Once again, I’ve been watching old seasons of The Great British Bake Off. My favorite seasons are Nadiya and Rahul, though I also don’t mind the Sophie season. It’s funny how, in watching or half-watching these seasons again, I find myself getting freshly annoyed by the mildest things. In the Nadiya season, I didn’t remember detesting Ian, but now I sort of do (sorry to this man, who I am sure is a perfectly fine person) due to his “who, me, winning again?” schtick that I find very unappealing in anyone, but particularly a grown adult in a televised baking competition.
In my previous job, I had Good Friday off from work, something I always forgot about until it was nearly upon me. Now I get bank holidays but not Good Friday. Despite this glaring injustice, Easter weekend seemed long. This year, we hosted the family get-together on Sunday, which meant no small amount of shopping and cooking and cleaning the day before. This was a sort of make-up date from the scuttled Kovid Khristmas we were meant to have in December, and it worked out well because we had weather fair enough to open the windows, which came in handy when we set off the smoke alarm. Despite that minor inconvenience (the lamb was fine!) it all went very well and everyone went home full and happy.
Two family members who missed out on the Easter feast were my dogs, who spent Easter at overnight camp because they cannot behave. On Monday evening, I retrieved them unscathed and very clean due to the baths I booked for them. According to their report cards, my little dog behaves more or less like a dog while she is at school. The bigger one prefers to be with people, aka ladies who probably spend the whole time toting him around while he tries to kiss them on the mouth.
Monday morning, it must be said, was a struggle, and I groaned in dismay when my alarm greeted me thusly:
Nevertheless I Persisted! But not, you know, too hard.
On Easter, my mom brought me a little bag of goodies, including a diamond painting craft kit. I resisted these all through the pandemic but at this point, there is basically no crafty hobby I would not consider. Does it involve tiny fussy pieces of things? Do I need both my hands so I cannot hold or use my stupid phone? Sold and sold. I started this endeavor a few days ago, and I can see why people took to it so readily during Plague Times: you don’t have to make a single decision. Everything is pre-ordained, and at the end, you have a picture suitable for framing.
Shall we share recipes? I’ve been cooking a lot of very basic dinners, but this coconut chicken and sweet potato thing was new to me and is a good weeknight option. Not to be one of those people (“I used fish instead of chicken and cardamom pods instead of carrots because they both start with C”), but I used butternut squash instead of sweet potato because I had it all chunked up in the freezer already.
My friend Christine tipped me off to this granola recipe, which has been going down a storm in our house. Years ago, my father-in-law used to buy large bags of Kirkland brand nut clusters at Costco and my husband and I would make ourselves delightfully sick on them; now we can continue because this granola is more or less the same thing. I even put some out with the cheese board on Easter Sunday as it seemed like the kind of thing you could plunk on top of goat cheese with fig jam and have quite a good textural journey.
Our work weeks were variously trying/harrowing (with the exception of the three hours I spent one afternoon getting my hair cut and highlighted), so on Saturday, we drove an hour east to have lunch at a newish winery/inn/restaurant. This enterprise has occupied a half-finished and abandoned lakefront mansion. Here you may be having visions of some robber baron’s folly left to crumble after his sweetheart died of consumption, but the building was started in…1997. The owners have salvaged it admirably and planted small, tidy rows of grapevines, which allegedly produce Cabernet Franc.
If you live in a place that has any kind of “winery” culture (and is not, you know, Napa or Sonoma or what have you), then I don’t need to tell you that the wine is not really the main attraction at these places. Or it is, but only in the sense that it is alcohol. No offense to America’s local winemakers but, let’s call a Pink Catawba a Pink Catawba.
These places are weird in that many of them have been done up very nicely, and you could do much worse than an expansive Lake Erie view, but you have definitely reached this odd destination via a two-lane highway variously studded with abandoned carpet outlets, used car lots, shabby motels advertising weekly rates, and gleaming Sheetz stations as big as high schools. In the motels and boarded-up mini markets killed off by Sheetz, you can see the vestige of places average people used to go on vacation. Now those people go to Orlando and Punta Cana. I suppose I get it: why spend a fortune on an Airbnb in Ohio of all places, where the only grocery store within walking distance is Sheetz?
NEVERTHELESS. The winery was still somewhat under construction, but the restaurant was really nice. Our server kept apologizing for “the wait” and I wondered if people were being awful to her at other tables with worse people at them, certainly not us, the valedictorians of eating at restaurants. She comped us dessert, which was very kind of her, mainly because it was bread pudding.
It was a good day, and despite being deeply in the part of Ohio one might associate with a particular political party, I did not see any you-know-whomst signs. I don’t know if that’s because they were never there or because they have been taken down, but anytime I can pretend he doesn’t exist, I’ll take it.