The Dining Room

The dining room, kitchen, and laundry room of our condo are on the middle level, above the garage. The kitchen has a large south-facing window that gets sunshine during the day. I've been cooking all our meals since we arrived: after 2 weeks of travel, eating in restaurants or in our hosts' homes, it's nice to cook for a change.

At right and on the set table above, you can see our dinner tonight, as well as the table setting that comes with the condo. We had Nile brand instant soup (it's surprisingly good), raw vegetables, and sandwiches made from last night's leftovers: pot roast and cooked apple slices. To drink -- water from the filtered spigot in the wonderful refrigerator.

Elaine and I made the same roast a couple of weeks ago when I was staying with her. Pork now is very similar to veal roast from years ago: not very fat! So I brown the roast and bake it slowly in a tightly covered casserole, with a few herbs and slightly-browned onions and carrots but no liquid. This method keeps the meat quite moist, and does not require a lot of undivided attention during the hour and a half or 2 hours of oven cooking. Other roasting vegetables like celery would be good in the pot as well. The liquid from the vegetables and meat becomes a very nice light sauce.