Almost a New Year, Let's Get Planning

While Christmas has come and gone, we are now in final countdown mode to New Year's Eve and the welcoming of 2005. It's great how this time of year works, because if New Year's was not coming up, I feel quite certain we'd all be seriously depressed. "I've got a car full of presents! And...weeks of boredom ahead of me." This way we get to come back to work for a few days (or like SOME LUCKY BASTARDS GET THE WHOLE WEEK OFF) but with the knowledge that there is a mighty big party around the corner, and in the case of my circle of friends that party will once again take place on the Chesapeake bay, where we brought in 2004 with dangerous bouts with fire, and mysterious juice concentrate and whiskey mixtures. My friends and I warmed up the house with a serious get-together over Christmas break. Not serious as in sad, boring, or otherwise, but serious in the sense that all eight of us, who've been emailing since high school, made it for the event. We realized that we may never have all been in the same place at the same time (save the hallways of St. Stephens and St. Agnes) and found great cause to celebrate because of it. We even made a list for the evening, including such items as "solve all our problems" and "plan Cara's wedding." This one, of course, was of great intrest to me as I've gone into full-fledged I-SEE-WHY-PEOPLE-GET-SO-INTO-THESE-THINGS! mode and am ready to plan a damn wedding like nobody's business. And despite my careless blog title, it will certainly need to have an agenda.

The latest comical notion is that not only should the reception be at the bay, but the ceremony as well. We'd stand at the end of the pier as friends and family pulled up in various boats, rafts. Because J and I will both burn in hell should we not be married in a church, with God and all the saints witnessing our happy union (No, of course we don't live together yet, Father!) the boat idea will probably just remain a daydream. Plus, our friends aren't nautical types. Come on, now.

Small Disappointments

This is my column for the December 23 Chatham Record. Don't like using one writing source to fuel another, buy hey, we aren't all lucky enough to get the Chatham Record, so I thought I'd post this.

My life has been overcome with joyful occurrences as of late.

After my trip to Italy and the onset of the Christmas season my boyfriend surprised me when I was truly least expecting it and we are now engaged.

We happily called family and friends to tell them the news. This went on for a couple days until there was no one left to call and we finally had some peace.

I could regale you with the more precious moments, try to pluck a few heartstrings, but to be honest, I’d rather talk about the tortellini.

The tortellini we discovered while on our vacation is called cappelacci di zucca and means squash-filled hats.

I found a recipe in my Mario Batali cookbook Simple Italian Food and decided to make it for friends coming over that Saturday night. “Simple” is not a word I’d use after the experience.

Using an ancient pasta maker my mother had given me years ago (no doubt she’d grown tired of the thousands of hours making homemade pasta takes) I rolled out thin layers of dough from setting one to two to three and so on until I reached setting six and held my breath as the paper-thin dough escaped the metal grasp of the pasta machine, hopefully, without holes.

You can’t fill up pasta with anything if there are holes. Lesson one.

Each little square I cut so carefully using my sharpest knife and never quite measuring up to the three by three inch prototype set out for me by Mario had to be filled with the squash mixture, then folded not once but twice using intense precision and tiny sprays of water for adhesive. Lesson two: no patience, no homemade pasta.

When I’d finally crafted three suitable little hats, I boiled them for the short time required, and performed a taste test.

My creation was not beyond edible, but certainly not good, or tasty, or any other desirable adjective.

I tried several more times, painstakingly forming the triangles, and attempting to get the filling just right, but each time my attempts were met with, again, not failure, but certainly not success.

Lesson three, at least in my book, was: give up.

I was ridiculously dejected after this process. I knew, of course, it didn’t measure up to true tragedy – it was more on the level of a failed Christmas shopping trip to the mall, coming home empty-handed – but weren’t things supposed to flow with ease now? Wasn’t I engaged and happy? Weren’t friends coming over to celebrate? Shouldn’t my squash-filled hats be perfect?

I sat on that bleak Friday afternoon in the solitude and quiet of my kitchen, flour dusting the floor and my dogs’ noses, before realizing the positive response to the first two questions, and the absurdity of the third one.

Cheese and crackers, I thought, will be just fine, and with that, decided this season, especially lately, deserves more than ruminating on the small disappointments.