Happy Birthday Servius

Today we celebrated Servius' birthday with a lovely brunch of fresh-baked bread, his favorite, grapes, raspberries, cheese, and carrots. Instead of having the picnic outside as originally planned, we watched the Japan-USA final match of the women's' soccer World Cup. The game was fantastic. It was exciting and I was rooting for Japan, because the country has had a really bad year and certainly deserves some national spirit.

I love this swirl pattern!

I took the idea for this scoring pattern from the beautiful work at the Tartine Bread Experiment.

A Fond Memory

It's been a while since I have made any bread. I haven't had much time. Tomorrow is Servius' birthday so I thought I would make some bread so we could have a picnic lunch on the porch. I am making his favorite: my usual whole wheat Tartine bread with steel cut oats, flax seeds, and sunflower seeds.

While I was making the bread and some pizza dough for tonight, Servia and I were talking about the Harry Potter phenomenon. These last two movies which dramatize book 7 have been theonly two for which we did not attend the midnight showing (and I have not seen the final movie yet). We all have been really busy and book 7 is by a mile my least favorite of the set. Servia mentioned she missed going to the movie, but I really miss the pageantry of the books coming out. Even by the time that the second book came out in Britain (we rush ordered it because it took a lot longer to arrive in the USA), I was old enough to realize that the writing was not particularly good, but I enjoyed the pageantry of the whole thing. When the books came out, Servia and I would make apple pie for Servius as he read the books outloud to us. We drank tea and made plot predictions. Those summers on the porch are some of the happiest moments from my childhood (and beyond) and lining up to get the books at midnight made it seem like this happiness and vigor was widespread. I was considering this afternoon how much I wish there were another equally-appreciated series that would once again have people of every age and personality lined up at book stores all over the world. Maybe someday...

Success!

Left this note for my dad when I left for work today.

Tartine Loaf with note

Details forthcoming...

A special thanks to Servia for all of her help.

Valentines Day Wrap-Up and Wine Snob: Wine as Old as Me!

As I mentioned in a recent post, Servius cooked dinner for Valentine's Day. It went over quite well, actually. He used my Chicken Marsala recipe. This was actually a good test for the recipe: someone like Servius who cooks infrequently cannot make the types of judgments that my recipe requires: salt and pepper "to taste" and deciding when the sauce has reduced significantly. This reminds me that I am not a particularly precise cook-- I fuss, fiddle, and taste. In future, I will try to add a greater degree of precision to my recipes in order to allow someone with less experience to cook them more easily.

Servius cooks!

The dinner was lovely. It was accompanied by a wine given to my mother by her brother for her birthday. This is the oldest wine I have ever tasted. Unlike me and my complete lack of wine knowledge, my uncle is something of a connoisseur, specifically of California wines, and has the ability to pick obscure wines that are fabulous. This was no exception.

Label [1].

Bottle

The wine was wonderful. Bottled in 1988, it was the oldest wine I have ever had (I think the earliest wine I had tasted up until this point was a 1998). It was a lovely, fairly light Cabernet Savignon from Newlan Vinyards & Winery in Napa Valley (which I believe no longer exists). The wine was a dark, rich ruby red; it was almost a mahogany color, but lit up with streaks of bright, glittering red where the light hit it. The smell was light (although my allergies have been acting up) and Servia thought she detected a hint of leather. The taste was smooth but complex with a pinch of garam masala and white pepper and a light smokey finish. The smokiness reminded me of Laphroaig (although it was only at the end) or the smell of smoked ham. I have never tasted a wine with a smokey finish like this-- only scotches-- and I thought it was quite lovely. Overall, the wine was stunning. It was perfect with food like chicken marsala because it held its own against the marsala sauce, but not so light that it overpowers it. Perfectly balanced with many flavors. Simply lovely.

The one problem with the wine was that the cork broke when I was pulling it out and we had to push it in to the bottle and strain the wine. My decanter (which doubles as a vase) was in the garage, so Servia had to find something. She was given a wonderfully eccentric silver and glass decanter by a friend, so we used that. The decanter is fabulous, outfitted by pictures of Dionysus and cherubs playing.

We then laid out the table while Servius cooked.

The table before the food.

Endnotes

1. As (almost) always, my photography is for the purposes of illustrating or demonstrating, not for being pretty.

Updates and Valentines Day Fun

There is a chocolate cake post, a discussion of garlic, and a "Wine Snob" post in the works. I have been busier than usual recently with my new math class and various other obligations so I have not been positing as diligently as usual.

Tomorrow (or I guess later today) is Valentine's Day. Sadly, Cerinthus and I will be spending the first Valentine's Day apart in three years. Since I am at home, I get to witness the modern marvel: Servius cooking. My father does not cook. He burns toast and he once made me "scrambled eggs" that looked like they had been put through a  cheese grater. However, on Valentine's Day a few years ago he actually cooked Chicken Marsala for my mother...and she said it was good! He is going to cook the same dish again this year and I get to witness this highly unusual phenomenon. I love Chicken Marsala, so I am pretty excited.

Christmas Traditions of the Servii, Part 1

For these posts, I will be referring to my family as the Servii (given that I have taken the name Sulpicia, daughter of Servius). I will also give my mother the name Servia. I realize that this is incorrect in the practice of Roman naming [1], but it is an easy convention.

There are a multitude of family traditions among the Servii. I thought I would highlight a few of them as they come to mind. We are not religious-- not at all-- so the holiday is more about celebrating our friends and family and the quirky traditions that have evolved.

Christmas Tags

When I was a child, my family wrote normal Christmas tags likes everyone else. Things were from my parents, my grandparents, Santa, etc. Gifts to friends were from the family or individual members of the family. We have a few Jewish friends who come over for Christmas dinner, so my dad started making their gifts "from Santa" as a mild joke. But one Christmas, the tags took a stranger turn.

There was a woman writer, whom I will call Julia, who worked with my father for many years and spent a lot of time with our family. As with many stories or descriptions from my youth, I am not entirely sure whether it has been influenced by stray bits from the passage of time that seem like they have become part of the memory, or whether this is exaggerated, but I will describe her to the best of my ability. As I remember Julia, she was a tall Southern vixen; she was long and thin with a mane of curly hair dyed an artificial red. She wore all black: a black top, skinny black jeans, and high-healed black boots which she accented with a royal attitude, a sharp wit, and a partiality for the more melancholy of philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I always really liked her. For all of her airs, she was very sweet to me, but even from my skewed perspective I could tell she was an eccentric.

On Christmas when I was eight, Julia came over for dinner, as usual. I remember that my father tagged her gift "From Jesus Christ Himself," in order to amuse her. From then on, as I recall, tags got stranger and stranger. Now, most of my gifts come from absurd images such as "Reindeer nose icicles" and "Russian-leg handbag cream." I have, in past years, tried to outdo my father, but I shy away from gross or disturbing thoughts more than he does so I cannot entirely compete. Most of mine make a little to much sense as well, such as my mom is receiving a very large, poorly wrapped gift from "the drunken elves who wrapped it."

Happy holidays, everyone!

Endnotes

1. In traditional Patrician Roman naming, a male is endowed with three names: a praenoman (which is one of about 20 common names such as Marcus or Gaius), a gentilicium (the name of the gens-- much like a modern last name), and the cognomen which specified the part of the gens. My favorite cognomen is Cicero, which means "chickpea" and was bestowed upon this part of the gens because their noses supposedly resembled chickpeas. Women, even patrician women, only had two names. They had the female version of gentilicium and this was followed by the genitive (and sometimes diminutive) of their father's (and later their husband's) cognomen. For more Roman naming practices, see the wikipedia page on the subject.