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This was the wedding menu.
Starters
Rounds of Grana Padano
Breads
Seafood platters
Prosciutto with melon
Prawn cocktails
(The prawn cocktails were at Mrs. Gardner's insistence. She said she'd never heard of prosciutto and was dubious about meat served with fruit.)
Entrées
Chicken with white sauce and vegetables, or
Beefsteak with mushrooms and béarnaise sauce
(Alex's requests. We copied them from the menu of his favorite restaurant.)
Dessert
Platters of cannoli, cassata, biancumanciari, setteveli, and almond cookies
The desserts were my wish list. Traditional and Sicilian, just the way I wanted them. Mrs. Gardner said she wasn't "a sweet tooth" (in a way that made it sound like a kind of tribe), and Alex couldn't care less about dessert. I thought of these desserts when I went to aerobics classes, trying to lose weight before the wedding- imagined the smooth filling of the cannoli, the cool velvet of the cassata, and the toothy crunch of the almond cookies.
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