I’m back in France now with a dinner party to look forward to. I have invited the boys and Stella and Ed. I didn’t get a chance to celebrate Matt’s March birthday or to properly thank these folks for looking after my plants and my house while I was away.

The air has changed here and it is decidedly colder with highs in the mid-fifties. Dave says it is a north wind that is responsible for this change. The days are brisk but beautifully bright and dry and I can’t find anything to complain about. Well, maybe the need for a fire at night but that seems small potatoes.

The menu for Sunday supper is pretty simple. I will do chicken parmigiana, pasta, salad, garlic bread and carrot cake for dessert. This requires getting up early on Saturday to start mom’s sauce and let it simmer on low for the better part of a day. I love this sauce because it tastes like home but it occurs to me that it might not be great-just familiar. Well, my guests are going to have to put up with it because it is the sauce I like to make. My kitchen smells like home when it is bubbling on the stove top.

Later on Saturday I make the carrot cakes. I think my carrot cake is one of the best but what a pain in the ass it is to assemble It involves grating carrots, grating nutmeg (they don’t sell it ground here) and then the three cake pans, and the production of tons of cream cheese frosting. I struggled to get all the cake pans in my small oven to cook at the same time and I was too tired to stagger the bake so one of my cakes was wonky and had a decided lean to it. I decided to forgo the three tiers as the cake is just huge anyway and I froze the wonky one for later. In the end, I was quite pleased by the finished product. So much so that I ate a massive piece well past the place of comfortable fullness.