Yesterday afternoon I received an email from a blog-reading friend, who noted: "You didn't say what you are making for Super Sunday. Or do you not observe?" His question made me laugh because, in fact, I had purposely avoided mentioning football in my post. When my younger son is home, we always watch it together, but without him here Tom and I are not always so faithful to the spectacle. Though I'm mostly indifferent to football, I actively dislike the Patriots, which does not lead to easy small talk up here in Patriot Country. So, given that I don't like to make my friends crabby, I usually keep my mouth shut.

Yet we have a new TV, and Tom has been busily setting up its habitat: a room that we can't quite figure out how to name. It's a spare room/TV room/stereo center/tiny corner room/place the cat likes to sleep. So far we are trying to find something along the lines of "hospitality suite" for a room that is nothing like a suite.

In any case, midafternoon I said to him: "Are we watching the Superbowl, or aren't we?" And he shrugged and said, "I could watch it." Thus, I now coil back to my friend's email question: what did I make for Super Sunday? Well, I boiled some shrimp and served them with spicy Indian catsup. Then I made cheese wafers and a big salad: sauteed cherry tomatoes with garlic and pesto, a mixture of spinach and arugula, a diced avocado, and thinly sliced kumquats. And then we had warmed-up leftover pear crisp with plain yogurt on top. It was not exactly classic football-shaped-platter fare, but it's what I had to work with.

And we actually watched the entire game, and our team won, and I also realized that I recognize zero Justin Timberlake songs. This is what happens when the young people move out.

[Here are a couple of quick photos of the hospitality closet. The coffee table is my father's 4-H show box from the 1940s and 1950s, when he and his Guernseys used to compete at New Jersey fairs. Tom built the stereo cabinet, naturally. And one of those turntables is for playing 78s.]