Supper Club

I spent the Saturday before Supper Club in the kitchen.

Barefoot.

Covered with flour.

The open windows and sliding door let a cool breeze tease my legs. My feet slid on the flour coated floor while I rolled and kneaded, proofed and mixed.

I wished for an island, more room for my appliances. I wished for a Kitchen Aid with its massive dough hook that would allow me to double the batches instead of four painfully slow single batches.

I quick pickled onion in lemon juice and googled how to cook Israeli couscous. I dragged my crew, consisting mostly of the under seven crowd, outside to move chairs, straighten table clothes, pick up gardening tools.

And then I shook out white curtains - the only fabric I own big enough to cover the eight foot table - and layered them with a red table cloth. Elizabeth rolled lemons between colored glass lanterns. The sun beat down on our heads while we smoothed the fabric and put bright blue paper plates at one end.

The dishes began to arrive - potato salad flecked with parsley, pistachios chopped with mint, couscous with bright colored flecks of peppers and lemon, chicken simmering in a pot, brilliant purple eggplant roasted to perfection, bright tomatoes tossed with hot peppers, and the smell of pitas grilling.

We put bottles of deep red wine and sparkling white on the table and sat as the sun set. We filled our plates with food, our glasses with sweet Moroccan mint tea, and the air with laughter. The candles sent a glow across the table while children filled the apple tree.

Soon, one by one, the kids went into the house to watch a movie. Elizabeth crawled into my lap and cuddled next to me. The gold clip on earrings and chunky pearl necklace she'd insisted on wearing clinking as she shifted to a more comfortable spot.

Every now and then, there's a perfect moment. I treasure those moments, savor them.

And that night, in the candle and star light surrounded by friends and my children, was one of them.