A Beautiful Weekend

Good morning, everyone. A really good morning! Where were you when you heard the news? We were walking back from the farmer’s market, when the phones in our pockets started buzzing like crazy. We FaceTimed Phoebe in college, then called Abby, who was driving home from practice. We instructed her to lay on the horn the whole way home. It was 70 degrees, the blue, cloudless sky presenting a dramatic backdrop for all the golden and red-leaf November trees. We cracked open that Pappy! We donated to Stacy Abrams’s Fair Fight. We checked in with everyone we knew, like we had just had a baby. That is actually what it felt like. My brother texted back “It really feels like someone pulled a nail out of my brain.”

Later, my oldest friend Jeni and her husband, Ben, drove up from the city for champagne and chili around our fire pit, and they showed us videos of New York losing its collective mind. We ate cheese, guacamole, and two roasted vegetable dips (sweet potato-tahini, beet-yogurt-horseradish) and served with baguette slices. They brought iconic, absurdly indulgent Levain cookies up from the city, and we spent a solid ten minutes debating whether the chocolate peanut butter was better than the oatmeal raisin. We drank a lot of champagne and completely forgot to watch Biden and Harris (KAMALA!!!!) deliver their victory speeches.

I know that nothing is over, and that this country faces an uphill battle, given how divided we are right now. I know there are people reading this swearing they will never come back to my dinner table again. But for one weekend, it felt hopeful that a big piece of the puzzle, the person whose instinct was to stoke hatred and divisiveness, would be rendered powerless. Wow does that feel good.

This week, in the interest of realigning everyone’s equilibrium (I still can’t get a good night’s sleep) I’m going to post a bunch of my favorite easy dinners, some familiar — like this chicken that Bon Appetit’s instagram reminded me of yesterday — and some new. I’ll probably get back to the Project-Pantry-Purpose series, too, because the winter promises to be hard, and I feel like we’re going to have to pull together again in a big way. I hope you’ll come to the table as always.