This Week In Food

My Top 3

At this point, the kitchen is the most furnished room in the house, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in there this week. Here are some of the results:

Turkey pho, prepared with homemade chicken stock, fresh Thai basil, and Thanksgiving leftovers from and D.

Canadian bacon banh mi with freshly grated carrot and daikon relish.

This picture is mostly intended to taunt and . Before moving here, I didn’t know Kozy Shack sold banana pudding in the twenty-two ounce tub. Guess what I’m bringing a case of to Inferno next year?

Antipasti from tonight’s dinner. Not pictured: eggplant parmesan and lemon squares, both made in the same Pyrex baking dish which I bought at Goodwill yesterday morning, along with the loveseat, coffee table, and candle holder you see here. Also not pictured: the five friends who showed up to share all that food.

When people asked me why I wanted to move to Seattle, I frequently answered that I wanted to be able to have people over to dinner. There have been moments since coming here (when I was elbow-deep in fried eggplant slices and needed to disable the smoke alarm, for example) when I have questioned the soundness of that motive. Surely such a huge undertaking demands a more ambitious rationale.

But when your ambition is to satisfy wants in your life that have gone unanswered, even the littlest reasons are a big deal. And I can tell you that in those few hours with friends around a tiny table in my new home, every apprehension I have about choosing to be here fled away.

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