Friday mornings #3
Seven items from a busy week
This week’s newsletter is more food-focused than usual. Keep reading to find out why I chose this somewhat unusual art…
Since last week’s “Friday mornings,” I’ve encountered the beautiful “Ashokan Farewell” in a few new forms, one of which was kindly sent by a friend and reader. If you read last week’s newsletter, you’ll likely be just as astonished as I was about this: At a work retreat this week, we got to hear a talk from Bill McClay, whose Land of Hope I mentioned last week. But on top of that, he ended up playing “Ashokan Farewell” on the piano later in the evening, along with a very talented colleague of mine who played the violin part. It was as though my newsletter had come to life right before my eyes.
We live not too far from a public dock on the Rappahannock River, and thanks to my son’s recent choice to begin waking up for the day between 4am and 5am, we’ve started a Saturday morning tradition of bringing coffee down to the dock and bird watching. Last weekend, we got to see one of the many osprey frequenting the banks these days nose-dive into the river to catch a fish.
My husband and I marked our fourth wedding anniversary this week. We’re celebrating in a very local way this weekend, with an outing to downtown Fredericksburg’s monthly “First Friday” event and some of the art galleries in town.
On our actual anniversary, I made a favorite pasta sauce: Giada De Laurentiis’s pomodoro sauce. It’s quick and easy, and the recipe makes a lot more than we need, so I get to freeze leftovers for another day. (If you can’t find canned cherry tomatoes, I recommend using the canned marzanini tomatoes from Trader Joe’s.)
Since it’s strawberry season, I keep finding myself with strawberries on the brink of going bad. One fun way to use them up: We made semi-homemade strawberry ice cream by mixing chopped strawberries with Costco’s store-brand vanilla ice cream in the Ninja Creami. It turned out a lot like Häagen-Dazs but with even more strawberry flavor.
One last food-related item: We broke out the charcoal grill for the first time this year, which went well until a Virginia sunshower came along and dumped rain on us for 15 minutes. On the bright side, this led to the temperature dropping about 15 degrees once the rain was gone. (Side note: Do you have a word for when it rains while it’s partly sunny? I learned from the New York Times regional dialect quiz that some people don’t have a word for this at all, and others have very creative names for it. I’ve always called it a sunshower.)
The Garden Club of Virginia’s Historic Garden Week came to our neighborhood this past week. It was fun to watch a few of our neighbors painstakingly prepare their yards to be a stop on the tour. I have hopes of becoming a better gardener, but I could never dream of keeping yards as planned and immaculate as some of our neighbors…
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing if you do, and feel free to pass this newsletter along to friends who might be interested. I’d love to hear from you: