My Hour of Crazy

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary and after my daughter finished doing my makeup (she's home for spring break from college and asked if she could), I took out the jewelry I planned to wear out to dinner at Stephan Pyles (yum!) last night. I could not find my earrings and went into an hour-long bout of crazy looking for them.

The ring and bracelet I'd planned to wear were right where they should be...in a small yellow jewelry bag that sits on the crystal plate in my bathroom which houses all my nice non-safe deposit box jewelry. The earrings should have been in the same small yellow bag, but were not. My daughter and I frantically started looking in drawers, in my closet, my bedside table—anywhere they might be. Eventually I got so upset I told her to stop. Continuing to look would spoil my evening. And so I decided that my next "project" would be to reorganize my bathroom drawers and closet space, all in the service of finding the damn earrings.

I got dressed, put on a different set of earrings, then went into the den to relax until it was time to leave. About five minutes before we left, I asked, "Do either of you actually remember my wearing them after I bought the other jewelry on our cruise this past summer?" Neither had any recollection. Suddenly I remembered blogging about the jewelry I'd bought, and posting pictures of each piece, last August, and ran into my study to take a look.

Guess what? There were no earrings. I'd actually invented them in my mind, but of course, after thinking about it, realized I'd never be so matchy-matchy. This hour of insanity will undoubtedly and undeniably go down on my "most crazy" list that I mentally keep. See, I never lose things. In the past five years there have only been two instances in which I could not find something, and in both cases, they were actually where I thought they were. Problem is, the inside of my backpack is black, and the neoprene cover for my iPod is also black, as is the zipper bag in which I store my laptop plug and chargers for my phone and Kindle. Both times I went more than a little nuts trying to find one or the other, but in both instances, they were actually there...I just need to root around to find them.

Anyway, we all had a good laugh about it, and I kept thinking about the earrings that weren't lost because they didn't exist during our delicious dinner. So much that I actually designed a pair from looking at my bracelet. This is what they'd look like. If only they weren't so matchy-matchy

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Btw, dinner last night was one of the best meals I ever ate. I mention it specifically to write about the sous vide stuffed chicken. Until last night I'd never actually eaten any food prepared in this manner. If you ever have the chance—and since more and more chefs are incorporating this style of cooking into their menus, you well may—try it. It was the most moist and tender chicken I've ever eaten. Now, I like chicken well enough, and adore my husband's pan-roasted chicken, but I'd never imagined it could taste this good. Of course, my appetizer was phenomenal (really, how could seared foie gras be anything but amazing?), as was the amuse-bouche (a small bite of lobster and asparagus in a delicate sauce), but the dessert also blew me away: Mexican chocolate fondant with fleur de sel caramel and Kahlúa crema. For a few years now I've loved salted caramel and salted chocolate, so this was a real treat. My husband's dinner was equally wonderful, and after 28 years of marriage, I'm still wildly in love.

If you're ever in Dallas, have dinner at Stephan Pyles. He's among those few chefs who invented Southwestern cuisine, and I can remember in our younger days waiting six weeks for a reservation at his first restaurant, Routh Street Cafe. Not only was it the place to see and be seen, the food was brilliant. What can I say? It was the late 1980s and we were yuppies with a disposable income.

My Hour of Crazy