I understand no plan. I love no plan. I want to cook what moves me, fall in love with food I never met before and if the moon lines up with Jupiter I want to be ready to jump into a dress and be asked out for dinner.

But you know I have two eggs, 1/2 a cup of meat sauce, the end of a half gallon of milk and aging olives in the refrigerator.
I can guarantee there is nothing I haven’t met in there.
I could pick up my phone right now to check for a dial tone, but I know it’s working and I know there is no one on the other end of it thinking about asking me to dinner because he’s in the shower at the moment and when he gets out of the shower, he’s not going to ask me out.

The truth is No Plan is a beautiful thing if you’re ready to eat a whole lot of pretzels but for a mother that doesn’t work.
Exciting happens when there is food to cook with, and if I plan it, if I think about food I have never made before and then buy it, the chances of eating it improve a lot.

I’m back to making menus:

From Marion Sullivan, a salad of scallop, apple, chive and tarragon packed into a timbale and served on a golden beet soup. Yes. But I’m going to change the apple to fennel and the tarragon to fennel. I might even change the scallop to lump crab.

I’m going to keep going with the soup and try a carrot soup with fresh ginger and garlic and I’m going to serve that with a lentils or maybe I’ll try making a lentil burger smothered in a red pepper marmalade.

I have had collard greens cooked with a smoked turkey leg on the mind to go along with corn bread and black eyed peas. Lemon meringue pie.

I could use a steak. And you know I have never made a bearnaise sauce-almost everything like it but never bearnaise. And a steak would go so well with those kind of potatoes that you boil whole, smash with the heel of your hand and then saute with cloves of garlic. A salad w/a french vinaigrette. I’m going to buy some Edith Piaf and figure out how to put my hair in a chinon.

Because Ferdinand loves his surprises anytime and anywhere but at dinner, chicken pot pie wrapped in it’s own pastry.