When to combine and how to separate/ When to wait and how to watch
I do not remember a Christmas breakfast without tomatoes on toast. It was so regular, so consistently a part of our Christmas morning that I believed it to be a long-standing and worldwide tradition.
Sprezzatura, as a concept, is impossible to translate fully. It is bravura, a swagger you can back up, a cool beyond cool. It’s the years of laboring on card tricks or juggling, so that you get thirty seconds, somewhere in the undisclosed future in some bar with some stunning person, where you actually pull off the sleight of hand, or the turn of phrase, or just plan catch the tipping glass. It’s charm.
Then I said it: “I bet I can come up with a menu for shopping at Whole Foods that comes out cheaper than eating fast food.”
These days, the saddest thing I can think of is caramel. Not honey caramel or crème caramel, just regular caramel.
How good it is to heal each other, bring ceremony into our homes, employ the art of waiting, share a cup, and take a drink ourselves, just for the sheer pleasure of a spot of tea.
To me, the table is such a sacramental place. How enormously blessed am I that I don’t sit at it alone?
Nestled between the Rhône and the Saône in Lyon, France awaits an experience of gastronomy sure to please both the palate and the heart.
There is a pivotal window of time in the viticultural year when grape farmers pray for perfect weather, and this year prayers fell softly as drizzling mist for weeks on end, just when grapes most desperately needed a last push of sunshine to ripen.