Soaring Through Blue

lobster

I sent the book into my publishers. Or rather, WE sent the book into OUR publishers. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes YES.

Oh, what a savoury, gluten-free sentence (I don’t like sweets much, you see, unlike-those-sleazy-un-suspendered-summer fruit type people).

On Friday, at noon, right after we got up, we did it, the lambent light leaping luxuriously limpidly over our thighs, PapaChef groaning with pleasure. We sent in the book, I mean.

We sent in everything- our recipe adaptations, techniques culled from our cookbook collection, my flowery essays, the words no longer slithering over our brains and hungry lapping tongues.

We know it will need editing, but we hope that the editor will keep it for years and years, so that we can have our well-earned break from all this occasional part-time work.

We cannot believe that we adapted so many recipes in 9 months, when took all that time off in the middle to have our first child, sometimes working for two hours a day (ay gods, the nonstop finger clattering!) when the Midget Peanut woke up thinking about lamb legs and caul fat and pork sausages and would not go back to sleep.

And the last three weeks, I’ve been working almost as hard as when I had a real full-time job. It seemed, at times, that those hard three weeks would never end. A lifetime, almost as long as the time when we lived in Italy.

I hope that you, dear readers, will buy this book for yourself and all your friends, especially for Christmas, so that I never have to go back to that life again. Think about me, gloriously and quotidianly working hard in all that I do for you, in the Dahl-esque writing shack for which we’ve set up a WeNeedAHouseFund.

We did it. Sigh. Ay, gods. Oh dear. Goodness lordy me. And it seems that we had a few reasons to celebrate around here. And celebrate we did. We had lobster for dinner on Monday evening. Lobster always reminds me of my unique bowlerhatted interpretations of silly movie love stories, you see. Nevermind if you don’t get it- it’s a private joke between me and PapaChef. Living so publicly on this site all the time, we need some privacy, not counting Facebook and Twitter, now and then. Please understand. Don't be alarmed. Concern not yourselves. Goodness goodnessy me.

On Friday afternoon, PapaChef prepared to dispatch the live lobster, and I bounced around the kitchen, singing and dancing, preparing to take endless photographs of the lobster’s glorious death in the ineffably beautiful evening light (PapaChef had to do the dirty work, you see, as he has prior professional chef experience and I am a Buddhist).

Turns out death isn’t as funny as I’d imagined, so I didn’t let the Midget Peanut watch.

With the death bit over, I grinningly prepared to eat our glorious savvy Francaise-style lobster dinner, thanking it all the while for willingly giving up its life for our book celebration and thinking for a few seconds about how, unpreventably and spontaneously, joyous celebration and the pure, unadulterated enjoyment of food are always gloriously mixed up with the brief sadness of mortality.

Julia Child would be proud. I only wish I could tell her about our lovely dinner via Twitter.

And then we fell into bed. To sleep. Nothing else. For the moment.

Now, we'd like to know. What do you eat when you celebrate, and what recipes do you use out of which cookbooks?