Setting the Menu

Ah, a challenge. The ultimate challenge. Is it a life-changing examination? A feat of acrobatic endeavour? Do 1500 words on the merits of hippopotami as pets need to be compiled at a moment's notice? Good grief, is a life on the line? No, it's greater than any of those, it's the annual New Year's Day banquet, and on this occasion the theme is Italian. Italian!

Putting together a menu is the second most difficult part of the whole operation, but also the most enjoyable. The enjoyment is in the theory, the exertion is in the sequencing of the different operations so that it all fits together, and the chaos is in the doing of said operations. Six different dishes to all be ready at the same time? Easy! You just need an intelligent octopus, five assistants who all follow instructions blindly, an instantaneous washing up machine, and a piece of string. To be honest I don't know why you need the piece of string, but it's traditional and expected.

Why do a mega-meal on New Year's Day? Not just because it's tradition, surely? Tradition is anathema to the logical mind. Is there a rational mind in the house? Eschewing all the major faith-based holidays leaves only the arbitrarily chosen New Year's Day and the ever so slightly squinky birthday. Why describe birthdays via the only vaguely defined 'squinky'? Why keep asking rhetorical questions? Rhetorical questions are the most fun. Birthdays are squinky because they they mark a person's emergence into the world, and into independence, but not their beginning. Birthdays don't even come along uniformly at 40 weeks of actual age. They're 'squinky'. Golly, I hope squinky doesn't have an actual definition!

One of those rhetorical questions didn't get an answer, at least not a whole one. We know why New Year's Day, but not why a super stressful mega-meal is to be produced. Maybe you have to give back sometimes, and so on this day I cook dramatically for the lady who cooks relentlessly for most of the other days of the year. A super-meal for the mother has to happen. It's time to pretend to be a nice person!

O.