This past week, I had two food encounters with friends – one in person, one over the miles via Zoom – that were fun and meaningful despite the distance between us. It’s possible, it just takes a fair amount of planning.
The first was a tea in honor of my friend Debi’s recent birthday. Usually, we go out for tea somewhere within a two-hour drive or less from our homes. We’ve been doing this for so many years to mark her birthday in October and mine in February, sometimes twice a year but other years somewhere in between as a combination treat. If we’d actually kept notes, we could have by now written a “Guide to Tea Around DC.” Instead, we tend to try to test our memories every year by discussing the places we’ve been.
We tend to recall places by some memorable decor, type of tea, theme of the offerings, or in some cases an event. The latter includes recalling the time at Beans in the Belfry in Brunswick, MD when the waitress slipped and dumped all the little sandwiches into my open purse, or the time we arrived for a relaxing tea experience at Sweet Simplici-Tea in Sykesville, MD only to find a full-on beer festival happening on the same street.
This year, instead of braving a tea room in the time of COVID-19, I planned a socially-distanced tea for Debi at my house. This involved thinking about what we usually have at the teas we’ve liked best (a full menu including soup and salad along with the usual tea savories and sweets and of course scones and a selection of teas), finding recipes, and then actually baking, cooking, and making a really big mess in the kitchen. Next, getting out some nice china, tea cups and saucers, cloth napkins, and etc. I got a whole new appreciation for tea rooms, and will never scoff at the $25-$30 they charge per person for full afternoon teas.
The second food experience stemmed from the fact that some of my folklore women friends missed our usual food adventures when we meet in person for the annual American Folklore Society meetings. We decided to cook and eat and talk together one evening.
We chose to make gnocchi from scratch, something that none of us had ever attempted. Not just normal/simple gnocchi, but a recipe for sweet potato gnocchi with sage butter sauce which sounded totally awesome (and was).
It was deeply satisfying to knead and shape the dough, watch the little pillows come to the top of the boiling water, then to brown nicely in the bubbling browned butter. We had some laughs when our friend Lucy lost the flour she had measured, “which was here a minute ago,” and other little silly things along the way.
We then all sat down and ate (in my case, way too much of) the finished product, talked, laughed some more, and got a little weepy that we weren’t able to meet together. But somehow, the fluffy little balls of potato pasta eased the sadness. And the miles between Cathy and I in the DC area, Sue in Northern Indiana and Lucy in Northern Ohio melted away with each mouthful.
