Apr 30 2006
The Show-Off
I was Suzy the Culinary Exhibitionist this weekend, for the benefit of friends (a show-off must have an audience).
Saturday: Really excellent Eggs Florentine, with hollandaise sauce made from scratch, fresh spinach, free-range eggs, and whole-wheat English muffins. Mmmm, death on a plate.
Later, it was sour apple martinis and a screening of Reform School Girl (1957), starring no-one you’ve ever heard of. The eponymous heroine takes the rap for a delinquent boyfriend, and gets sent to, you guessed it, reform school. If the movie was meant as an Awful Warning, it was a total failure, since reform school seems to consist of gardening with no supervision (allowing for flirting with local boys through wire fence), playing volleyball and ping pong in tiny shorts, supervised dances with local boys (allowing heroine to meet Mr. Right), learning about the finer points of the Civil War while wearing tight sweaters and skirts with stiletto heels, with the occasional cat fight thrown in for good measure. I wish someone would send me to reform school.
Sunday: Thai dinner for tonight – everything made by Me except obvious things like meat. Grilled beef salad (not for my consumption, I hasten to add), chicken in green curry sauce with fresh basil and chicken, and to use up the leftover cilantro, chicken marinating in a paste of cilantro, garlic, fresh mint, and sesame oil, which will be grilled. All to be served with rice and salad.
Now that everything’s under control in the kitchen, it’s time to lounge on the couch and fantasize over the real estate section of the New York Times. What will it be? A house in the Hamptons? A perfect pre-war apartment overlooking Central Park? A magically unscathed antebellum plantation house? All of the above?