 400 degrees – 5-7 minutes.

IT WAS ALL MY MISTAKE. Zazzle sent me the correct order – the FIRST time!!! THEN they sent me the second order, packaged identically to the first one, and I mistakenly assumed that the second was incorrect as well. BUT as I finally looked again – very closely – at both the packing slip (which was my order) and the package of items, I realized that they were packed as a unit, and not individually. I had ordered CARDS. That’s all. No ornaments. Adrian’s ornament, packed with the Grammy-love that wasn’t able to be delivered in a timely way, was sitting in my closet, completely forgottten, along with the other ornaments that I had also ordered so far in advance that they were non-existent (in my mind, anyway).

So here I am – with the proverbial egg on my face. Oh, and Lana’s reply?? (When I wrote to her and confessed all) was again just as gracious as it had been the first time. “Have a merry Christmas. You don’t have to mail back the duplicates; keep them, discard them or donate them.” I deserved ANYTHING but THAT! It was mercy and grace. I’ll take it – gratefully. Thank you, Lana, for your Christmas gifts to me.

It was on a much smaller scale, obviously, but it kind of reminded me of another Gift given, don’t you think???

Oh, I was disappointed, all right, and I’d wanted them to know it. You see, my miniature martial arts guy, a Christmas ornament for our grandson, did not get put into the package that was mailed to us in a timely manner. And the replacement, which was eventually shipped, was scheduled for arrival exactly one day AFTER our trip to our daughter’s house – one day too LATE for Grammy and Grampy to be able to hand it to Adrian for his little Christmas tree. And that was not OK. (And if you’re a grandparent who does not live next door to his / her grandchild, you know what I’m talking about and you can clearly see that a LOT was riding on that one small package. LOVE would not get delivered, and THAT tends to put grammies over the edge. Which was why I had begun composing my email to Lana).

As I was struggling to get just the right words – so that I wouldn’t sound like a grammy-grinch (although that was exactly what I was going to be to Lana, who probably doesn’t even begin to get paid enough to read about how the omission of one ordinary object could threaten to destroy the entire legacy of a loving, well-meaning, efficient, organized, timely – did I mention that I sent my order to Zazzle waaaaay in advance of when I needed it?? – grandparent to his / her grandchild), when, all of a sudden, I saw myself. And what I was doing. And I laughed right out loud. Sheesh.

It’s Christmas. It’s a busy time. Things happen. Mistakes are made. Yes, an entire chunk of my order (most of it, actually, not just the juvenile judo jock) was ommitted from the package, and sadly, yes, they were all checked off, but I don’t know, ….maybe the person packing it that day had had a family emergency. Maybe it had been packed an overworked, way-stressed, worried, frightened mama who’d had to send her sleepy child to school that day because he was kept awake the night before by events too egregious to even begin to explain. Christmas isn’t always happy in every home….

So I didn’t send it. We’ll do sonmething else with Adrian on Wednesday besides putting a new ornament on his tree. It’ll be OK. Each day we go is a gift, and it’s not because of the things we carry in our hands.

And Lana and the packer of our package? Well, I say, “Merry Christmas” to each of you! And Lord, give each of them grace today, too. Amen.

As difficult as it might be, she would hold steady…That was her task now, to hold through, with no guarantee, like all those in gray who filled the streets on the way to their jobs, anonymous from birth to death and thereafter, the little people, so called, who so often were as brave as soldiers and as great as kings.       p 323

When he first got off the truck, infantrymen in the line that had formed at the first station offered him a place in front because he was an officer, but he refused it.  It was expected that they would offer, and it was hoped that he would decline.  They appreciated this, and when officers were as filthy and ragged as they were, and despite their rank had not put themselves ahead, they would follow them wherever necessary.  It was the way it was supposed to be.   p 495

It was at least the tenth time he had brought the jacket in, always cut in the same place….She was grateful and at the same time somewhat resentful, for over almost a year the work she did for him served to keep her accounts in the black month after month, even if not by much….For him, whatever he was doing was not a duty.  Nor was it pleasure or displeasure, but only somehow written in.  Time after time he wold bring her the jacket he cut and she would gently reweave it.  Perhaps he took pity on her.  Perhaps, he had lost a son and seen her star, or had been commanded in a way he did not know, or was simply generous, as some people are.  Perhaps, after the war, he was a bit crazy, and thought that an exquisite woman sitting alone in a little shop was reweaving and repairing with gifted persistence not just the torn jackets, pants with cigarette burns, and coats with fraying edges upon which she worked every day, but the whole wounded and suffering world.      pp. 635-636

From In Sunlight and In Shadow, Mark Helprin, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012, pp. 310-311.

The horses sensed the excitement, and though silent and enslaved, they were the most expressive of all. Meyer Copeland had once said to his son, ‘I have often prayed that you will grow up to be as dignified as a horse. You could do a lot worse.’

‘Maybe they’re merely quiet.’