Easter dinner musings

Everyone's gone after the evening and I'm thinking about how much story is in our wonderful family dinner. For years, since the kids were little we had a simple Easter dinner with Honeybaked Ham, my sisters potato salad, a caesar and Easter candy. A few years ago my niece, not a ham fan, asked why the menu never changes. So we changed. Last year it was salmon.

This year as I was musing about the menu, Ina Garten's Provencal Lamb roast jumped into my experience and became the centerpiece for the day.

My Grandma Edith used to cook a leg of lamb for Sunday dinner every few months. She'd prep the lamb, stud it with onion slices and roast it perfectly. (Edith Mary loved the kitchen.) She'd make a proper mint sauce, not jelly, our roots are from England. So lamb is a very comfortable part of my repertoire. Ours for Easter was roasted with a Provencal taste -- tomatoes and onions, balsamic vinegar, honey and dijon mustard​, thyme and garlic.

We had roasted potatoes the way Maureen Feldman​ serves them, cubed and cooked with a bit of fresh rosemary and butter. My friend Julie Prendiville Roux​ introduced me to 400 degree roasted carrots about fifteen years ago and I make them very often. Laurie O'Toole​ gave me the recipe just yesterday for asparagas bundles wrapped with bacon and lemon peel and roasted, and we enjoyed purple and white roasted cauliflower with credit to Sheri Litherland​ and Mary Arranaga Landis​. Margaret Gill​ brought her new recipe for Irish Soda Bread and her in-demand potato salad which is a must have when Grama brings ham, which she did. We finished, much later, with macerated strawberries and a little vanilla ice cream. A dish that graced the Sunday dinner table a throughout summer when I was a kid.

I love it. Not all from a recipe book or a magazine, but a little map of our history spread about the aqua linen tablecloth, bedecked with the multi colored foil of See's chocolate eggs and sprinkled with both the light of the candle and the love of a family's shared history.

Keep Practicing!

I have a newfound appreciation for the art of practice.

My very earliest recollections of practice were when I was eleven and a violin was placed in my hands. Initially the practice was just to be able to find a note. Get a sound.

But then, it became about finding a string of notes, a lyric, a rhythm and at some point it became about playing. Oh! The double entendre. Playing. Not so much for me at the time. I was working! I wanted to be really good, I wanted to have my teacher and my friends notice this. But of course, it takes facility. All this practicing wasn't building to one point, it was the point. Somehow either the adults around me never said it, or I just didn't get it.

Practice is exploring.

Practice is learning.

Practice is the path.

It can be that we practice what we love. If we let go, we can fall in love with what we practice. 

Since seeing the movie Whiplash, my son, a fairly talented trumpet player, has taken to loads more practice sessions. He sees the connection. Practice is a path leading to the level where he'll have more freedom. 

Me? I love to write. I have since high school, (which was a while ago). I began, then, filling spiral bound notebooks with words. And poems, and ideas and rants and schemes and dreams. I wrote and write because I love words. I love connections. I love the connections that words allow. Words in my head and words on a page. Strings of words that at some point become a real idea. Many mornings as I get those pages filled, I'm simply exploring -- practicing moving my hand and my mind together.

I've tried to keep this in my thought as I've approached other arts. So, some twenty months ago the words art journal came across my path and I added some art to a journal and then more and then, I, who know nothing about art, was making some art. Gratefully, I could hear my own words -- the ones I'd said to my kiddos when they were little and playing with art:

Art is an exploration.

Today Pam Garrison shared a bit about how important the rhythm of practice really is. Her work is wonderful. Always an inspiration, and because she writes about it in her fabulous blog -- we get a peek into how she thinks and all the joy she spills all over the place. While you go there, just look at all the practice. (It doesn't look to me like she wants her teacher to notice what she got right.)

All of this reminds me of the Ira Glass quote floating around right now. 

Then I remembered, I'd found something similar on the interwebs a while ago and pinned it somewhere. It's important. Oh, and it turns out Pam Garrison put dip pen to paper to share it. 

Here's my take: Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes possible.

Oh, and thanks Pam.

A perfect day.

I wait for this day every year. It doesn't always get here. This is a downside to living in beautiful Southern California. Rainy days? Not so many.

But today is just lovely. It's not too cold. The rain is constant and just a drizzle. Things are in a beautifully chaotic state with Christmas being packed away for another year.

The Narcissus is blooming.

And my big dog? Well, he can't decide if he wants to be in or out, so we pass in the kitchen, often.

The pup and I were up very early to pick up papers from the vet so she could go to obedience school. Then school. Coffee in the rain with my friend and her doggy. I just said coffee in the rain. Ya really can't say that very often here in our town. But we sat outside at the Starbuck's with our poochies until the drizzle turned to drops and got a bit soaked walking the dogs back to our cars.




The first part of the day had Lucy and me just a bit exhausted. I made a fire out of our wonderful cedar firewood. Crack! Pop! Good night right there on the living room floor. I snoozed a bit and was joined by both Lucy and my girlie. At this point, I'm heading back to Christmas while the two of them nap.  I'm in and out with boxes (and my big old German Shepherd) and just enjoying every minute.

Crackling fire. Raindrops. Naps. Reorganizing.

This is my idea of a perfect day.

A nice cup of tea is in order, don't you think?