My very dear Feastlings,
Each holiday season, I can feel myself retreat further and further into the hiding place in the back of my head. I feel like I should be lying on a couch telling you this while you take notes from the chair at my head, nodding and punctuating my statements with, “and how does that make you feel?” But it’s true. I know I’m not alone here- many of you have confided in me that, like me, the holidays fill your cup not with holiday joy but with a stress that only remains in the cup by means of surface tension. For those of you who find yourself in my situation, I offer my coping mechanisms. The first, which is more immediate but more theatrical, is the old standard: hyperventilating into a paper bag until your breath returns to normal and you feel you can again deal with the outside world for a limited period of time. The second, which is more pleasant and no one needs to be the wiser about, is to lose yourself in delicious food and drink.
In the interest of furthering this method, we at Feast have worked diligently to offer you some choices:
The first coincides with this, the first Tuesday of the month, and is the December menu. We carefully brined Long Island duck breasts this weekend, we made spaghetti squash waffles, we imported exotic cheeses, and we simmered Cornish game hens. We did a lot more than that as well, and you can see the results here, with our December menu, which beings today with little fanfare but with great earnestness.
The second is this Saturday’s wine tasting, which is a little step up from our usual casual level. There’s no need to dress up, but the wines will be a little fancier and the price will jump up from the customary $12.50 plus tax and tip to $15 plus plus. Not grave for you, I hope, but worth noting.
The third is a dinner with Tommy Oldre of Vineyard Brands, another in our Trust Your Importer series. Tommy arrives Wednesday, December 11, with five remarkable wines from various points around the globe, and we’re making five dishes to accompany them. You can see the menu here, and decide whether a lovely dinner with fabulous wines is a suitable escape from the pressures of holiday life.
There’s more to come, for sure. There’ll be wine tastings each weekend, and a menu of goodies for you to pick up for Christmas in the event that cooking all day isn’t your idea of a good time. That menu will be posted by the weekend with an extra little note that with any luck you won’t regard as overkill. And in the event you do, let’s go back to that paper bag.
Love,
Doug and everyone else at Feast