Rejuvenated at Amada (and a NBG review/giveaway)

I have been in the kitchen for much of this summer—planning and cooking lunches and dinners, planning again, cooking again, starting again. Somewhere along the way, food lost its luster. Meals had become the thing to figure out, to be on the ready for. I wasn't, frankly, much in the mood, and the truth is: I miss my mother's cooking. No one ever did or will again cook like she did. I miss her simple chicken, her sandwich cookies, her inventions. My mother taught herself to cook. I never learned enough from her.

But last night, at a Philadelphia restaurant called Amada, I was blessed with the most exquisite meal I believe I have ever had. Spanish tapas of the authentic sort. Delicate prawns. Asparagus like candy. The sweetest serrano ham I've ever seen. Flatbread to die for. Ice cream like no other. And at the end, of it all a cookie thin as paper on a white rectangular dish.

Something was reborn in me, eating at Amada last evening. Something like hope. So this is what food can be, I thought. And this is pleasure. And this is the reward that life offers.

Becca is another reward that life offers — a brilliant reader and writer and teacher and liver of life. Today, in a beautiful gesture, she is offering a review of Nothing but Ghosts, as well as a giveaway. Visit her site, if you can.