Babette's Feast

It wasn't easy, trying to assemble a mince pie this year. Joy of Cooking had a recipe which made 20 pies and called for four pounds of chopped beef or ox heart and two pounds of beef suet, clearly not what we wanted. A search of several stores finally produced a small jar of  Crosse and Blackwell mincemeat, barely enough to fill the pie shell, and when the top crust went over this ungenerous filling, it sank, split and cracked.

Babette's Feast was a movie about a woman whose art was cooking. When she won a large amount of money, she spent all of it buying ingredients for a fabulous meal. When someone said to her "But now you don't have any money", she replied  "An artist is never poor."

I told this story to my dear departed painter friend Howard once and it made him cry. I thought of it when I looked at the ruined pie I had hoped would cheer Nicodemus up. Holly patches of red and green pastry seemed a possibility. The power went off and then back on while the pie was baking, and after two hours, I was surprised to see that the oven was still cold, the pie unbaked. 

I guess I am some kind of artist, though I don't know what kind. I do know that I hardly ever feel poor, no matter what my finances look like.  Nicodemus was ecstatic about the pie.