Thursday, May 22

One Year Anniversary

[One year ago today, littleplate made its debut with an article on recipes of the past. Today's article is the result of much indecision and inability to settle on a concept reflecting upon that debut and the thirty-four other columns that followed before today's. Can you say "timed writing exercise?"]

Littleplate is one year old today. If it was a baby, I would buy it a cake and let it squish its face into it. If it was a spouse, I would buy it a gift of paper. If it was a dog, I would let it gnaw on a big rawhide bone.

It's none of those things, of course, and so it is hard to decide how to commemorate this anniversary. I'd planned a column reflecting on what has happened since littleplate came to be, but abandoned it. Such a column would have been altogether too depressing. I found that I could think of three bad or infamous events for every one good or even decent event over the past year, which does not an uplifting column make. Scratch that idea.

After canking that idea, I had another one: perhaps, in the spirit of anniversaries, I would write a column about wedding food. After all, I've been to five weddings since littleplate went live last May. They ran the gamut, too, from formal to informal, from splendid to heartfelt, from the beach in December to the country in April. I enjoyed them all, and nothing's more uplifting than a column on the unions of souls, right?

So I sat down to write it and realized one unfortunate fact. The unifying feature that all of these weddings possessed was: the open bar. Whoops! No wonder the actual menus were somewhat hazy! I have to apologize to all of the friends who invited me to their weddings over the past year (and warn anyone who might be considering inviting me to their nuptials in the future). You might as well not bother to feed me, because I am too busy drinking wine and dancing to pay much attention to the food. I can say with assurance that I enjoyed the food at each and every reception, and I can remember a dish here and there-- filet mignon, biscuits and country ham, Italian wedding soup. I just can't remember many details. Sorry, newlyweds. I'll make it up to you with the gift.

Several more ideas were written down and halfway fleshed out, but none of them seemed quite right for an anniversary edition. Of course, I can't share them with you yet. I might need them at a later date.

Then I was left with this column about discarded ideas, which is actually a good transition to the fact that over the past month I've considered discarding littleplate altogether. You might, or might not, have noticed that littleplate has been dormant for the past few weeks, and I admit that a general laziness was exacerbated by a new two-night-a-week commitment. (Kickboxing, if you must know. Unlike professional big-city restaurant reviewers, I do not have a personal trainer to offset the effects of my sampling.) I thought about turning the column into a biweekly one, or a monthly one, or maybe just a whenever-I-felt-like-it one.

Then I thought again. I thought: I would miss having the weekly scramble to come up with an idea good enough to write about. I would miss the creative outlet and the opportunity to try new recipes and restaurants. I would miss reading the comments of readers and hearing what they thought of littleplate recipes. And I would really miss the conspiratorial wink and whisper of various friends at food events: "Do you think this might make a column?"

So I'm not Ruth Reichl yet. In fact, I'm so incredibly lazy that my littleplate-logo'd aprons have never materialized, and my carefully planned packages to Gourmet and Bon Appetit have not been sent. No matter. I still like to write these columns, I hope you all like reading them, and I thank each one of you for bothering to read them, respond to them, and suggest new ideas for them.

[Ding! That's the timer. I have to stop, which is good, since I have a tendency to get sappy. Before I do, I just need to plug the recipe for white sangria to the right of your screen. I can personally recommend it for early (or late) summer evenings on the deck, beach, or patio.]