Until noon today, I was planning on baking a rosemary olive-oil polenta-lemon cake.
Yesterday, going through more boxes and unpacking them slowly — right now, it feels like I will never be done unpacking boxes — I found a treasure trove. My husband’s 3-ring binder, full of recipes from every restaurant he cooked at, his spin on them, and hundreds of pages of recipes he clipped from newspapers, menus from places he ate around the world, and what he made for me at Impromptu, the wine bar where he led the kitchen when I met him.
Sour cherry chutney! Spicy peanut sauce! The barbecue sauce he learned at culinary school (and still the best). Cajun Andouille seasoning?
I made room in one drawer of the sideboard we put in our living room. Later, I told myself. Not today.
As I tucked them in, one poked out. David Lebovitz’s rosemary olive-oil polenta-lemon cake.
“Honey, remember this?” I asked him. And we reminisced about how often we had made that cake together. Dan first adapted this cake to be gluten-free for his restaurant in Madison Park, in Seattle. Then we made it at home, frequently. Any time we needed to bring a dessert somewhere, or donate a cake to a dessert auction for a charity on Vashon, we made this cake.
“Oh!” I told him. “I know we put this on the blog, years ago. I’ll make one for tomorrow.”
I wrote half the post. Rewrote the recipe the way we make it now. Went to bed.
This morning, the world had other plans for me.
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