lenten journal: thursday night dinner

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We gathered around our table for Thursday Night Dinner, which is a weekly occurrence at our house. We have a IMG_4198fairly regular group around the table, along with others who come occasionally, to eat and talk and laugh and be friends. For me, it is a chance to go exploring the culinary landscape to see what I can find. Tonight, the menu was:

Strawberry salad with mixed greens, cheddar cheese, and fried green beans
Roasted chicken with a orange-coffee sauce over cocoa pasta
Guinness gingerbread with passion fruit mousse

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The menu came about because of a cookbook I read while I was eating breakfast. It was given to me for Christmas by my good friend, Jay. My idea for the chicken I served came from a duck recipe in the book. The gingerbread dessert went back to a night Ginger and I ate something similar at Six Plates, a local winebar. The salad happened because a local farmer has figured out how to grow great strawberries in his greenhouse (and Whole Foods sells them) and I had green beans I needed to use. So I cooked a good part of the day and we called it dinner.

I love cooking good food. I love getting to use my imagination in the kitchen. Yet what I love most of all is eating IMG_4207together around the table: laughing, talking, telling stories, being friends. The food is fuel for something far more significant. We are changing the world on Thursday nights. I love it.

I just need to figure out how to get a bigger table. And a bigger kitchen.

Peace,
Milton

5 COMMENTS

  1. Not to mention, how to provide people with the ability to travel instantaneously to your house while stopping time completely at their OWN homes & in their OWN villages, so that they may join your table for hours & hours & hours & somehow still make it home in time for dinner (lol) …

    I have never in my life wanted someone to be my next-door neighbor more than YOU … Have you thought of moving to Atlanta?!?!?

    Miss you, Milt — but especially I miss cooking with you. . .

    Hope all is well,
    Mitch

  2. Milton, do you know of the Smitten Kitchen blog? Her “claim to fame” is that she does the cooking from her tiny NYC apt. kitchen. Somehow I think size of kitchen does not limit you very much!!! These sound wonderful. Hope the recipes are in your file as I have old, dear friends coming for lunch next Friday.

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