Salon.

J and I are having our first salon tonight. This is something we've wanted to do for years. When we first talked about it, it was going to be called Eating and Writing or something like that, a gathering with a literary focus. And food, of course, because food goes with everything. We've made it a little more broad, with songwriters and filmmakers invited too, and we don't have a clever name for it yet. We're just calling it the salon.

I'm going to play a recording of one of the songs from Lizzie Borden from the concert reading we did last spring, the finale of the show. It's called "Where Are You, Lizzie?" It's an old song -- I wrote it in 1989 for the first incarnation of this musical -- and there are several new songs in this new version but I don't like the recordings of them as much as this one. I'm also going to sing a song I wrote in 2005 called "Fine." It's not new either, but it's my most recent song other than the new Lizzie Borden songs and I want to sing something live tonight.

I made a slightly spicy and very orange squash soup with coconut milk, using acorn and butternut squash from our farm. We also got lots of kale from the farm last week, so I made potato, kale, and roasted red pepper soup based on a recipe from the chef at the restaurant where I cooked in Utah. And I made baba ganoush for an appetizer. The only bad thing I have to say about our CSA farm is that they plant way too much eggplant. We get barrels full of them in every delivery for months. I have a freezer full of roasted eggplant. But we love baba ganoush, so I guess it could be worse.