You want to know why I don’t have any mirrors in my house that are easy to find? Because I’m tired of looking at myself. The color is dull, the skin is falling like snow off a pitched roof, and the hair–let’s just say that a girl that gives herself a haircut with her son’s paper scissors is better off avoiding reflection. I thrive on the rest of the world, where even the same old, same old, year after year can get better.
ie: the Thanksgiving table. A huge mound of deep golden bird, surrounded by a terrain of mushroom and celery stuffing with rivulets of butter and broth winding through succulent bites of toasted bread, soaked to a saturation of happy. Glowing bowls of jewel red cranberry sauce with spicy bits of candied ginger and slender slivers of pecans tucked in the holiday balls that are brussel sprouts. A tiny reservoir of gravy in a porcelain pot and baby onions swimming in cream. You could leave it like that or serve baked apples with a cinnamon stick, vanilla bean and calvados, a sweet potato pie from a great grandmother’s recipe that knocks the socks off a cat or a sparkling wine from a French cellar or a whole new salad that nobody can get enough of–baby beets braised with a bouquet garni, tossed with a little butter and lemon and fennel nestled into a salad of little gem lettuces, St. Augur, and deeply, darkly caramelized shallot.
The Thanksgiving Table to a cook is the Nutcracker Suite to a ballet dancer. Expected to always be the same, an endless performance, exhausting, and the mark of fabulousness if you can take all that and make something of it.
That’s what I’m talking about.