Wednesday night dinner

It was lovely having my dear husband home for dinner tonight. Jack and I called it a day on our crossword just in time for me to make dinner and serve it before 9. Living like Europeans I tell you! Our meal was seared sesame- and mustard-crusted tuna alongside cauliflower and fried shishito peppers with picada sauce.

www.em-i-lis.com

What's picada sauce? I didn't know either, but it's a "Catalan-style pesto made here with almonds, parsley and chocolate" (Mar 2015 Saveur) as well as some sherry, sherry vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper. I added the vinegar and lemon juice and was glad; you might also consider adding pimentón. Yum.

Shishitos are a sweet, thin-skinned, versatile East Asian pepper. This is a very nice dish, though I definitely encourage you to tweak like I did.

www.em-i-lis.com

www.em-i-lis.com

How decadent is this pug's life, I ask you?! He's the Pug and the Pea.

www.em-i-lis.com

Boyfriends past, pitiful pugs

Yesterday's white shroud of a sky opened last night like a sail ripped down the middle, and the deluge of freezing water gushing through hasn't stopped since. It is just a cold, wet mess of a day out there. As such, before Percy and I trundled off for our walk, I bundled us both up as best I could.

Have you ever seen a more pitiful-looking pug? He hates this coat with every fiber of his being and lets me know by gazing mournfully at me and refusing to walk more than a foot or two without sitting dramatically like this.

I have to wonder why the coat also seems to prompt him to drag his butt a few inches after sitting. And yes, all you readers who are like surrogate parents to my pets, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Em, that dog might have pin worms or some other anal condition."

Let me tell you, he does not. Percy is the picture of health. I swear to you I think this dog will never expire. Ever.

Ultimately he won as I simply could not take the snail-pace of our walk. As soon as I removed his coat, he stopped butt-dragging by the way.

On our way home, a bottle of Drakkar Noir walked past. How one human can wear that much cologne without suffocating is beyond me. The point, however, is that I was whisked back in time to high school and my first serious boyfriend, a wonderful guy who also loved Drakkar Noir.

At that time, Drakkar was the scent. If you were a guy, you needed to be wearing it, and if you were a girl who liked guys, you definitely wanted your man to be clouded in a spritz of the Noir. I know I did.

David was the best first boyfriend any girl could ever want. He was kind and handsome and chivalrous and fun. He wrote me notes and folded them into little triangle-shaped packets that he'd slip into my hand between classes. They made me sizzle with anticipation, and giant shoebox of them is probably still under my bed at my parents' house. He took me to the Olive Garden in Beaumont, TX (a 45-minute drive from our Louisiana hometown) for special occasions. He gave me my first jewelry. He had a great family. He was my first love. And did he love Drakkar Noir. Whoa, Nelly!

I thought of David today as Percy and I exhaled D.Noir and meandered back home. I like memories like these, prompted by something so seemingly inconsequential as a stranger's smell. All those years ago came back to me in a wave, much like the rain as it first rolled in last night.

Sons, a pug, a salad

Friends, it's been a week. A lot has transpired in a mere seven days, and so when my trainer had to cancel our session this morning, I admit to feeling the heat of thrill. I'd been carrying a weight in my heart, noodling on it, working it out, letting it run its course, and awoke today with a lightness of being that felt awfully good. Once the cancellation was confirmed, I took my lightness to the couch for a magnificent thing called Reading the Paper. It's a remarkable event to quietly read two full sections, was it three??, in one sitting. I kept looking around furtively, as if I had forgotten a child somewhere, had the day wrong, was being caught on Candid Camera in "the mom who only thought she suddenly had an open morning" episode. As it turned out, none of these foreboding thoughts were true, and after reading the paper, I called my sister for our scheduled phone date. Afterwards, I decided to rake the yard because the flood of Biblical proportion that besieged us for the past two days finally got out of town late last night, leaving a serious trail of debris strewn all around.

I'm waiting for a call so took my phone outside with me. From across the yard I heard a bing so scampered over to check. It was an email from Oliver's teachers, subject line: Bathroom Behavior Alert.

"This cannot be awesome," I thought to myself, opening it with the slightest bit of trepidation. It turns out that my little Shamrock (such a fortuitous birthday for this kid; seriously, I've known that there was meaning in Ol coming two weeks early to be born on St. Patty's Day, since he was oh, about 8 days old) and two buddies were caught in the gymnasium bathroom pantsing each other and laughing hysterically. Can you even imagine the hilarity involved in discovering three five year olds exposing each other's goods [tiny] in front of childsize toilet stalls?

The coach who discovered this mayhem is awesome, and I swear to you he had to work hard not to laugh. The teachers, too, could not have handled this "teachable moment" more sanguinely. Obviously each of these tykes will receive a talking-to tonight and I am confident this will not happen again.

Say it with me, friends: "It's always something!"

Because the sun is finally out, I then suggested to Percy that we go for a walk. By the time we reached the backyard gate, he was panting to beat sixty. You'd have thought I'd just picked him up at the finish line of the Iraqi Iditarod. Good god, Percy! He spent half of our walk being pulled through slick grass on his back and finally plopped down in a puddle to relax-and-slurp.

At least there was this marvelously calm salad to enjoy for lunch! Hah!