{"id":3800,"date":"2011-08-28T18:33:39","date_gmt":"2011-08-28T23:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/?p=3800"},"modified":"2011-08-28T18:35:30","modified_gmt":"2011-08-28T23:35:30","slug":"never-apologize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/never-apologize\/","title":{"rendered":"Never apologize"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We are going to have an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.afs.org\/\">AFS<\/a> student this school year, a 17-year old Italian girl. We picked her up yesterday afternoon. I made some dinner for us &#8211; 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 &#8211; 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/debslunchpix.tumblr.com\/post\/9521432467\/donut-peaches\">cute little donut peaches<\/a> we&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_3801\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/pistachiotart.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3801\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3801\" title=\"pistachiotart\" src=\"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/pistachiotart-400x266.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\" srcset=\"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/pistachiotart-400x266.jpg 400w, https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/pistachiotart.jpg 650w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-3801\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ugly apricot peach almond pistachio frangipane tart<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Over dinner, Mark and I told the Italian girl about the Julia Child, and how she said <a href=\"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/pg90MyLife.jpg\">&#8220;never apologize&#8221;<\/a> for your cooking\u00a0 &#8211; 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&#8217;s posthumous autobiography, <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=7BUf0xhBN8EC&amp;dq=julia+child&amp;source=gbs_vpt_read\">My Life in France<\/a> she amplifies: not only never apologize, if the food is truly vile, you must bear it with a smile &#8211; and learn from your mistakes. Most of the time, the food is not truly vile. Usually, it&#8217;s pretty good, it&#8217;s just not exactly what you, the cook, had in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8211; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,233],"class_list":["post-3800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-failures","tag-julia-child"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3800"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3804,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3800\/revisions\/3804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}