“Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.” – Truman Capote, Summer Crossing, 1943

High season. It’s been hectic, to say the least, to put it mildly, and I don’t know where I find the energy. Commitment to the project, to the team, to my own sense of self. Thirty, thirty-five, forty and more for breakfast any morning, and I find myself run ragged, yet so many of these mornings things go quite smoothly, surprisingly smoothly. We, myself and whoever is helping me in the kitchen, Nathalie or Ophélie, turn to each other come ten o’clock and say, “oh! That’s that and that was pretty easy!” Another morning or two, a client has said to me “You look frazzled” or “You look stressed” and I was, am, as, most likely, things had gone a bit less smoothly, maybe twenty of a group all show up at once or something that pushes us off balance. Breakfast begun and ended in an hour flat.

I am still on a learning curve and learning how to handle forty-two breakfasts having never done anything even remotely like it in my life (give or take one or two spaghetti dinners at the synagogue when I was a teen) is, well, yes, rather stressful.

But step out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, the sun streaming onto the pavement, filtering through the rose vines, and, face turned up to capture the warm rays, and everything is all right. I chat with the clients, share stories, answer their questions about the hotel, about my life, laugh together, tease and be teased, and the stress of the morning melts into contentment.

Once my breakfast duties are finished, now that it is high season, I dash into the laundry room and give a helping hand by folding piles of clean towels straight from the dryer (and it brings back memories of my pulling loads of towels from the dryer when I was a kid and loving to just push my face into the softness, the warmth, snuggle and breathe in deeply). I smile while I fold towels in the peace of the laundry room, the drumming and whirring and rattling of the big machines blocking out the rest of the world, my worries, and wrapping around me as a cocoon.

The only cooking that I am doing these days, at least for the rest of the month, are the recipes that I am developing and testing for my cookbook proposal, so Jean-Pierre and I eat salads, frozen pizza, or pop out for a meal. So I am sharing one of my favorite recipes from the old blog that I don’t want to get lost in the haze of the past. A beautiful vegetarian meal, a meal for winter or summer, a meal even for a finicky son.