This has been a banner week of cooking on Stowe Lane.  After a wonderful pre-birthday celebration with my family last Sunday the weather turned even more frigid, icy and just plain I am winter and you’re not the boss of me…you’ll take what I dish out (no pun intended) and suffer through until Spring.

Plans of going out to dinner with the Aunt M’s was not going to happen, which I was a bit relieved about because they already spent way too much on gifts…don’t ask how I know, I just know.  I don’t  haul myself about in crappy weather anymore, I’ve got a laptop and a cell phone I can work anywhere, so I looked in the freezer and pulled out a pork tenderloin, mixed mushrooms, green beans, and hit the pantry for some polenta and stock.  You’ll come by me for dinner, famous last words.  If I planned on having a tombstone those words might just do.  It’s such a joy when they burst through the door ready to eat.  We laughed and ate and laughed some more and they only need go out for a minute to get home.  The perfect birthday.

I am a fan of Judith Jones who published a wonderful book called, “The Pleasures of Cooking for One” that I read over and over.  Yes I’m one of those people who can stay up to read a cookbook like a novel till the glasses fall to the end of my nose and I’m asleep.  It’s a treasure, in it she states, “Cooking for yourself is particularly creative because you are inspired by what’s in your fridge or freezer or garden or nearby market.  You don’t have to follow a recipe slavishly; planning how to make three quite different dishes from, say tenderloin of pork…..” So before you ask why I had pork tenderloin in my freezer, it was perfectly legit.   As were the individually portioned baby lamb chops that were destined for later in the week. Just sayin.

Dinner with my friends David and Jan is always amazing, this time at their home.  We commence the revelry as soon as one or the other of us enters the door.  Jan is not the cook with abandon kind of girl that I am, strict with the recipe and planner of menus, she has confessed that she never cooks without a recipe.  And of course, her meals are always delish!  It’s the added ingredients of love and laughter that round out the flavors.

Now for those baby lamb chops, baked potato, spinach soufflé with frizzled onions and a beautiful cabernet.  The therapeutic value of going through the seasoning, the grilling (making sure the fan is on high and the kitchen candle is lit or the fire department might be joining me) coating the potato with olive oil and salting, the soufflé was a cheat (thank you Stouffer’s) but the garnishes were all lovingly crafted by me, for me.  A meal like that must be eaten at the table complete with cloth napkin.  Do not keep rolling your eyes…bits of all these meals would turn themselves miraculously into something else during the week.

Best and busiest of the days was cooking with my friend Louise.  We have been trying to do this for years.  She lives in the Midwest and travels east with some frequency but the timing has never been right until this weekend.   I put a pot of sauce on Saturday morning and the smell was heavenly, it’s been awhile since I pulled out Gramma’s sauce pot.  It’s a true antique with all the bangs and brown spots to prove it.  Louise did confess to some sauce pot envy.  Frankly, I can’t imagine who’s going to make the sauce when I’m gone so she might just wind up with it.  I made the pasta dough and when she arrived we got to work on the ravioli, she made the filling while I ran the dough through the pasta machine.  Once it was thin thin thin, she began to fill and cut the ravioli while I pulled out Aunt Millie’s pot to start the water boiling (yes more vintage pot envy).  My kitchen is small and I can do a pretty good dance when I’m in there alone but I have to say we had just as good a choreography going with code words like scoot left, behind you, scoot right.  Somehow it worked and we thoroughly enjoyed it.  Our friend Evi and her family joined us for dinner and we sat around the table eating, laughing, drinking and telling stories for hours.  Truly this was my idea of a perfect evening.

At the end of the night when everyone had gone and the dishes were done I processed the pictures I took and posted them on Facebook.  One of my friends summed it up perfectly:

Indeed there was much satisfaction in this night of cooking and laughing with friends.  I know like I know I could do it again and again and again.

No one who cooks, cooks alone.  Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.   Laurie Colwin