Bon Appetit

I like Curtis Sittenfeld's novels.  Prep is probably the best of them but I also really liked American Wife and Sisterland.  (Here's what I don't like: Book titles in italics.  Why, MLA?  Why? Did you think that underlined titles would look too much like hyperlinks?  Well, maybe that's a legitimate concern, actually.  I keep lightly swiping my index finger across the paper page of the actual, real, hardcover book that I'm reading now, and expecting a new page to load.)  In Sisterland, 12-year-old twin sisters take over the family cooking after their chronically depressed mother takes permanently to her bed.  The girls find three recipes, and they rotate among them, never varying the recipes, cooking and serving one of the three dishes every day until they leave for college years later.  Hard up for dinner ideas one night, I actually tried one of the recipes (pork chops in orange juice.)  I'm sure that Curtis Sittenfeld didn't intend to write a cookbook, but there you are.  Give me a cautionary tale, and I'll take it as a helpful hint.  I usually prefer the before picture.

So right now, I'm waiting for frozen meat and cheese ravioli to defrost. My 10-year-old has been collecting recipes from a series of books about the states, and the Missouri book's recipe was something called "St. Louis Toasted Ravioli."  Never mind my surprise that any sort of ravioli dish is a St. Louis local favorite.  I'm once again all out of dinner ideas, and a fried ravioli recipe copied onto an index card from a dusty school library book seems like just as good an idea as anything I'd dig up on Cooks.com.  None of us are particularly hungry today, anyway. 

*****

The hardcover book is a used copy of Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies. I like it.  I like the wisecracking snappy mid-century humor, and I love the utter lack of introspection or gritty honesty.  I'm sure that Jean Kerr's life as the wife of a famous and probably demanding drama critic and the mother of his six children was probably harder than she makes it seem, and I'm sure that she had moments of frustration and anger and resentment, but I'm glad that she kept that part to herself.  I'm glad that she occasionally mentions feeding her children, but that she offers no insight whatsoever regarding what exactly she fed them, and why.  Jean Kerr makes me a little nostalgic for a time that I just missed.  

*****

My ravioli are probably thawed now.  I'm going to follow my 10-year-old's instructions, and we'll see what happens.  Maybe I have some pork chops in the freezer.  I always have orange juice.