Tuesday marked nine years that Sean and I have been together. One more year till a decade, which is sort of unbelievable. Sometimes college seems like it was just yesterday, and then, as Anna reminded me on the phone the other night, you remember we graduated seven years ago.
My Christmas present from Sean was a cooking class at Sur La Table in Canton and an overnight stay at Green Acres B&B in Simsbury. He chose the inn because it was close to Sur La Table, really well-reviewed online, and....*drumroll* they have chickens. A whole flock of free-range chickens who have the run of the property, and who provide all the fresh eggs for the breakfast. Now, it has long been my dream of having some chickens, the queen of which shall be named Petunia (in aggregate they shall be known as "Petunia and her sisters"). Even given adequate space, which we lack on Concord St, I've doubted whether I could ever manage it, considering that I read that chickens only lay for 2 years, after which time you either need to kill them (not sure I could) or resign yourself to feeding a "poop machine", as the article put it.
Anyway, I was delighted with the gift, and with the inn, which was an 18th-century structure that the current owners had taken down to the studs and painstakingly restored. It was filled with antiques, and the mind positively boggled at the amount of money that must have been required not only to restore the house, but to stock it with extraordinary period furniture and objects. There were only two guestrooms, and a wonderful fire in the living room in front of which Sean and I battled at checkers (he wins), a game called the Captain's Mistress that's basically Connect4 with wooden balls, and an old pub game called Shut the Box. Our breakfast in the morning ranked as one of the best we've ever had in an inn: fresh fruit parfait, french toast, and the most shockingly yellow, fluffy, pillowy scrambled eggs, made from the hens outside, served on china and crystal and silver that looked like it belonged in a Jane Austen adaptation.
All of this was awesome, but I was just a little bit downcast because no hens. Thanks to the stupid polar vortex and the snow the area had just received, it was too cold for the hens to be out of the henhouse (although Jim, the owner, assured me they were generally out and about even in winter). I resigned myself to being surrounded by chicken figurines (seriously, there were a whole bunch),and eating their eggs, without ever getting to meet them. On the order form for breakfast, under "location" the options were: in room, dining room, swimming pool, patio WITH CHICKENS, and patio WITHOUT CHICKENS. I may have sniffled. Breakfast with chickens! We came at the wrong time of year.
However, this sad story has a happy ending, because in the morning, as Jim was telling us stories about "the girls", he said he'd be happy to take me out to the coop before we left. Joy! Ignore the fact that it was literally 7 degrees outside and that I couldn't feel my face after five minutes, it was still awesome, because I got to pet chickens. For Jim they're pets; he keeps them even after they stop laying (though he pointed out that one of the eggs that morning had come from a 4-year-old hen, so they can make it past 2 years), and he has them all named things like Dulcia. News flash: chickens are really fucking soft and fluffy. They're not very smart (he kept calling to them by name, trying to get them to come close enough to the door of the coop that he could grab them, and I asked "oh, do they respond to that?" and he laughed at me), but he said they really won't ever peck you, and they're easy to take care of. Also, I learned that they love fruit! He tossed in the canteloupe rinds from breakfast as their treat.
The cooking class was fun, too, but let's be honest, the highlight of this for me was the chickens. Our other planned activities came to naught: the farmstore I had located in Granby that sold their own pork cuts was closed when we got there, and the Mark Twain house in Hartford turned out to be closed on Tuesdays when we got there. We did stop in Windsor along the way and discovered a new bakery had opened near the train station, so we picked up a honey wheat loaf that is quite...chewy. And yeasty-smelling. That reminds me, I ordered a sourdough starter from King Arthur so we can make our own bread. I'm not sure the culture is very lively, but if I can lay hands on some rye flour today, I can soak the wheat and make the leaven tonight and bake tomorrow. I'm going to use the recipe from Michael Pollan's Cooked, which has to go back to the library....today, actually. Good to know!
ETA: Our jaunt to northern Connecticut actually did not start on an auspicious note. Monday was a really unpleasant day to contemplate doing anything more than staying indoors--it was cold, overcast, and raining. I wasn't in a great mood when we headed out, and I was grumbling that Sean wanted to stop for lunch in North Haven instead of just going straight there. He was headed for a diner in North Haven, which serendipitous-ly happened to be adjacent to Leon's, a slightly expensive restaurant that we really like. What were the chances they were open for lunch at 2:15 on a Monday? But they were! We had the elegant dining room almost entirely to ourselves, and great service from our waiter, who we've had before and who knows Sean from their baseball team way back in the day. Add a good sandwich and--most importantly--a glass of Reisling, and all of a sudden the thoroughly unpleasant day wasn't looking so terrible. It wasn't a cheap lunch, but it was a magical solution, and one infinitely preferably to diner food on a Monday afternoon, with old people.
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