Monthly Archives: September 2018

Zitella's Favorite Recipes

A Recipe for the Happy Couple

When I opened the bridal shower invitation, a blue 4 by 6 index card fell out.  What is this? I thought, as I picked it up off the floor.  Then I skimmed the invitation for the who, where, and when.  At the bottom, right under the bridal registry info, was a simple request:

Please use this card to share one of your favorite recipes with the bride.

Although I have not yet met the bride, the groom is my cousin.  His mom is a very special cousin to me, and his grandmother was a lovely great-aunt.  I thought about holidays I’d spent with them when I was a child, and tried to remember some specific recipes my great-aunt had made.  But the bride would be getting those recipes from her new-mother-in-law.

While I have dozens of favorite recipes, I wanted to give the bride a recipe that the happy couple would surely enjoy.  And I had no idea what they’d like.  So I checked out the bridal registry for clues.

They’d registered for fun stuff: party platters, small plate dishes, a margarita pitcher and glasses, and cappuccino cups.  They were planning on doing a lot of entertaining.

An easy but elegant crowd-pleaser came to mind.  It looks like way more work to prepare than it actually is.  In fact, if you can separate an egg, you’ve got this.  So besides sharing it with the happy couple, I thought I’d share it with you.

Chocolate Mousse Recipe

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Life Lessons

The Party’s Over

Every store I enter is jam-packed with back-to-school supplies.  Although the temperature remains toasty, we are losing daylight at an alarming rate, and the leisurely weeknight barbeques of July have become a race against time to finish before it’s too dark to see what you’re eating.  Labor Day weekend has passed – the party’s officially over.

For children everywhere, September brings the promise of starting over – the new school year literally offers a blank page in a brand-new notebook.  Yet, despite being a good student, I never felt that excitement about going back to school.  Instead, I experienced a mix of equal parts melancholy and anxiety.  The night before the first day of school, my clothing and supplies all laid out, I would go to bed early but have trouble falling asleep. “The party’s over…it’s time to go back to school.”

I never minded the actual school work – it was the getting up so early and the restrictive structure of the Monday-through-Friday routine that was the problem.  See the irony here?  What I didn’t like about school is exactly what most of the workforce, myself included, complain about on a daily basis.

A friend of mine talks about having the “Sunday night blues.”  She says it coincides with the television show “60 Minutes.”  The moment she sees the stopwatch and hears the ticking sound of the passage of time, she becomes angst-ridden.  I don’t watch “60 Minutes,” but the emotions I experienced the night before the first day of school remain so vivid, and continue to rise up in me every Sunday night.

Nothing can compare to the carefree feeling of the childhood summer vacation.  As working adults, we take off for a week or two in summer to recharge our batteries.  But the bottom line: whether you’re a kid going back to school or a working adult, vacation is fleeting.

As my friends and co-workers talk about getting their children ready to go back to school, I can’t shake the image of school supplies, and I remember the black and white composition books of my own school days.  It suddenly seems that it’s not so much about the first day of school, or about mourning the end of summer, or even about the daily grind, as it is about the chance to start over, fresh.  It’s about that blank page in a brand-new notebook.

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