SEASONAL FEASTS: THE JOY OF ANTICIPATION

 "There is no season such delight can bring, 

as summer, autumn, winter and the spring." ~ William Brown

An Autumn Feast Hosted By High School Debbie A While Back

Earlier this week I was reading about seasonal feasts in the book Simple Abundance. Ban Breathnach says "The joy of seasonal cooking is the simplest of pleasures, but one of the most overlooked. It brings harmony and rhythm to our days, demonstrating with gentle wisdom that simplicity and abundance are soul mates. The joy of seasonal foods transforms even the ordinary days at the table into hallowed moments."

Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it wasn't those very words, when read for the first time so many years ago, that inspired My Great Epiphany -- the one that made me see the link between all those great books I had read about people who were living "the good life." The epiphany that made me aware of something I dubbed "seasonality" -- a quality that has colored most everything I have thought or done since, from how I cook and eat, to starting a garden design business called Seasonality which focussed on four seasons of interest, buying this Hill Country home and naming it Seasonality, trying to grow some of my own food, and even writing a blog called Seasonality.

When we first bought this place, I had great plans for big seasonal feasts to be held out on our porches or patios, with tables full of interesting people, scintillating conversation, and the best food that the season had to offer. Unfortunately, for the first several years we only came up here a couple of weekends per month, we hadn't got to know any locals yet, and we didn't have beds to sleep more than two out-of-towners at a time, so the feast idea sort of fizzled. This essay got me to thinkin' about it again.

Ban Breathnach went on to mention a favorite cookbook for seasonal feasts, Table For Eight by Judith Huxley, which contains "fifty-two sensational menus -- a week-by-week walk through the year celebrating the pleasures of the table", which got me to thinking about the great foodie friends we have made since moving here, about how lucky we are to have two kids who love to cook, and who, by some miracle, have both ended up living nearby in Austin, and about our forever friends Paula and Tim, who would be the only ones who would need overnight accommodations (unless one of our siblings wanted to come, in which case they could take turns). Hmmmm. Wonder if I could still get my hands on a copy of that cookbook, after all these years? If so, it just might be time to resurrect the idea of those seasonal porch feasts...perhaps in the form of a once-a-month-or-season, old fashioned Sunday Dinner. What say my foodie friends and family?