end-of-2006

A wrap-up of my first food-blogging year that is a day late. This has also been the year of my kitchen disruption, which is leaking into 2007 (but surely not farther?).
Here are some dishes and meals from 2006 that I didn't blog about:
Left--my birthday cake, a yogurt cake based on Clothilde's soaked with an orange-infused simple syrup, and topped with ganache and whipped cream. Excellent!

In July, I ate some of the amazing food in Lake Tahoe, most of it bought at the farmers market--perfect local blackberries, tapenade made from local ingredients (not pictured), my friend Kris's mother's famous eggplant dish (left). (Had I ever had a fresh-from-someone's farm eggplant before? I don't think I had.)



Dark, luscious, local cherries (during local-eating August) made part of a picnic on the road to my niece's wedding in upstate New York. And in early fall, there was an amazing dinner at Three Birds restaurant to celebrate finishing the first draft of my novel--see the crowning dessert below, left.





In November, I was amazed to find I still had herbs and greens still growing in my garden (and even more amazed that I'm planning to go out later this afternoon and pick some cilantro to go with the black bean soup I'm planning to make; I'm worried about global warming, but does that mean I can't enjoy a small silver lining?).



In early December, I made a very successful (but unrecorded) chicken curry, dodging the plastic sheets that hung in the half-renovated kitchen.



And finally, right before Christmas some friends and I had our annual holiday lunch at Parker's, a great Cleveland-area restaurant that closed at the end of 2006 (yesterday!), and let our festive martinis serve as a valedictory virtual toast to the end of the year. It was a pretty good one for me, but even so, I'm always happy to see the new one arrive--the promise of something new, new projects, new writing, whatever is coming up.