Old Friends, New Things, Very Grateful!

Our trip to Florida each year at Thanksgiving always brings new adventures. This year was no exception. We took a pasta-making cooking class with Chef Chris Covelli, a good friend of Pat and Bill (and now of ours), Pat invited me to tag along to his swim aerobics class every day, and we had an on-going Mexican Train tournament.

Chris is a professional chef who just landed a job as head chief at an exclusive cooking school in Sarasota. He includes among his friends Marcella Hazen, the woman who is considered the Julia Child of Italian cooking: Joanna and Ivan gave us her major cookbook last Christmas. Harry and I were included in a pasta-making class during our visit, along with a group of friends of Pat and Bill. We made tagliatelle and ravioli from scratch, while Chris made the sauces for the pastas and two kettles full of oso bucco. The sauces for the tagliatelle included butter, cream, truffles and truffle oil which Chris brought back from Italy in early November. He also teaches in a cooking school in Lucca.

The ravioli was filled with pears sauteed in bourbon and butter with a dab of smoked mozzarella cheese. Words cannot express what these dishes tasted like. I felt like I was in heaven eating with the angels. Harry and I feel like we have the pasta making pretty much down now, thanks to Chris and my friend Linda who gave us a lesson last year.

To ward off the pounds I always accumulate on this trip, I immediately took Pat up on his offer for me to join his Y for a week. Each day we got up early and headed off to a water aerobics class. (Harry, meanwhile, had a relapse on the chest cold he contracted from the cast of Richard, but did manage to leap around in the home pool and play with the stretchy things which our trainer, Alex, loaned us for the trip.) One morning Pat and I even tried a water yoga class. This Y was a wonderfully old-fashioned comfortable kind of place with a charming mix of the old, the very old, and young families. I learned some new water tricks for my arthritis that I think will be very helpful over time. It was fun, too, just spending one-on-one time with Pat.

Harry and I spent hours sitting by the pool in the lanai reading or napping, and the four of us played many games of Mexican Train. Pat and Bill play a little different game than the one we learned in Mexico where you play for money. Both are fun, but I think the Florida game is a bit more challenging, and of course with these bridge masters the competition is fierce. Harry lost the Hearts tournament yet again, but only in the final deciding game, and considers it an act of bravery to play such a game with them in the first place.

This was our ninth year of going to Florida for Thanksgiving. Our tradition is ever-changing but our friendship with Pat and Bill is a constant in our lives and as Art Garfunkel sang, Grateful, grateful, truly grateful am I!