Night of wine and butter

[celticdragonfly]

My, what a dinner.

Inspired by the Bujold list's recent discussion of alcohol, where different types of people store it, and then a side track on cooking wine versus regular wine, I made spaghetti with red wine in the sauce tonight for a late dinner. I have a couple of these little individual bottles of merlot, come in a four pack, single serving size. Part of it goes into the sauce, the rest into a wineglass shared between selenite and I.

I also did some food geekery for selenite. He likes bread and butter. We always forget to take the butter out of the fridge at the start of the cooking process, and then he ends up having to microwave a stick to be able to spread it. So I decided to make butter for him. Yep, I made fresh butter. Heavy whipping cream, a bowl, and a hand mixer. And patience. He was pleased. "That's fresh!" he said. I offered Jamie the buttermilk. He seemed dubious about it.




Homemade butter. It actually worked. It was very nice, even. We had lots of bread and butter with dinner.




Here's Jamie cheerfully enjoying his spaghetti.

He was wearing some of it on his head at one point, but took it off before I could get to the camera.

Why yes, he DID get a bath before storytime. They both did.




Here's Maggie proudly showing off that she got HER spaghetti on the FORK!

Then she forgot about that and proceeded to play with it for a while with her hands.



What I'm finding disconcerting about all this is how much I was enjoying the glass of wine. (Well, half-glass, split between us.) I noticed this at my birthday dinner recently. It surprises me. I was never a big one for drinking. My family generally only has wine on special occasions. College age, when everyone around me was urgently wanting to drink, of age or no, it didn't interest me all that much. I did drink at the quarterly end-of-term parties of my community service organization, wine coolers or my own pitcher of mixed drinks (hate beer, especially nasty cheap beer), but it was for the relaxing effect, and I didn't enjoy it for the drinking of it. Didn't do much of it. I've rarely touched it since then.

Now, of course, I've been restricted from it much because of the babies and nursing. Jamie's big enough and nursing at a lower level, so I don't worry about up to a glass rarely.

But now I'm finding that when I have it, I really enjoy it, enjoy the taste and the feel of it. When did that happen? Did my biochemistry change? With age, or with having the kids? I'm feeling rather cautious about it, too - growing up, I had my family which had it rarely, and I'd heard of people who drank regularly - i.e., alcoholics. I wouldn't want to be like that! selenite points to his parents as counterexamples.