chouxettes

Dear Michelle-

I love your photos of Dijon! It sounds amazing, and delicious, and I cannot help but remember reading M.F.K. Fisher's Long Ago in France, which tells of her early married years living in Dijon while her husband either taught or studied at a University there. I wish I'd given that to you to read before you went, it's a terrific book, that woman really loved food. I can only hope to be somehow involved when you try to recreate some of the dishes you had when you were there. . . ?


Since it's been a while, I am going to share some photos with you from Virginia while I gather my thoughts about brownies, pork belly ssam, and cherry-sour cream ice cream, all of which I have been wanting to share with you. For dinner tonight I'm making fried green tomato sandwiches with aoli, crispy oven fries with apricot-curry ketchup, and a green salad of mache and wild arugula. If it turns out like I hope it will, then you'll be seeing the end result here at some point.


For all that I'm glad I am now married, for all the fun of seeing so many people that I love all together at once, including many I hadn't seen for years (like your family!), I am glad the wedding is over. Now, I can think about cooking again, and I can take time to do things like clean the apartment, and go to the farmer's market, and contribute to our correspondence. But before I do that, here are some photos I took in the days leading up to the wedding. They aren't of food, but they are just as beautiful.



I haven't been home in May since college, and so have never experienced the full glory of the garden at that time. We'd planned the wedding for late May in part to take advantage of the hundreds of peonies that grace the driveway to my parent's house. This year they started a little early, what with all the heat, and though we came up with plan B, they cooperated in the end.




All of the bouquets and centerpieces were made with flowers from my parent's and their friends' gardens, and were made by my mother and two of those friends. It was so beautiful, all of those flowers, in whites and light pinks and deep magentas, some of them as large as 7 or 8 inches across. In the two days before the wedding, we picked and received about a dozen buckets full of peonies; the garage was bursting with them, and smelled of their perfume.