Weekend Update, June 23, 2014

"Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow"

lots and lots of people

There are some adages that are older than dirt. But those are the adages about what came before dirt, and no one remembers them because no one was there. Then there are adages like the one above- slightly younger than dirt, which is to say to say old as humanity.It's likely that even before there were words to express pleasure, a successful mastodon hunt was more fun when you hunted as a team. 
It's a brain boggler. Take any pleasure, any hobby...take for instance a hobby like one of mine:

trying to sew stuff.

Chances are that you have that pleasure because someone shared a pleasure with you which they had received from someone else, which they in turn had received from someone else...one joy to another, on and on,back and back

Nope, even further back....

back and back until the first designer discovered that when you stitched one thing to another thing, it made a whole different thing,

and that was a pretty good thing.

Downside: Cast out of Paradise.
Upside: a really cool botanical bikini

Of course one could suggest that if the joys of our lives grow greater when shared, and if we owe most of the pleasures of our lives to those who first shared them with us, then the icky bits in our lives must be someone one else's fault. 

Well, maybe and maybe not.  

The thing is, there's a human phenomenon of blaming and passing the buck that is about five hours younger that the phenomenon of shared human pleasure,but we're not going to talk about that tonight.

unless by "passing the buck" you mean that there's
venison for dinner, in which case, please do pass the buck,
and the gravy too.

Tonight we're going to talk about the great things that happen when shared passions team up and land on a plate. Like this:

The classic team of fish and chips gets a grilling

Ok, so maybe it wasn't a legendary battered-and-fried fish and chips. But I did learn (finally) how to grill potatoes without burning them: the America's Test Kitchen Technique of soaking the potato pieces in hot water. Douse the taters in hot water, let them sit awhile, dry them off, toss them in olive oil and salt and throw em on the grill. Viola! the insides are cooked before the outsides are charcoal.

that technique worked equally well when it was tried on another veggie that burns before it cooks- 

that's grilled broccoli next to chicken and waffles,
The mustard sauce on the chicken was even better on the broccoli.

You'd think that the most exciting teams of the week were either those on the plate or those playing in Brazil. Not so. The most exciting teams of the week by far were two that I met this afternoon at Farmer's Market in Dallas: 

the brilliant mother-daughter team that's
building The Brownie Cottage

who are responsible for the best gluten-free treat
I have ever put in my mouth. That's it on the left.  Honestly. Wow.

These two set my mind spinning on the wonderful things that can happen when a joy is transmitted from one generation to the next, how much more fun pleasures and challenges are when they're shared with someone who love you, and how fantastic cooking is when it's played as a team sport. So much fun! 

and then I met this guy: 

the hard working man behind the Palmieri Cafe

who is responsible for some of the best not gluten-free
treats I ever put in my mouth.
Yes, I pretty much ate my way through Farmer's Market.

You may think from that picture that the man behind the Palmieri is all on his own. But that's not true. Because the man behind the man behind the Palmieri is an Italian pastry chef with decades of devotion to the art of beautiful food. And behind the man behind the man behind the Palmieri is an entire Italian village, a village where a young man learned that when every player on the team, when every dancer in a festival, when every instrument in a band, when every ingredient in a recipe comes together just right, what you have is a moment of joy.

And that is, of course, what I wish for your week.
Whether it's a perfect pastry,
or a perfect paragraph,
or a perfect spreadsheet,
I hope your week is filled 
with perfect moments.
And that you have teammates
near or far, seen or unseen
that somehow share those moments with you,
and with the sharing, turn them

into moments of perfect joy.