We are going to have an AFS student this school year, a 17-year old Italian girl. We picked her up yesterday afternoon. I made some dinner for us – pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, and cucumber sour cream salad. Nothing came out quite the way I wanted it to. The basil in the pasta wilted and turned the color of cooked spinach. Somehow the sour cream dressing for the cucumber salad was filled with tiny bubbles – almost foamy. I also made a tart with apricots from the farmers market that had gotten a little bruised on the way home, and I ended up stuffing in some of cute little donut peaches we’d also bought at the market. All in an effort to cover up the lurid green of the almond-PISTACHIO frangipane. Shoulda known. I think it will taste good, but it looks awful:
Ugly apricot peach almond pistachio frangipane tart
Over dinner, Mark and I told the Italian girl about the Julia Child, and how she said “never apologize” for your cooking – it only makes the people who are eating your food think maybe something really is wrong. Actually, on the page attached, which is p. 90 from Julia’s posthumous autobiography, My Life in France she amplifies: not only never apologize, if the food is truly vile, you must bear it with a smile – and learn from your mistakes. Most of the time, the food is not truly vile. Usually, it’s pretty good, it’s just not exactly what you, the cook, had in mind.
