This weekend's party was beautiful to look at, but even more beautiful to be at.
You know, ever since I was a little girl I've gotten a bit teary every time a party comes to a close: once the food is eaten and the drinks are drunk and the candles are burning down and everyone’s gone and it’s just me and Kendrick puttering around, picking up discarded glasses and plates and wiping down countertops and floors, I look around and think wait.
Come back.
For Sunday's afternoon garden party, I wanted to serve a light cocktail with a spring-y vibe, and decided on simple, kinda retro wine spritzers. Wine spritzers are something I associate with, like, ladies wearing shoulderpads sitting in a fancy restaurant in 1985, but for some reason they feel fresh again. Throwback-y.
And they are easy to make, and delicious, and lovely-looking, and there you go: perfect warm-weather cocktail.
Classic White Wine Spritzer
When Indy and I were in California together, we stopped into a little cafe in a very expensive town (the town that it turned out would permit us to buy a one-room cabin with a ladder instead of a staircase). The sandwich that I got in that cafe - which was seventeen dollars and consisted of exactly what you traditionally find in sandwiches and not, as one might imagine, diamonds - should have perhaps indicated to me that we were in FancyLand, but I was less dismayed by the price tag of that sandwich than you might have expected, because oh the side salad that it came with.
Now, I recognize that food that you get in restaurants is generally good because it's full of secret things like All Of The Butter, and is often quite tough to replicate at home. But this little side salad seemed to me to be just a whole bunch of pretty simple stuff mixed together, and so I took out my handy little notepad, jotted down the ingredients that I could see, and when I got home:
made it.
The day after Kendrick and I got engaged, we drove back to my house in Los Angeles and sat in my backyard with a Brides magazine, cooking burgers and staring at the ring on my left hand and drinking sparkly drinks and just generally wondering at our new reality. And at one point, I remember, Kendrick looked at me and said, “Can every day really be like this?”
And I knew exactly what he meant. It wasn’t about the burgers or the California sun or even about our engagement; it was about the fact that it was nothing more than a Monday afternoon, but it felt like a celebration. Not of our engagement; of us. Of our life.
Ever since that day – and I think about it all the time – I’ve tried to consciously look for ways to incorporate those mini-celebrations into even the most ordinary of days. Take the afternoon off to go see a matinee, or drizzle chocolate balsamic on some strawberries, or drink a glass of prosecco with dessert. Just because.
What you see in these photos is a pretty good example of how I try to operate when it comes to our evenings: keeping things simple, but adding little upgrades wherever I can. The Ecco Domani wines pictured here, for example, aren’t about being fancy; they’re about taking a second to recognize that a day doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be special.
