Happy Father's Day...

Like Mother's Day, I feel like I've written just about all I can about my wise and generous father in honor of his special day, and there's not really anything new I can bring to the table this year, except to commemorate what I actually put on the table to thank him for his continued support and presence in my life. I'm not really sure what this says about gender roles, but to fete Mom on Mother's Day, we went out to celebrate so there would be no cooking and no dishes to wash, but for Father's Day, I spent the day in the kitchen preparing his favorite dishes as my gift to him.


First, with the assistance of Mom and Justin, I made Lentils a la Brasserie du Theater, easily the most complicated dish in my entire cooking repertoire, as it requires very finely chopping vegetables, poaching eggs, and monitoring three vessels on the stove at once. I actually haven't made it since his birthday in 2009 (when I described it here but did not photograph it), so I figured it was time to tackle it once again. We experimented this year with silicone egg poaching cups, which significantly eased and cut down on the mess associated with poaching eggs, once we went online and researched how to properly use them. Given how much I dislike poaching eggs, I highly recommend investing in a set of these if you're interested in performing that particular kitchen task on your own.

For dessert, I baked up a batch of Dad's favorite cookies, which were a labor of love, as always. I must confess, I was a bit concerned when I discovered that Justin actually liked them upon being offered a sample, as I was previously convinced that one had to be genetically related to our family in order to possess whatever tasting gene is required to enjoy them. However, given Mom's extensive genealogical research into our family's origins, I think it's safe to say that she would have figured it out by now if Justin and I were distantly related. I'm just going to accept it as a good thing that he can tolerate our traditional family foods and stop questioning it.

On top of my gifts of fine cuisine, I also got Dad another awesome card from Etsy. I often rib him about how easy he had it as a parent, considering what a goody-two-shoes I turned out to be, and I managed to find a card that reflected that:

His response? "You haven't eloped with a guy you met on the Internet... yet!

Dad, I may have made things easy on you by staying out of trouble, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate all the guidance and encouragement you've given me for the last 26 years. Happy Father's Day!