Friday, August 31, 2007

under August moon

We prepare dinner for new friends who are leaving their summer idyll in Vermont. They are like we are when we leave Italy, packing up, saying good-bye, feeling the bittersweet departure coupled with the plans to return. The night cooperates. There is warm evening weather, and the turkeys living in our meadow trot our their new brood. We tour the gardens and the dusk hides a multitude of weedy sins. We play at summer house with cocktails on the terrace with a fresh cow's milk-sheep's milk cheese from northern Italy paired with rice crackers, olives and cornichons.

Dinner is also on the terrace with the chandelier lighted and the torches blazing. When darkness comes so does a chill in the air and we light a fire in our make-shift fire pit which radiates warmth. We sit at table to a favorite wine, coppa with fresh figs, the local bufala mozzarella with our own tomatoes colored both yellow and red, and a shrimp salad made with lime and herbs. The air smells of fresh mown hay. We tell stories, look at pictures, and plan future trips. The full moon rises, broad and orange, so obligingly. A fat spider slides down a thread from her web infront of the window. Once the moon is quite high, a dessert of peach tart is taken inside, upstairs in the livingroom. The meal is finished with last year's nocino alongside the walnut liquer from the southern reaches of Puglia in Italy's heel that inspired out own.

After our guests leave, we leave the dishes in the sink, and lie down on a bed of pillows under the sky. We watch the moon, and contemplate our empty terrace, the candles burning low, remembering long ago dinners under our wildly growing grapes. We imagine future late night card games at the dinner table accompanied by a pot of tea or a tot of whiskey. We remember and catolog our best meals of the summer. This was one of them.

Lime Herb Shrimp Salad for 4

Inspired by: 1) the desire for a cold summer shrimp salad, 2) a plentitude of herbs and the memory of a tabouleh dish at the Cafe Opaline in Manhatten, 3) a memory of a salad loaded with scallion in Belfast, Ireland prepared by a chef who'd spent time traveling in Malaysia.

4 dozen medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
12 scallions, green parts and all

a handful of mint leaves
a handful of cilantro leaves
half a handful of parsley
a walnut-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
a clove of garlic(optional), peeled and grated liked the ginger
juice of 2 limes
extra virgin olive oil
salt & pepper

Boil shrimp until just cooked in well-salted water. Drain and chill in cold running water briefly. Drain well again and put into a large tossing bowl. Season liberally with salt and pepper. Add the lime juice, grated ginger and garlic, and a little olive oil. Toss. Taste for seasoning. Add more salt if necessary. Finely chop the scallion, mint, parsley, and cilantro. Toss the herbs well with the shrimp, and serve.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

miss havisham's garden


It always happens this way: come August, the perennial gardens become wild. This year we've spent so much time working on the new stone garden that the other parterre has gone a bit to seed. Every year it is the same, with some likely excuse, the summer slowly running out of our hands until we are chasing after it. By August, the weeds have made their home, strangling and twisting about the true plants, and the lily stalks are dried and brown and in need of cutting back. The roses have usually contracted black spot or powdery mildew and given up their effort to bloom, or if they are valiant, like our rugosa's, and bud for a second wave, the Japanese beetles collect themselves into an armored mass of hungry clicking insect. Unless we go about every day pinching them off the blossoms or leaves, or shaking them into a glass jar then crushing them with a flat ended stick, all perverse pleasures, they grow rampant. The mint bolts and crowds out everyone else.

It is the same time every year that I decide I no longer like the garden. The plants are all mishapen, the wrong height, the wrong color. The black-eyed susan that I long coveted and long reminded me of summer's in Vermont has become somehow angry in its deep yellow and doesn't play well here with the flox and bee balm and seedum. The foliage in the garden obscures and masks, and is threaded with grass. But what should we expect? The garden is after all in an old hay field.

All our efforts have been backwards which make it extremely difficult to manage. We planted the gardens first without amending the soil, or truly ridding it of weeds, then we decided to make raised beds, then we decided to add manure and compost and sand, then we decided to dig up, and really weed, sift and re-plant, and now we've decided to edge with box, and yank out the invasive veronica that looks so pretty in the spring with its dainty blue flower.

This is why I call it Miss Havisham's Garden. It becomes like a forgotten love who waits at the altar in wedding lace until the body rots and and the lace yellows and all becomes eccentric. The party has been laid upon the table and left as is until someone eventually returns. In a few weeks time, we'll return to the garden, furious with the energy of what needs to be done, and spend three days weeding and digging and clipping and mulching until everything looks a little more reasonable and not so undone. We'll make resolutions that we mean but know we can't keep. Autumn will come and bury the garden in fallen leaves and more brown stalks which we'll leave until springtime for "winter interest" and additional warmth. At least this is what we tell ourselves. The reality may be that we too begin to hibernate and loose our desire to work outside. We'll sidle up to the fire burning in the woodstove, and decide to re-paint the bathroom. Again. Our attention turns inward.

For now, it is still August. At least until tomorrow. Heat, sun, and crickets will make us think the summer will never end, and in the shifting light, the blowsy and ill-kempt garden will never looked so good.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

la chasse aux papillons

The hunt of the butterflies. I look at the name on my perfume bottle to be sure I have spelled this correctly even though I studied French for 14 years. We are in a storm of butterflies, monarchs and fritellaries, resting and drinking deeply in our perennial garden and mint hedge. The heat is back and they have landed on every available floral surface and stay their wings, pressing them close together so they become almost two dimensional, or look as if they are praying. The orange and black palette of the monarch overrides the small black winged ones with bits of red and orange embroidered in the dust of their armature. There is a science that says that the beating wings of butterflies in South America can effect the weather in China.

It seems just like yesterday, but it was really at this time last summer, when our fields were full of butterfly hunters. Dressed in white shirts with long sleeves, white pants, and pith helmets or wide brim straw hats, they walked through the tall, straw-colored grass with their butterfly nets. We could not help but imagine a scene out of Henry James or a Merchant-Ivory film where the party stopped in the meadow with a picnic and parasols, stifled in their heavy clothes in the yellowed August heat.

I run outside still in my pyjamas to photograph the butterflies. I am transported back to a hot day in Paris this spring in a small perfume shop on the rue de Rivoli. This parfumeur's scents are lined up along the window overlooking the street, distillations of the perfumes settled in small glass jars stuffed with scent-soaked muslin. I stick my nose deep into the vials breathing deeply as I do when I taste wine. I leave the shop with a floral, slightly spicy scent redolent of rose, violet, iris, and white pepper named la chasse aux papillons.

The weather report says to expect violent thunderstorms, lightening, and possible high winds. When hurricane-like buckets of rain whip through town we wonder at the science of butterflies and if they have brought us such a wild night.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

another proper lunch




The air has changed. While we always hope for one last hot stretch to the summer, August is sometimes fickle in her weather. We have had several days with the thermometer reaching downward toward 40 at night, a high of 60 during the day. Some nights, there have been frost warnings for the low-lying hollows. We wear sweaters at night when we go home from the restaurant, and light fires in the woodstove in the morning when we wake up.

This week we inaugurated the new garden with a lunch. We read somewhere once that a space only becomes alive when it is full with the activity of people. We know this to be true. That's why one throws an open house in a new home, to christen the spaces with voices and laughter, and so we will eat a meal in the new garden for good luck.

The day was grey and brusque, and felt, smelled, and sounded like October. We were disoriented while planting magenta gerbera daisies and albutiron, a variety of hibiscus native to Kenya. We moved our farm table from the terrace and set it in the center of the garden. Tablecloth, silver, glasses, flowers cut from the perennial beds. We had a beautiful bowl of oysters to start and a small glass of Frascati gown outside of Rome, just flinty enough to offset the taste of the ocean. The main course was a French dish, a classic sorrel soup adapted from a Richard Olney cookbook which we served out of a favorite tureen, the soup thick and appropriate for the cold weather out of the north. We have one sorrel plant which we bought in the early summer, a lone potted thing looking a little sad and yellowed around the edges at the plant nursery. We harvested the sorrel, now looking a bit more robust, for the first time to make the soup. At the table, we wore heavy sweaters and a blanket over our legs, and drank a '99 Notarpanaro from the deep, southern reaches of Puglia. Raisinated and almost sherried, I realize I am no longer used to drinking wine with bottle age. I've become more acquainted with young, fresh wines. I think of rooting around our cellar to pull together several bottles for tasting to remind myself what happens to a good wine over time. Dessert is a plate of peaches and a Tuscan cow's milk cheese. We talk, and read our books while the wind whips the tablecloth and rattles the glass bottles. We head inside slightly drunk from exhaustion, good wine and food, and the fresh air, and sadly the tureen and oyster bowl slip from hands carrying too many things, and break and scatter across the porch floor. We will make a grand effort to repair them, but if all else fails we agree to bury the bits and pieces in the gravel paths of this new garden, the glossy shards to be a constant reminder of when this garden was young.




Recipe for Sorrel Soup for Four


1 large white onion
1 cup heavy cream
6 ounces sorrel leaves
6 tablespoons butter
4 large potatoes
extra virgin olive oil
1 quart water
salt and pepper
fresh chive

Peel the 4 large potatoes then cut in quarters and slice thinly. Dice the onion finely. Sautee the onions in two tablespoons of butter and some olive oil for about 15 minutes or until soft, but still translucent. Boil a quart of water. While the onions are cooking, clean the sorrel and peel back the stems so you are left only with the two halves of the leaves. Chop into a fine chiffonade. When the onions are done, add the chopped sorrell and cook until "melted" then add the potatoes and salt. Stir and coat the potatoes with the onions and sorrell. Let the mixture talk to itself for a few minutes then add the boiling water. Cook at a low boil and covered for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes add the heavy cream and fresh ground pepper and stir the soup and "mash" the potatoes with a spoon or wooden pestle until it all becomes a rustic puree. Cook for another ten minutes, stirring every now and then. Check salt to taste. Spoon into warm bowls and finish with chopped fresh chives and a swirl of extra virgin olive oil. Serve immediately.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Mi ricordo di Puglia



It is summertime, and so I have been thinking about, and eating, things roasted over coals outside…and I found this memory:

We are in Puglia, and it is time for lunch. The octopus and was already on the grill when we arrived. We could see it there -- slowly roasting over a low fire – through the wire mesh fence which surrounded us and the other diners on this seaside concrete terrace, only a few meters from the sea. (We are in Italy, so it’s the “sea”, in this case, the Adriatic, and meters, not yards.) It has contracted in the heat of the fire, a strange muscle, looking like a live octopus poised to strike passing negligent prey. Instead, it is grilling

We are there for the ricci, the fresh urchins, which we scoop out of their prickly shells with torn-off pieces of pane duro, a kind of very dense, yet very soft white bread that absorbs the urchin roe perfectly. There is some kind of local white wine in a pitcher. Then come the spaghetti with clams, and my own grilled octopus, with olive oil and lemon.

Almost everyone around us is eating the same thing, though some just stick to the urchin, bread and wine, then a coffee, and that’s all. There are large bottles of soda on a few tables, for diners who look like they should know better. It makes me wonder. Some people are having pasta, or some grilled fish, but fish grilled elsewhere, on a grill out of site behind the kitchen shed, no doubt where my octopus was grilled, because the original octopus remains on the grill, on the other side of the fence, alone. I am beginning to worry about its fate, that it has perhaps been abandoned.

After our meal we pay and linger outside the dining terrace enclosure, talking with the two brothers and their wives, who all run the place together. A young fellow appears on a scooter, says his hellos all around and chats and jokes for a few minutes, a friend or perhaps a cousin, maybe even a much younger brother. Plates pass to and fro, full then empty, more wine, trays of coffees from kitchen to terrace. The young man comes back from the kitchen shed with a sandwich, his grilled octopus squeezed between the two halves of pane duro.

Tomorrow we'll call our fishmonger.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

blackberries, again

We can't stop thinking about blackberries. They are slower to ripen on the edges of our high altitude field. We are watching them slowly turn from a yellow-pink, to red, then deepen to the black-purple that tells that they are ready to be picked.

The cats, Arlette and Janvier, like to hide in the treeline, not too far from the house, beneath the blackberries. They sit on a smooth paleolithic stone hidden in their fruited jungle remembering their panthered ancestory. We press against the thorny bushes, and stick our arms through the vale of leaves and thorns to reach what's there for the picking. Up the road, we loose ourselves in a tangle grasping for the fruit, our arms and legs gloriously marked with our battle scratches. We compare our wounds and generally feel victorious.

We bring in our harvest to the restaurant along with another pint from Nick and Theresa's farm stand. Although all these berries are wild, there are different varieties that line our fields and roads. Ours are quite bright, almost citrusy in flavor, while Nick and Theresa's have a softer, rounder, darker taste. We've been serving them with fresh, ripe melon, prosciutto, and slivers of aromatic mint as an antipasto at the restaurant. All finished with a squeeze of lemon.

Friday, August 17, 2007

this is what I did



As it turns out, time is ticking. Having planted several beds in the new garden, we lost a few days to just keeping up with needs for work and sleep, and finishing the last of the Harry Potter books, and the garden hasn’t managed to make much progress. Except for the tomatoes, the herbs, and the bean plants, which held a congress, a hearing, an impeachment proceeding, and decided to move on without us.

So one morning last week I had my boots on before I had finished my cup of coffee, and got myself down to the compost pile. There isn’t much material left there, but perhaps just enough to fill the last few beds so that a couple of late-harvest crops can be squeezed out of them. I got right to it while Deirdre started to tackle the problem of the perennial garden.

All compostable material from the restaurant comes home each night and is added to one of the two large composting bins we maintain at the foot of the lawn (downhill and downwind of the house). As we are filling one bin, the other is maturing, or composting, or disappearing to local furry bandits and the crows. It often seems to compost faster than I can fill it. But once I can’t put any more material in, I close up that container and start filling the other one. (We lost one lid to a bear a few years ago, so the remaining lid goes back and forth between containers according to need.) When the second is full, I turn out the contents of the first container, and start refilling that. The composted material then gets mixed into other, clean soil with the rototiller, and then, as luck would currently have it, a mix of composted horse manure and sawdust from a local horse farm. (The first batch of “weeds” in the garden will be oats.) Last week I loaded this concoction three times into the garden cart for a trip up the lawn to the next bed to be filled, the one in the NE corner of the garden. And I even got some more arugula in.

Cross your fingers.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

montreal lunch/montreal on the rooftop





We followed the noses of our two traveling companions. They had eaten lunch in this residential section of the city over New Year's when it was cold, snowy, and very windy. They'd found a little Vietmanese spot through Chowhound, and ended up in a tiny kitchen/diningroom with two other diners. They bought beer next door at a depanneur, and tucked into authentic pho, those brilliant Vietmanese soup dishes.

Our friends did not remember the name, only the location and the feel of the street. We walked up and down a broad section of St. Victoire out past the cemetary, but to no avail. It seemed that the little restaurant had disappeared, the one likely storefront now swallowed up by a restaurant supply shop.

We were not without recourse. At the intersection of St. Kevin and St. Victoire is another Vietnamese spot. They had outdoor tables in the shade which beckoned on what turned out to be a hot, hot day in the city. In the cool shadow of their umbrellas, we drank beer and ate spicy, refreshing food: spring rolls, chicken brochettes flavored by the grill, bar-b-qued pork, and the classic omelet/pancake with scallions, cilantro, and Thai basil. So enamored of the food, we all forgot the name this time too, only remembering that it begins with an H. You can drive there, or take the Metro which has a station just down the street.


After such a long lunch and a late afternoon of wandering city streets, evening came quickly, along with a little hunger, and a hankering for refreshment. On a hot night in Montreal, we always like to go to the roof deck bar at The Nelligan in the old port. We've been there many times. One of the most adventurous visits was last summer when a thunderstorm brewed and it got so windy it blew the market umbrellas off the roof and out over the old city. We still wonder what happened to them when they landed. This time, the sky was calm, the air thick with humidity, and a slight balmy breeze. We drank martinis and melon mojitos and ate shrimp cocktail and watched the sun go down, and the city lights come up.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

breakfast at the ritz and a bespoke couch

We ate breakfast in the garden at the hotel, an outdoor terrace tucked behind the building shaded by a blue awning and revolving around a small pool with four white ducks. Pots of ferns and begonias filled white painted cast iron plant stands, a note of Victoriana. The scrambled eggs and bacon were hearty served with little roasted potatoes, and ample bowls of fruit. But it is the yogurt which was of particular distinction. Fresh and tart, slightly acidic yet creamy, it was sublime.

At the turn of the 20th century, the five investors who built the historic building of this old hotel (known from the beginning as La Grande Dame) had planned to name the hotel after London's celebrated Carlton when one of the investors remarked that his best friend Cesar Ritz had opened a hotel in Paris in 1898 which had quickly become recognised as one of the finest. They felt the Ritz name alone could guarantee good fortune. The group successfully applied for the rights to use the name but had to agree to several luxury conditions. Any hotel bearing the Ritz name had to have a bathroom in every room; a kitchen on each floor so room-service meals could be served course by course; round the clock valet service, and a concierge who could do things like trace lost luggage, order theatre tickets, make dinner reservations. The lobby had to be small enough to create a certain intimacy, and the hotel had to have a wide curving staircase from the mezzanine so that, on special occasions, women could make dramatic entrances, displaying their gowns to their best advantage. On December 31, 1912 the Ritz-Carlton opened for $3 million with such a special occasion, celebrating with a banquet-ball, the guests dancing until the early hours of the morning.

It was late hours of our morning, and breakfast lead us to a clutch of stores on St. Laurent, furniture and design palaces all with unique personalities. We were on the hunt for a fold-out couch with a decent mattress to replace our old couch in our sitting room whose mattress has lost its form. We found this out recently when giving up our bedroom to a good friend visiting with her two young children. We took the guest room and felt like we'd been swallowed by a too large goosefeathered pillow.

When we stopped at Licari where we bought our bed, the sales woman tells us that they don't make a sofa bed, and she didn't think anyone else on the street did either. If someone had a good idea for a sofabed and offered it in their showroom, everyone else would know about it as to those in the business it's really considered an impossible piece of furniture.

Cote de Sud is across the torn up street from Licari, and we walked over planks and gravel to get to the front door. The mastermind behind this store which features their own designs as well as Phillipe Stark and other goodies from Kartell sat at his desk in his glassed in office at the back of the showroom tapping his pencil and taking phonecalls. We think he looks a little like the French film actor Gerard Depardieu. We admired the large round wooden dining table, the faux Louis chairs upholstered in glam-rock fabrics, and the espresso machine sitting on an elegant art deco bar. We felt rather desperate for a coffee. But we perservered and learned that Cote de Sud didn't have any fold-out couches on hand, but we could have one made to order with almost any model they make. We sat on and stroked and peered under cushions; we looked through a three-ring dossier of designs. We landed on a look that seemed to fit. The saleswoman drummed up an estimate. We would compare this with other options.

Out the door and to the Greek grocery down the street to load up on dried split fava beans for the restaurant and canned delicacies like stuffed grape leaves, the idea of cooking making us hungry for lunch. We head out to an untraveled part of the city in search of our next meal.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

excursion-montreal



On Monday morning, we left for Montreal. An extra day off from the restaurant as all the staff (meaning the two young women who are working with us for the summer) were on family vacation. Cool and rainy when we left, the skies cleared and the sun heated the farther north we drove. We were late for lunch arriving to the city, but snuck into Boris Bistro, an old stand-by, in the old city. Since we were dining after the lunch crowd, we had the restaurant to ourselves, a modern industrial space most noted for it's large outdoor terrace with a faux half-constructed facade. We ate salads with beets, blue cheese and walnuts, lightly seasoned and seared tuna, steak tartar, and a coconut and saffron curry with shrimp, all with a minerally white from the Loire. We shared a decadent chocolate dessert reminiscent of the interior of a high grade Three Musketeers bar.


On this trip we stayed for a deal at the Ritz-Carlton, the first Ritz ever. On the street down in the old town, we met the manager of one of our favorite auberge, The Bonaparte. When we told him we were staying at the Ritz because he was full, he mimed a yawn, and then told us not to die there. And while he is right that the Ritz is rather staid and reminiscent of very proper and well-off grandmothers, it is still a pleasant place to spend a night or two, enjoy breakfast in the garden, or a an old-fashioned cocktail at the bar. It is two doors down from the museum, and all the shopping you could ever want. The movie theater is a few blocks, so it's easy to catch a film, then trundle off for a late night supper at one of the many bar a vins cropping up all over the city. This is exactly what we did: shopped, went to the movies, then found our way to the Mile End, a slowly gentrifying section of city past what is known as the Plateau. We ate and drank well at Bu, the french past participle for "to drink". We knew about this little wine bar because the owner had stopped at our own restaurant about two weeks before and left a card even though we were unable to seat him that night, and from a loyal Montreal couple who comes every August on their way back from Maine. They always supply us with a list of their new favorite spots in the city.





At Bu, one sommelier and one chef manned the house on a Monday night and they had all the business they could handle even after ten o'clock. We did flights of wine from various places: the Loire, the Piedmont, and Sicily. We also tried a white from the Friuli, a blend of Ribolla Gialla and Tocai, as well as a stinky, vegetal white from the Jura. The menu consisted of only antipasti and we partook of cured meats, an assortment of cheeses, a classic caprese, a carpaccio of beef. We finished with a local speciality, a style of ice wine made with apples, which was silky and cidery and very fine and rather poetic, our response I'm sure influenced somewhat by it's very French name: The Face Hidden in the Snow. We deconstructed its making with the sommelier and thought of trying our hand this fall, then we took a quick tour of the cellar and tasting room, a space that will by used for a play in the round starting next week. A cab driver drove us back to the hotel, and even though it was early for us by our restaurant hour standards, we fell asleep with books in our hands and our lights on.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

black cat wine


The blackberries have arrived. Or are arriving, depending on where you live in this place of mountains and valleys. When the blackberries come, we make another liquer. In July, Caleb makes his nocino, and in August I make vino gattamora, or what we loosely call black cat wine. Usually, I mix a dark concoction of black currants and blackberries. Our currant bushes thrived this year, yielding more fruit than ever before. Sadly, for us, I decided to pick too late. This morning, they were gone. The birds must have had a black currant festival, or surelythe brood of turkeys living in our meadow this summer ate their fair share. So, we are left with only blackberries, a curse we're happy to carry.

While Caleb's nocino sits in front of the French doors in the sun for another two weeks before straining, the vino gattamora is relegated to the pantry to stay somewhere dark. A dark cure for a dark brew. Mason jars of Italian brandy, hearty stuff like Stock 84, are filled with the blackberries from our hedges and from pint baskets gathered by friends. The fruit suspends, then sinks with the weight of its own drunkeness. I add vanilla bean from Madagascar, and lavender from our garden for a touch of exotica. Now, we wait for the requisite 40 days before straining and cutting with simple syrup to taste.

We like the blackberries in other guises as well. At the restaurant, we serve them with fresh whipped cream and lavender merengue, or as a cocktail, a few black fruits sitting at the bottom of a glass of prosecco accented with fresh mint.

Friday, August 3, 2007

accanto/next to


A few days before the beginning of August, the cicadas pick up their song. The sound hails the true essence of summer for us: heat, haze, ripe berry fruit, the Herculean effort to keep up with what grows in the garden, the lazy urge to take a nap in the afternoon in the shade. Our lazy urge is tempered by Caleb's arrival home with the fruits of our latest endeavor.


Caleb had gone to a metal fabricator with whom we have long worked. Melanson's is on the edge of the industrial section of Rutland and we have had a variety of pieces made there, all of our own design: the bar top for the restaurant, kitchen counter tops, a dish draining system for the kitchen at work. This new project was a new kind of piece for us: two bedside tables. We've been re-designing our bedroom and after we found the bed in Montreal, the lamps at Crate and Barrel, the mirror from a designer in San Francisco, Kenneth Wingard, we went on the hunt for the bedside tables. After looking at several catalogs and in several shops and on-line, we opted to design our own. The inspiration is versatility, and in the end we want the table to be able to work a variety of ways. With this design a desire that had been brewing for some time comes more fully into focus: our hope to take a stab at launching a furniture line and design studio--an effort that we see dovetailing organically with our work at the restaurant.


Only the frames for the tables were made in Rutland. We opted not to have the chrome finish for the prototype. We pull them out of Caleb's car in all their metallic glory and immediately get to work on the table tops. With straight edges, and speed square, and table saw, the plywood core is cut to size, then we set to covering them with a faux ostrich skin that we found in Montreal and with which we upholstered the banquette at the restaurant. We discuss, and perhaps argue, about the best way to adhere the the tops to the frames: pins, no-slip pads, nothing at all. Collaboration is not always a snap.





But we've been collaborating a long time. The way forward is to experiment. We think of different materials for tabletops like wood, glass, opaque plexi. Then of course, there is the name. Caleb seizes on accanto uno, or "next to, one" in Italian. I add "no.1" so it becomes accanto no. 1. The name may change, the table may change, but for now, on a hot summer night with windows thrown open wide, we are just pleased to see them in their steel frames and upholstered tops nestled next to our bed.