I've been trying, with mixed succcess, to introduce in our household the idea of the Sunday supper. You know, slightly earlier than dinner might be on other days, and perhaps even more elaborate and more lingered-over. Sometimes such a dinner salvages the day from a certain kind of malaise, when there's lots to do but everyone's out of sorts or when you're trying to be productive but nothing comes together quite as planned. We had that kind of day at our house, but sitting down to dinner erased most of our frustrations and, for the first time really since we woke up, we began to enjoy each other and relax. Even the Little Diva, who usually despairs of our intent to keep her confined to her high chair for the duration of the evening meal, was in good humor and ate all of her chickpeas and yogurt.


Part of my increased cheerfulness stemmed from the success of the corn fritters. I've never made any (actually, I had never even eaten a corn fritter in my entire life) but somehow knew they'd be great. So I kept this idea in the back of my mind for years and years and only today finally made a batch. We enjoyed them thoroughly. Not health food, to be sure, but a nice treat enjoyed with ketchup (for the Boy Wonder and my husband) or salsa (for me) and a wonderful complement to the richness of the steaks.


In my zeal to follow the recipe (which is an old one) properly and also indulge my enthusiasm for keeping dishes to a minimum I beat the required egg white to stiff peaks by hand. Big deal, you scoff? Not so, says I. As someone who is generally loathe to move one inch more than necessary my success in this venture could well mark a turning point in my approach to these kinds of activities.


Anyway, I highly recommend that you make corn fritters for yourself and see if they can't help revive you from a troublesome day. I used one can of cream corn (horrors!) and one can of kernal corn (Not-so-horrors, but still!) and combined them together with about one tablespoon of baking powder, 3/4 cup of flour and the beaten white of one large egg (beat until fairly stiff and fold gently into the other ingredients). Heat about 1/4 inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan and, when quite warm but not smoking, add the batter in large spoonfuls (the rounds should be about 2 inches in diameter in the oil). Turn fritters once on the way to getting both sides a nice golden color. Drain on paper towel lined plates and serve with your favorite condiments (I read somewhere once of people eating them with maple syrup!).


Remember my cut finger? A surgeon friend had a gander at it yesterday (I didn't go see him about it, but ran into him and he noticed the rather large bandage I had installed). His response? "DUDE! Why didn't you get this stitched? Do you have any idea how poorly this is going to heal? What the h*ll did you wrap this in? Saran?"


Well, actually, no. So he goes into this long thing about the fascia and the skin and the...I don't know, insert surgeon-speak here and now I keep watching this finger (the bandage has been removed) waiting for it to turn into this malformed digit of ill-wrapped revenge or something.