Tag: celebration
July 29
Today is our eighth wedding anniversary. It’s also the 11th birthday of this blog, the first day of our first-ever corporate tax audit, and the day that my mother officially moves to Seattle. It’s a lot of Big Adult Stuff, and I have lots of feelings, including immense gratitude for our accountant. But most of all, I’m glad that these two wide-eyed pups, the ones in this shot circa 2007, decided to take the great leap that is marriage, that they’ve kept at it, showing up, cooking, eating, building, building some more, figuring it out, duking it out, and loving, loving, for eight whole years. And I’m glad that this blog made it all happen. Thanks for being along for the ride, everybody.
P.S. A wonderful, and relevant, episode of On Being.
P.P.S. Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in the car on a hot, sunny day, with the windows down!
And now, for a properly celebratory cocktail: The world does not need Campari Granita. It is enough, I think, that Campari exists, and that we can mix it with soda water and drink it. But the instant I saw this recipe in Jennifer McLagan’s excellent book Bitter, I knew I had to make it, because the only thing better than straight-up Campari and soda (or a Negroni, or an Americano, or a shandy), is Campari and orange or grapefruit juice and the smallest splash of lemon juice, frozen and forked to the texture of a snow cone and eaten with a spoon on a sticky July evening, while you make dinner. Or more succinctly, in the words of our friend Michael Riha: this stuff is great. Cheers. Stir the juice, Campari, and lemon juice (and sugar, if using grapefruit juice) together. Pour into an 8-inch square metal pan (or another pan of similar volume). Place in the freezer. Stir the mixture with a spoon every hour or so, to break it up into large ice crystals. I used a fork for the last stirring, to make the ice crystals finer and fluffier. It took about three hours for my granita to be fully frozen and to the right texture. If you forget to stir the mixture and it freezes solid, don’t panic: just break it into chunks and pulse briefly in the food processor. To serve, spoon the granita into chilled glasses. Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Campari Granita
From Bitter, by Jennifer McLagan
For the orange version:
Or for the grapefruit version, which is more bitter, and which I prefer:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In three months, this site will be eleven years old. Three nights ago, I got to stand on a stage in New York in front of hundreds of people I admire – including Martha, THE Martha, who looked foxier, and younger, than anyone – and accept a James Beard Award for this blog. I was so nervous, so totally electrified with terror, that my right eyelid twitched for six days leading up to the ceremony. I hope I never forget what it felt like, after so much hoping, to hear my name called. I hadn’t planned a thank-you speech – if you take your umbrella, yadda yadda, it won’t rain – but once I was up there, everything felt oddly…
Read moreNine
I am typing this post from the back office at Delancey, where I’m holed up, working on a deadline, while Brandon and Co. prepare a five-course meal for forty-five in celebration of a gorgeous new book. Deadline: I will destroy you. In more ways than one. But I had to take a break to pop into this space, and to send up a cheer – if you can, in fact, hear me from back here behind the Essex walk-in – that it has been nine years today since this site was born. Nine! I was a delinquent graduate student then, giddy to be creating a space to write about things other than Michel Foucault and discourse analysis and anything described…
Read moreWe did it
I am very happy to announce that June is here. I had my first contraction while sitting at the bar at Delancey last Friday evening, eating dinner with my mother, and went into early labor in the middle of the night. Twenty-nine hours later – after deafening my companions on the drive to the hospital; discovering that I wasn’t far enough along to be admitted; a few hours spent laboring on a bench on the nearby campus of Seattle University, scaring incoming freshmen into a lifetime of abstinence; and much care and encouragement from my saintly longtime doctor, the world’s finest doula, and a nurse named Wendy – our daughter June Elizabeth Alexander Pettit was born at 6:29 am on Sunday,…
Read more