Monday, March 10, 2008

Of pâté and friends

I am a firm believer that things happen for a reason; even if it appears so on the surface, life is not completely random. Today, while gearing up for making a passel of desserts for Saturday night (and one for Saturday afternoon), I consulted my notes from last summer’s wedding cake trials. I was thumbing through sticky pages of smudged ink, looking for the final results of experiments in stabilizing whipped cream, when I passed by a page of notes on nut pâté. I didn’t think much more than, gee, I really would like to follow up on it, it would be a nice type of food to add to the rotation of regular offerings.

Then later today, I was chatting with the Ladies of Knitting, remembering the glorious spring weather we encountered in Germany, right around Easter last year, and how we seemed to be enjoying a rerun here in the Pacific Northwest, with both Easter and the sunshine much earlier than usual. It was during that trip that I first met that sunflower seed pâté whose ingredients are jotted in my foodie composition book.

A chat with a girlfriend today invoked the name of a friend far afield; where I once greeted her with a smile just about every day, a painful chasm split us apart for far too long, and just as we were regaining our footing, she and her family returned to their home island across the pond. It was one of our stops along the way last spring. We are still tentatively moving toward each other again, neither of us quite remembering what had happened to us, but both of us clearly wanting to move forward rather than dwell in the past.

It was at her new old farm, where she and her husband are raising gentle, sweet alpacas that I discovered mushroom pâté, another in this family of spreadable vegetables that are completely absent from American grocery shelves. We gathered at their vegan table several times, each one a delight in its own right, but each one also evoking a previous meal. I think of poolside iced tea and strawberries, rich winter stew over couscous, bright yellow turmeric tofu masquerading as scrambled eggs.

Clearly, I was meant to think about pâté today; and it pushed it a bit higher up in my consciousness. But mostly, I think I was meant to think about friends and the community we build around ourselves and our families, how precious they are, and how we shouldn’t waste a single second of our time fighting over things so unimportant as to be less memorable than the joy of a shared meal.