Getting On The Bus

After four full days of cooking, imbibing cheap American beer, and fielding half-serious marriage proposals, it's high time to brave the trip south. I'll be retiring my apron in favor of my American Express card, retiring my knives in favor of corkscrews. My home kitchen is the type of kitchen that performs best as a reheating area, where canned soups and takeout containers transform themselves into adequate dinners. There is no Viking stove and ventilator hood, no granite countertop, no Cuisinart, no Sub-Zero. My Kitchen Aid is dusty from lack of use. In New York, accomplished home cooks who live alone become accomplished diners.

I did miss the familiarity of restaurants during my time out of New York. I missed wine lists and I missed my food friends. But I suspect that when I arrive back in town I'll feel equally nostalgic for the facility of cooking afforded by a nice kitchen and willing test subjects.

Well. The grass is always greener and one luxury always supplants the next. Next week I'll no doubt wax poetic about the bread stuffing I miss so completely, even as I sit at some hip New York joint eating the world's best bone marrow. You can't have it all. But as for my foray into entertaining, the cupboards are now officially closed until the next holiday impels me to drag out the skillets.