Last night’s trip to Walnut Creek for Christmas Eve dinner and chocolate sauce testing was a great success, particularly since it gave me my first chance in several years to see David and Sandy’s kids, Casey and Cooper. Fine kids, which could be expected under the circumstances since 1) they’re David and Sandy’s and 2) it was Christmas Eve, when all kids are at their finest.
Their new black Lab bitch was also fine. However, when I complimented David on her most excellent behavior, he confessed that her regal reserve owed something to the miracle of modern chemistry. Yes, Virginia, there is Puppy Prozac.
The dinner was excellent, the other dinner guests were entertaining, and the chocolate sauce tasting went off so successfully that I may have to try this again.
Afterwards, I returned home to treats on another plane, my friend Chris having arrived from Germany bearing a smoked eel, a smoked mackerel, and something like half a kilo of Schmand, a German dairy product known only in the region around Kassel and tasting somewhat like a super-rich, extra thick crème fraîche. To facilitate their passage through customs, his mother had thoughtfully got her butcher to seal these items in impervious heavy plastic and then gift-wrapped them. Luckily, I had in the refrigerator some thumb-sized mutated blackberries from Driscoll’s in Watsonville, so we were able to sample the Schmand immediately. It was everything I had expected, and afterwards I drifted off to sleep with visions of annexing Daly City dancing in my head, Chris and his friend Dirk having gone out for an evening of Midnight Mass and the pursuit of sodomy, in that order.
Today, after I shower and shave and take my Pravachol (cholesterol inhibitor), I’m headed out for Christmas Dinner, for which my contribution will be fingerling potatoes in Schmand and cornbread made with blue corn and duck fat.