A present of rhubarb from a friend’s garden

Tags

cream, gratin, postaday2013, potatoes, rhubarb, swiss cheese

You have to appreciate a lady when she promises you rhubarb from her garden with a copy of her recipe for rhubarb chutney and the very next day, she delivers said rhubarb and recipe. Bonnie is a peach! I will have to make her recipe so that I can tell her at next month’s French club meeting that it was yummy. I should try to make something else and deliver her some of whatever I come up with. While she was at the door, I was in the process of peeling potatoes because I decided to make a gratin Dauphinois or gratin of potato. It has been the perfect weather for baking and roasting things because it’s either drizzling, cloudy or sunny at a cool 69 degrees. I am not complaining, I love the roasting and the baking, I am only getting concerned for my plants because there is such a thing as too much rain and they can drown. Tomorrow they are predicting between 3 and 5 inches of rain, the grass in the park behind my house is flooded already, tomorrow won’t be pretty for the water logged meadow. Theoretically the next time we are due for sun will be on Saturday. My plants and I will be looking forward to Saturday. I do have to say that this spring has been really great in one aspect, I haven’t been plagued by May flies at all, between the rain and the wind, they were nowhere to be found this season. Hooray for that!

Red pill / blue pill

If you could get all the nutrition you needed in a day with a pill – no worrying about what to eat, no food preparation – would you do it?

NO, no and no.The last thing that I would ever want to give up is food preparation, it is therapeutic, challenging, it feeds my creativity, it's interesting and it feeds all of the senses. On the other hand, I could see the temptation of having the pill instead of eating because if you noticed, I didn't really say anything about the eating part, I was describing quite enthusiastically, the art of food preparation; the chopping, the mincing, the peeling, the sautéing, the poaching and any other culinary technique I can imagine. I might forgo the eating part if all of my nutritional needs were taken care with one pill and I wouldn't have to worry about gaining any weight.

I don't really need the eating part because after an hour or more of working with food, I am not the least bit hungry. It's as if I have absorbed all the food through my pores, my nose and ears by the time I am done cooking or baking. The pleasure that I get from cooking and baking for others is much more important than what pleasure I get from eating it myself. I always prefer to eat someone else's cooking, when I haven't spend a lot of time looking at it, poking it and tasting it, instead simply sitting there and tasting it in its final stage for the first time. That is when I appreciate the eating aspect of food.