Vacation

V. and I have greeted the new year in appropriate fashion. A friend of ours who owns a large townhouse in Rehoboth invited us down to see in 2006, and ten of us had a very nice dinner out. I had some potato encrusted rockfish served with a shellfish veloute and tomato and cream reduction. Yummy. Then the other eight (single) guys went to the bars for a few hours, while V. and I went back to the townhouse for some quality time with each other and an inexpensive sparkling wine. This afternoon, the same group of people were at the townhouse for dinner. I was not in charge of the preparation, but I did manage to make sure that the excellent beef roast got done to the correct temperature, and I stopped my friend C. from making a casserole with canned cream of mushroom and/or cream of cheddar sauce by making a mornay sauce myself. It was stellar. I also made the mashed potatoes, which were everything that mashed potatoes should be.

Anyway, tomorrow morning at an hour so ungodly early that I can't even bring myself to mention it, V. and I will be up so that we can head off to Dulles to catch a flight to San Juan. From there, we're driving about 2.5 hours to a resort on the southwest coast of Puerto Rico, where we will do not too much of anything for four days. V. is not taking the laptop, so there is no chance of updates, but shortly after my return, I will be sure to report on all the excellent food I've managed to ingest during the trip.

I wish everyone the very best of all possible new years in this best of all possible worlds. (Observant readers will be able to guess from that last sentence what I'm taking with me to start reading as soon as I've finished Light in August. If you can't figure it out, think of it as a cliffhanger ending.)