Sunday Supper: come eat cheese with us!

A very very special and exciting announcement today!

We’re off!

It was an extremely agonizing decision and I was pretty bummed out for a couple of weeks trying to make up my mind to get to this point. There were tears. There were excited conversations. There were moments of questioning my own sanity. There were moments of angry bickering. But finally, finally, finally….here goes:

I’ve given notice to work, and as of March 11, I will become a world wanderer…and a student at Cordon Bleu in Paris in September! Alex and I have decided to take the next few months to do some traveling in Asia, before returning to Canada in June for our wedding. Then we’ll be off in August to Paris, where I’ll be pursuing the Patisserie Diploma at the Cordon Bleu school from September to March!

It’s a lot to digest, and I spent a couple of weeks feeling nervous and unsure – there were moments where I wanted to scream, “JUST JOKING! I would love to have a job!” but Alex talked me off the ledge every time. It’s just that, all my life, I focused on trying hard at school, going to a decent university, getting a good job…and now we’re taking a sharp turn to the left. I can still hear the tires squeaking as we veered off and made this decision. It makes me a little bit smug and proud that I have proven to myself that I can do it, and slowly, very slowly, I’m getting used to the idea that I’m going to take some time off and try to enjoy life and my youth (what’s left of it…*sob*) before settling down to be all adult-like and host dinner parties again.

Speaking of dinner…to celebrate, for Sunday Supper, I made Julia Child’s cassoulet. With lots of adaptations and substitutions, because ingredients like 2 pounds of pork rind are just not typically on my shopping list, and I wouldn’t really know what to do with it all. I made a mini version in my little pot, and it was just enough for two with delicious leftovers. To drink, we threw in the champagne we bought from Iron Horse vineyard shortly before we got engaged. We always said we needed good reason to celebrate to drink it, and we drank a bottle when we sold our apartment in July, so this seemed like a fitting occasion for the very last bottle from that trip. (Interesting tidbit: this will also be the champagne served at our wedding because it just so happens to be the champagne the venue carries – so meant to be!)

  

Happy Anna Howard Shaw Day everyone, and you’re all invited to come eat cheese with us in Paris in September! I promise to also throw in some pastries if you hang around long enough ;-)