Two summers ago, the summer after my second year, I moved to Colorado to live with my aunt and uncle and to work at a nature conservancy in the mountains. Despite the fact that it was the summer after my second year of college, and we all know college is the best time you will ever have in your whole life and things will definitely never get better than this, I had managed to spend much of the year before stressing myself out, taking on way too much, and generally working myself into a frenzy.
After school was out, my dad came and moved me out of my apartment, and a few days later, we drove 2 1/2 days to Snowmass. Important book on the ride to Colorado: Freakonomics. Great book, but sadly, we listened to it on tape, and also I would hardly consider it the most important book in my life. Though it did instruct me on important things, like: Don't Become a Drug Dealer Because You Won't Make Very Much Money Anyway. Long story short, we made it to Colorado, I didn't sell drugs, and my aunt and uncle and I started a daily routine that involved: eating breakfast (granola-y cereals and smoothies made of Kiefer), watching Bloomberg, me leaving for work, then returning from work. When I got home every day, my aunt and I would sit very, very quietly and calmly in the dark den and watch one recorded episode of the Barefoot Contessa. If you've ever seen the Barefoot Contessa, you would know that this is the only way to watch it, because she speaks very quietly and she cooks in this beautiful kitchen with all white materials and you really need to focus on the food in front of you.
After the Barefoot Contessa was over, we cooked dinner together. Usually Dianne would cook dinner and I would watch. A lot of the time Jim would grill meat as well. Dianne kept her recipes in this old blue Duke binder that she had from when her son was at Duke. They were all printed out from Food Network online and sorted by category. She's such a good cook and usually didn't need them, but sometimes we got wild and tried something new. When dinner was ready, Jim picked the wine. As far as wine experts go, he is #1 in my book. He had offered to teach me a little about wine that summer, so he would explain where the wine was from, what the story behind it was, and since he had visited many vineyards and wine regions, he sometimes even knew the vintner. Every night we sat together, talked, enjoyed the food and a bottle of wine, and after dinner we would take a long walk on the ranch with the dogs, whose pastime was rolling in cow patties. Yum.
The next winter, I asked for the Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics cookbook for Christmas. It wasn't even passed down, it was actually purchased on Amazon by another aunt, one who taught me Hershey Bar Pie and Taco Dip. The book is beautiful. It has pictures of all the foods, but the kind of pictures that make you want to lick the page. The cover is this really pretty green. I take good care of it, and I usually write the recipes down on a separate sheet of paper so I don't have to bring the book into the kitchen with me. If you came to my house, you'd find the book between Weight Watchers in 20 Minutes and the Bon Appetit Recipe Binder on my Target bookshelf. You probably wouldn't think that much of it. For me, it means: "The summer I spent with Jim and Dianne and learned how to relax, how to cook, how to drink wine, what a cow patty is, PBS news hour is the best one, Bloomberg maybe isn't good for the soul but financial markets are important, Keifer tastes nothing like regular milk." Really, I'd say, the best summer ever.
