A little friendly competition

Don’t use cloth napkins when serving chicken wings for lunch with blueberry shortcake for dessert. For once, I was smart about this and thought ahead by stacking paper napkins on the table. Add polenta and Cesar salad to the meal, and it was scrumptious! The farmers’ market had great blueberries, and I baked the shortcake from scratch. Delightful! Everyone (Portia and Louis, et al) seemed to enjoy it.

But the glory didn’t last long. My competition knocked at my door shortly after the last dish was washed. My neighbor Edward, an amateur French Cook (a weekender from NYC) stopped over after spending three weeks in Paris.

I was disappointed that we had finished up all of the blueberry shortcake. Part of me wanted to demonstrate (show off), that I could match his culinary skills. But my peasant-cooking ego was somewhat deflated when he told me that next weekend would be my lesson on how to make Crème Brule. We are talking about blow torches here! So after a summer of trying to get our schedules in synch, next weekend is our planned cooking lesson – dinner through dessert - I will be his apprentice in the kitchen.

I am imaging duck, cheese sauces and small portions.

He left me with a stack of cookbooks to browse. He told me that the duck in the markets upstate are not thick enough, so should we decide on this, he’ll pick some up from NYC. I wonder if the same is true about chicken wings? I am definitely out of my league here, and don’t think we’ll be making any emergency visits to Stewarts for forgotten ingredients.

Whereas my cookbooks have grease stains with pages stuck together with butter crumbs, Edward’s are gourmet-glossy, with each page featuring a fancy photo. I politely accepted his offering to browse through them, but in the back of my mind, I envisioned Alan ripping through them page by page. So before Alan awoke, I safely stacked them out of his sight. So now the question is…should I try the duck?

In other news: Tons of children with painted faces running around creating pottery, posters and whimsical drawings at the Summer Arts Celebration sponsored by the Saugerties Art Lab down at the beach. Alan wanted to play in the sand and swings. Tomorrow is the soap box derby and Bootie arrives back early next week. Eileen too.