Lend someone a hand: an auction dinner for Jennie (plus a cooking class)

If you take a look at Jennifer Perillo’s food blog and inspect the archives, you will notice that on August 4, 2011, she wrote about cherry slushies. Finally! Here she apologizes for the delay in posting and rattles on about all the other little details that we food bloggers love to rattle on about when writing about a recipe.  The recipe follows, along with a pitch for canning and how convenient it would be to make a really easy dessert on the spur of the moment when your pantry is full of your homemade goodies.  This is business as usual in the life of a food blogger (and I should add, it is a delicious business.)

Skip to the next post on August 8^th and you will see Jennie’s husband Mikey swinging his daughter in a sweet video. Mikey’s last dance.

Mikey died suddenly of a heart attack.

This is how it happens.

One day, life is going along and you are loving it, complaining about it, planning it, living it. And then, the next day, it is not. Not. Going. Along. Your world has crashed. A big bomb has exploded right in the middle of everything, shattering your heart into a million pieces and sending your life along with it. Everywhere and nowhere.  Pieces, little pieces of it, flung to the moon and back. How do you put it together again?

Of course, you cannot put it back. Jennie cannot put it back to where it was. We can only send her love and hope she will slowly, oh so painfully slowly, find peace one day.

I only barely met Jennie. It was more of a we-were-at-a weekend –gathering-together kind of thing than an actual meeting. But my heart breaks for her and I would like to do something. I feel so grateful for my own life. Anyone who hears Jennie’s story knows that they are just a hair’s breadth away from the possibility of living it, or something similar, themselves. Life is not always kind. Jennie’s story reminds us of how fragile it is. And how precious.

So, in order to do something tangible, I am hoping you will join me in helping Jennie just a little. A wonderful trio of women (Maggy, Erika and Aimee) started Bloggers Without Borders to help fellow bloggers in need. Shauna of Gluten Free Girl has kicked off an online auction to raise money for Jennie so that she and her daughters, ages 3 and 8, can have a small buffer to pad their current potentially precarious financial situation. You can bid on any of the auction items or make a donation,  or you can join me for a fall harvest feast that I am putting up for auction. You don’t have to know Jennie or even know a food blogger to participate. Just come and enjoy, and know that in the process you can make someone’s life just a teensy bit better.

AUCTION:

Description: I will throw a dinner party/cooking class with a festive farmers' market menu (vegetarian or otherwise) for 6 people at my home in the Boston area. We’ll try to start around 5:00 so we can all get busy on the instruction part of the class and settle in for a stupendous dinner. Date to be determined at a mutually convenient time.

Bidding starts at $300 (that's $50 a head, folks!)  Bidding will close at 11:59 p.m. on September 3. Leave your bids in the comment section.