Carolyn comes home

Carolyn finished her last final at 8:45 p.m. Thursday and jumped into a speeding car driven by her friend Brenda, who had come to visit, and arrived on Newgard just before midnight. The next day, Brenda joined us for a celebratory dinner, when we enjoyed zitoni (those are the fat hollow noodles that could serve in a pinch as straws at a bubble tea shop), with tomato-basil sauce, fresh mozzarella, asparagus and sautéed collard greens. They regaled us with stories of their college adventures and we had a fine time.

After dinner they headed off to a JUMP Company dance show, then we got a call asking if we had certain baking ingredients in the house, then the doorbell rang at 11:30 p.m. because Carolyn had forgotten her keys, and then there was a great deal of laughter and cooking noises filtering up from downstairs. In the morning, we found a nice batch of cookies on the kitchen table.

The oatmeal-and-cocoa cookies came in four variations: chocolate chip, peanut butter chip, coconut-cranberry-walnut and chocolate chip-walnut.

And since Carolyn is the master of sandwich making, she invited Brenda and her sister Vicky over for lunch and made us each a grilled sandwich to our specifications.