My sister Joan is a cookbook person. As kids growing up, I can remember her coming home from school and poring over a cookbook with a glass of milk. Today she spends her summers on her island in New York’s Thousand Islands. She still has lots of cookbooks, but like most of us, she gets most of her recipes online. That is why Joan is questioning of the need to keep her collection. My answer was: Of course you need to keep your cookbooks. I don’t think people will be throwing away their family bible simply because they go to the Internet to check out Facebook in the morning. Books, cookbooks in particularly, are part of Joan’s DNA. And, that is a good thing.
Joan and her husband Brian are wonderful hosts. They spend their summers on the St Lawrence River, right on New York border with Canada. Their little island has been in Brian’s family for generations and is a wonderful place to visit, but it isn’t exactly easy to get to. Joan and Brian have been going there for years, but it was only when our daughter moved to Ottawa Canada a few years back, that we made it there. The pace of life on the river is low key. One can sit on the veranda and stare across the river and see Canada while watching very large ocean going vessels pass. With all the noise in the media about the southern wall with Mexico, one has to wonder where the northern wall will go? LOL.
Joan, Brian, Susan and I were probably our original supper club. We all went to college together In Plattsburgh NY which was also close the Canadian border. Back in the 1970’s there certainly wasn’t any wall. You didn’t need a passport to get across the border. I don’t think we even had to show an ID. We would drive to Montreal for an evening. My buddy Ron Iles used to claim that the drunker you were, the easier it was to get across the border. His line was: “The Lord protects fools and drunks. That gives us double coverage.”
Back then we didn’t have much money for our supper club dinners. I can remember one late summer meal where I made Zucchini Parmesan with over-ripe squash from Joan and Brian’s garden. Iles, always a wizard with words, quickly began to shout praise for my Seeds Parmesan. Once you got past the larger seeds, the parmesan was pretty good and the price was right for hungry college students.
The menus for our dinners on Joan and Brian’s last summer were a lot closer to Joan’s cookbook standards.
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