At the grocery store tonight, I was buying a bottle of Madeira for a recipe later in the week, and I got carded. "Ha!" I told the clerk. "My marriage is old enough to buy alcohol legally."
OK, that's not actually my line, that was Mika's. But that just goes to show you what a good partner she is that she lets me steal her lines like that. And, yes, today is our 21st wedding anniversary.
At right is a cookbook given to us as a wedding present by our friends Libby and Rudy Amann. They have a celebrated collection of cookbooks of their own but wanted to get us started with a good general cookbook. While it's been eclipsed by other cookbooks - I usually turn to Mark Bittman for a base recipe for most things -- it has served us well and continues to be a good resource for 'homey' recipes (like skillet mac and cheese for the kids, etc.) We've been thinking of getting a new copy, though, even if it's no longer the staple cookbook -- it has been, as the photo illustrates, well-loved.
As for as the actual good housekeeping, we've been at that for 25 years now, more or less, the 21st wedding anniversary notwithstanding. The first meal I cooked for Mika was a lentil stew, one of my Mom's recipes she picked up in Cleveland, in an apartment in center city Philly. Strangely, our kitchen now, objectively, might be the worst we've had (well, second-worst after this rental place in Pittsburgh we had for one year), but it's fair to say it runs as an operation better than ever.
For our anniversary? We did family grocery shopping night! We take the boys and Mika and they wander around in the shopping cart getting a few things while I do most of the actual shopping, and then we get some ready made food and eat at a booth in the grocery store. It's not exactly haute cuisine for an anniversary but it's very efficient. And it seems to get to the heart of the matter with respect to the last quarter-century.
