Ugly Yellow

Tonight I had my next door neighbor over for dinner.  At the last minute, I remembered that she is allergic to gluten, so I couldn’t serve the Coq au Vin I made yesterday (I had dredged the chicken in flour before cooking).  Instead, I found a cauliflower and couple of potatoes in my fridge and cooked up a pan of Aloo Gobi.  Aloo Gobi has turmeric in it. Enough to make the entire dish bright yellow:

Then I needed a protein to go with it, so I scrambled some eggs. Meanwhile I poured us each a glass of orange juice. Suddenly I realized we were having an entirely yellow meal. Well, there are worse things in life.  What mattered is that I was sharing a meal and building a friendship.

But it got me thinking about yellows.  When anyone asks me “What’s your favorite color?” my answer has come to be “Ugly yellow.”

Ugly yellows are those weird shades of yellow that don’t look so great on their own, but they make all the other colors around them glow.  Chartreuse. Baby-poop brown (or in my family, s—-brindle brown).  Mustard.  Look at a Kaffe Fassett fabric; clearly he loves ugly yellows as much as I do.