Sunday Dinner

There are many lovely people in my class, but chief amongst them is Hannah. I can say that, because none of them know the URL for this blog. This is Hannah with her partner Jason and their lovely 1-year-old daughter Naomi. We had what is becoming our traditional boozy weekend lunch yesterday. Katie's come along for the last two, and she might be as close to adopting this family as her own as I am. Let me tell you about them.
Hannah has a scientist father who has invested in many a start-up research project over the years. Having a serial start-up father myself, I can relate. Her father, several years ago, was close to bankrupting himself over a particular agricultural product when Hannah and her sister decided to buy him out, giving him money with which to retire and giving themselves a business. It went rather well, and they sold the company two years ago. Since then, they've been traveling from their home base outside of Toronto (Jason is Canadian, Hannah is British but has lived in Canada for many years) to various exotic destinations. As of now, they're here, where Hannah is taking the course at the Sorbonne and Jason is tending Naomi in the mornings. Jason is very funny: a dry, kind of dark sense of humor. Naomi is a little ham who eats as much as she can stuff in her face and cracks herself up constantly. She's also a very entertaining dancer.
So last Sunday we set ourselves the project of a truly French Sunday meal. In France, as in certain parts of the US, all of the extended family gathers on Sunday for lunch, which lasts just about all day long. Ours lasted for six hours and several bottles of wine, so I think we did pretty good. Hannah made grilled white asparagus, beef bourgougnion, and tarte aux citrons (a French lemon-custard tart). Pretty damn French, right? Annie, our lovely Chinese friend, passed out on the couch after two glasses of wine, which is admittedly a lot for her, but the rest of us powered through. Katie did a lot of weaving on the way home, but I got her back here. She flopped down on the bed, without even taking off her shoes, and slept for hours. We may have to build up to the French thing...