Scrumptious dinner

Farmers who don't just sit around profiting from the Farm Bill deserve a lot of credit for hard work. Tom and I worked our tails off outside for several hours today digging, leveling and perfecting the foundation for the playhouse we're building for the boys. And we are sooo tired. And we haven't even started constructing the thing. Which is a 7x9 cozy cabin. With four window-boxes. Mon dieu.

But all good and all fun. And we were rewarded with a fabulous dinner. Potatoes Anna a la Nora Ephron, and beef filets with creamed chard and red wine and shallot sauce a la Florence Fabricant. Fabulous, delicious, the longest two recipes I feel I've ever freaking made. Why do I not read through them first?! Nora asks you to dry each 1/16" round of potato with a paper towel, one at a time. Florence asks so very much too. Regardless, both made for a delicious dinner, and I feel happy to be invoking Nora tonight post-Heartburn.

I also opened for us a fabulous bottle of 2008 Hall Cabernet Franc. I love Cab Franc. It is so under-rated!

Squash blossom bonanza, wine DON'T

My good pal, JL, emailed me yesterday: what to do with an overabundance of squash blossoms? I tossed her a few ideas, she made a beautiful pizza, and then....she said she wanted to gift the rest of the blossom haul to moi. Would I take them? Indeed!

So this evening, we grilled a pizza. T opted for tomatoes and artichokes, but I layered mandolined squash, green tomatoes, the blossoms and mozzarella. Oliver tasted it and declared it wonderful. My thoughts exactly.

Unfortunately, I have a seriously horrible wine against which to advise you: The Sobon Estate Roussanne. Have you ever had a Roussanne? It's a white grape, and I often like the resultant wines. As well, they're great when blended with Marsanne. If you can ever get your mitts on a bottle, try Qupe's Mar-Rou blend. Aah. Anyway, I was slightly hesitant in buying this wine because I don't like the vineyard name or the label and the description left me a bit cold, BUT ever-hopeful for new and different summer whites, I took a plunge. After a few sips tonight, I threw it all out. Disastrous, lacking any complexity, cloying syrup of "No, Don't Drink This!" Blech!!!!

Kids are hysterical, great dinner Southern-style

The kids were in rare form tonight- calm, hilarious, getting along, no beefs about bedtime. Darling! They had this whole story-line going on about someone named Mark whose house was being taken over by a ghost. So, they shot the ghost and cut him in half and put him in the street. Then there was Rue-gaga (a character Oliver made up on our drive home from the beach; apparently Rue-gaga is a baby/young child whose family was was victimized by Haman so Rue-gaga avenged their torture) whose home was invaded by aliens so they took care of them too. You know, if you'd told me a year ago that I could write about violent boy-thoughts with such a laissez-faire attitude, I'd have told you you were nuts. However, it is abundantly clear to me now that this stuff is INNATE. Don't fight it y'all. Boys will make guns out of toast. Just go with it and appreciate their creativity and desire to keep you safe from the bad guys in the world. They will turn out fine if you just set some limits and remind them that normal, functional people do not hurt others and say things like "I'm going to kill you with my SkyBlaster foam gun."

T and I then cooked the most marvelous homage to great Southern cooking. Barbecued chicken and spicy okra on the grill, and a fabbbbbulous Hugh Acheson corn-tomato-basil salad with a thyme-shallot vinaigrette. With it we drank a bottle of Muga Reserva, a divine Spanish Rioja, and for dessert we're taste-testing a food52 recipe up for Your Best Mint: mint-cherry-chocolate rice pudding pops. BTW, peeps, if you have Pandora, make a playlist based on the Supremes. I cannot even handle how great the music we've been listening to is. 50s/60s/Motown is definitely the best era of American music. How could someone as nerd-tastic as Roy Orbison make a song like Pretty Woman and sing it in that meow voice?! Right now, The Archies' Sugar, Sugar...