The Clean Plate Club

"Clean plates don't lie."

-- Chef Dan Barber

Gastrointestinal (G.I.) Joes 12-18-14

"My favorite animal is steak."

-- Fran Lebowitz

"... and after swallowing the liquid 

I crunched the bones 

and sucked the marrow ..."

-- William Henry Hudson, Green Mansions

Leo invited his friend Jose to go weightlifting with him yesterday, and asked if I'd cook dinner for them after their workout.

Fuck yeah, I'll cook. That's a no-brainer.

Whenever one of my guys starts a question with "Mom, will you cook (insert food here)?" the answer is yes. 

The answer is always yes.

I love to cook. But I really love to cook when 1.) someone I care about asks me to, and 2.) I'm cooking for good eaters.

I asked Leo what he wanted me to make and he said "meat."

Other than "no dessert" and "minimal carbs," the boys left the menu up to me.

They're simple creatures with healthy appetites. What mom wouldn't want to cook for a crowd like that? Even if it's only a crowd of two?

So I grilled four big juicy ribeye steaks, roasted three fat caramelized yams and some lovely Roma tomatoes with olive oil and balsamic, steamed some broccoli, cooked a steaming pot of thick, spiced lentils, made a fresh jug of iced tea and, for "dessert," peeled and sectioned a bowl full of refreshing, palate-cleansing clementines.

When they got home from building up their manly muscles at the gym, they ate it.

All of it. 

To put it in their lingo, they "smashed." They smashed everything except for about a cup of broccoli and the half a yam that I ate.

Jose just kept saying "All of this food is so good."

What a sweet boy.

When they were finished, their plates were clean enough to put back in the cupboard. 

The dishes were empty.

The boys were full. 

The cook was happy.

After their meal, the boys sprawled on the couch in the basement for a couple of hours and watched a weightlifting movie while they digested. When they finally came upstairs and Jose had to take off, they both said they were hungry again. 

I was still full on my half a yam.

Jose said goodbye and thanked me again for the meal. Then he said some more magic words.

"You're a really good cook."

Aww.

Can I keep him?

Deviled Eggs

"Deviled eggs are so ding dang addictive. I love them!"

-- Ree Drummond, "The Pioneer Woman"

Deviled egg 12-9-14

"They held their hard-boiled eggs in one hand

and a piece of bread in the other, 

munching happily."

-- Enid Blyton, Five Go Off in a Caravan

I'm doing it again.

I'm waxing rhapsodic about eggs.

Shut the fuck up. It's my blog. I'll make sweet deviled egg love if I goddamn want to.

I'll eat eggs pretty much every which way, but deviled eggs are one of my all-time favorites. I don't make them all that often, so they always seem special when I do.

For lunch yesterday I made myself a deviled egg.

That's right, I made one. I did not make myself a bunch of deviled eggs, because if I make a bunch of deviled eggs, I will eat them all until they spew back up, and that is a terrible waste of good deviled eggs.

So I ate one. I enjoyed it. It was a good egg.

When you only have one deviled egg, you have to slow down and savor its textures, its flavors, its goodness.

Here's a confession, though. As much as I love deviled eggs, I do not enjoy eating other people's deviled eggs. 

I really only like my own.

Deviled eggs are a very personal thing for me. I like them the way I make them (which changes, depending on my mood.) And I like eating them the instant they are made because I don't like them cold from the fridge. I like them when they're still warm and soft, just barely cooled.

But that's my prerogative. Because they're my eggs. 

It seems like the only time you get offered other people's deviled eggs is on a funeral buffet or some church-lady picnic spread where they've been sitting out too long, and the tops are dried out and nasty looking (the eggs, not the church ladies). And there is always some shit of unknown provenance and origin in the filling. I don't want my yolks fucked up with crunchy shit like onions and celery and sweet pickle relish and paprika and, God forbid, canned tuna.

And don't get me started on the evils of Miracle Whip. I can't even.

(In my personal Hell, Miracle Whip is the only condiment.)

Anyway, when the deviled eggs are really good, which mine are, I don't like to share. I almost always make them just for myself, when there's nobody else at home. 

My current favorite deviled egg variation is a sort-of homage to sushi, with a tiny bit of wasabi in the filling and a sprinkle of black and white sesame seeds on top. 

You're lucky I even shared a picture. 

Sharing My Food

"We should look for someone to eat and drink with

before looking for something to eat and drink."

-- Epicurus

Squirrel with nut 11-26-14

"If you really want to make a friend,

go to someone's house and eat with him ...

the people who give you their food

give you their heart."

-- Cesar Chavez

You know what makes me sad?

It makes me sad that schools now have rules prohibiting students from sharing their food in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

I even read a story recently about a kid and a friend who were both served detention for swapping lunches. 

Say I wanted to trade you my Doritos for your Moon Pie. We'd both be fucked.

Or say you forgot your lunch and I gave you half of my sandwich. Again, both of us, fucked.

Maybe you don't have money to buy a school lunch, so I treat you to a tray of hamburger gravy. Both. Fucked.

School officials say the strict rules and penalties are only an effort to protect kids with serious food allergies from unwittingly ingesting something that could kill them. You know. Foods like shellfish or peanut butter.

The rules also protect the schools' asses from lawsuits.

The USDA says the rules help ensure kids will eat lunches that comply with the National School Lunch Program's nutritional protocol.

Well, I've been in my kids' school cafeteria at lunchtime. I've seen the school lunches up close. You know where I've seen them? Uneaten, in the trash can.

Maybe the USDAs tactic for fighting childhood obesity is to serve food so disgusting that even fat kids lose their appetites.

On the other hand, I also read an article about a study that revealed how sharing food actually makes us better, less selfish, more altruistic people.

I agree.

I did it yesterday.

My incredible friend Jill stopped here on her way from Chicago to Cleveland, so I baked her a delicious, bubbly cherry crisp for us all to share. Jill's vegan, so I got some vanilla Tofutti ice cream to make it a la mode. And when she left for the next leg of her journey, I gave her an extra dish of cherry crisp to take along for her breakfast.

Giving another person some of your food is extremely intimate gesture of love. It's not quite as intimate as sex. But nevertheless, it involves one person offering another person something to put inside their body. It's about filling an emptiness.

Sharing food is absolutely essential to human togetherness and relationships. 

It's primal.

Take away that elemental urge and you take one more step toward isolating people from one another. 

If we persist in punishing kindergartners for sharing their Gogurts and Teddy Grahams, we'll create a selfish, isolated, love-starved generation.

Aren't we already selfish, isolated and starving enough?

Anyway.

All of this is by way of saying, with the Thanksgiving season upon us, I believe sharing good food is a good thing.

Go ahead.

Make extra. 

Pass it around. 

The Art Of Good Taste

"Cooking is an art,

but you eat it too."

-- Marcella Hazan

Portrait (tomato paste on paper) 11-25-14

"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces --

just good food from fresh ingredients."

-- Julia Child

"The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art,

one of the joys of civilized living."

-- Dione Lucas

A new specialty foods store opened here recently.

They specialize in Mediterranean ingredients imported directly from Greece, Spain and Italy. 

My little Italian nephew Marco loves olives, so I buy him several jars a year for Christmas and for his birthday. 

So yesterday, Mackenna and I braved the extreme winds to do a little Christmas shopping and to check out the new store and to to explore some new tastes and possibilities.

We came home with two large grocery bags stuffed to bursting with not only several varieties of delicious olives, but also sardines, and pastas, and rice, and pastries, and wine, and coffee, and pickles, and cheeses, and meats.

I was especially excited to find tomato paste in a tube. I fucking love tomato paste in a tube. It's genius. None of it goes to waste. You just dispense it like toothpaste, or oil paint, just a dab at a time. I bought some with basil in it.

When we got home I used much of our tasty bounty to prepare supper. 

I made thick, crusty sandwiches with salami, melted smoked provolone, and roasted wild goose (Yes, goose. Canada goose. Leo shot it on Saturday.)  

I made Orecchiette pasta -- small round pasta that looks like little ears. Mackenna picked it out. I tossed it in a sauce made of butter and olive oil infused with herbes de provence, along with some wine, lemon, fresh parmigiano reggiano and a few squirts of that basil-y tomato paste. 

I popped a bottle of a wine I've never tried, a Pinot Nero, from northern Italy. 

For dessert we bought a bakery box filled with a sampling of decadent cakes and cookies.

I live in an area driven primarily by amusement parks, water slides and tourism that caters to families with children and other people who like chain restaurants and familiarity, whose tastes are mainstream and boring and predictable. 

Around here, anything new or different or a little bit exotic -- anyplace that doesn't serve chicken nuggets or have a kids menu -- eventually atrophies and dies because people just want the same old shit.

Not me. This store is like a culinary wonderland. It's like an art supplies store for people who like to cook and eat and experiment and expand their palettes, er, palates. 

Palates?

Palettes?

I happen to believe that food is art, so let's just go with both. 

Good Recipes (And Cooks Who Share Them!)

"There is nothing like a good old recipe.

If it has lasted, then it is good."

-- Yotam Ottolenghi

My grandma's cookbook 11-18-14

"I hate the notion of a secret recipe.

Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared --

that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed.

To stop a recipe in its tracks, to label it 'secret'

just seems mean."

-- Molly Wizenberg

I don't use recipes a lot. 

Recipes are rules, and, well.

Recipes 11-18-14

Anyway. When I cook, mostly I just wing it. I follow principles as a general guide, but after that I like to wander off the trail and explore the landscape on my own.

Unless I'm baking. 

Baking is an exact science. It involves chemical reactions and precise measurements and combinations of ingredients and heat and cold and time.

So when I bake, I definitely stick to the recipe.

I have a shelf loaded with cookbooks full of recipes and a shoe box stuffed with hundreds more. Some of them are hand-written from friends and family, others are printed from the Internet or taken from television chefs or ripped from magazines. 

You can tell easily which recipes are my favorites -- the trusty old reliable ones that I return to again and again -- because that's where the pages in the books stick together. They're the ones on the food-stained and spattered recipe cards. They're the ones copied onto sheets of notebook paper that's been handled and folded in half so many times that the paper is soft and delicate as tissue.

One of my favorites is a recipe for Madeleine cookies that a French chef jotted down on an order ticket and sent to me via our waiter.

Anyway, all of this is by way of saying I popped my pecan pie cherry yesterday.

I baked an absolutely perfect pecan pie using a recipe from a Food Network cook after watching her bake it on TV.

Pecan pie 11-18-14

Pie crust has always been a bugaboo for me. Because if the pastry isn't good, then the pie isn't good. I make fine, serviceable pie crust. But I've always wanted to be able to make a crust so tender and flaky and buttery that it makes your eyes roll back.

It finally happened. I made a perfect crust. 

That fucker was as tender, golden, flaky and buttery as shit.

And it wouldn't have happened if someone else wasn't generous enough to share her time-tested recipe.

A tender flaky crust! 

True confessions, though.

I didn't follow the recipe exactly. 

It called for a cup and a half of cold shortening, and I'd only chilled a cup. So I added a stick of cold butter instead, and it worked beautifully. And I'd venture to say my tweak made the recipe even better, because it made it buttery.

Thanksgiving is around the corner. And Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, sure, but it's also a good time to do some plain old giving.

Good recipes will be trotted out and prepared on dinner tables across the country. If someone asks you for your recipe, don't be a Selfish McStingy Pants. Cough it up. Share it. Write it down for whoever it is. Let them know where you got it from. 

Good recipes have history. And that's part of the appeal -- knowing the path a recipe has traveled, whose hands and kitchens it has passed through. I love using a recipe that someone else gave me, especially if it's in their own handwriting. It's like looking at an old photograph. It's nostalgic and special. It makes me think of that person and evokes memories of a time and a place and the food we shared, and that feels good.

It tastes good too.

**(For the pecan pie recipe I used, click here.)**

Family Meals

"The shared meal is no small thing.

It is a foundation of family life ..."

-- Michael Pollan, 

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

Asian Lady Beetles devouring an apple 10-15-14

"If we want our kids to lead healthier lives,

we should eat with them more often."

-- Miriam Weinstein, 

The Surprising Power of Family Meals

When my kids were really small someone dragged me to a "rah-rah ain't it great to be a mom" party-ish kind of thing at the posh house of a very well-to-do wife of a local physician.

To protect her identity, I'll call her "Posh."

Posh was the featured speaker. It was her house, her party, and so I guess she also booked the talent.

Her "message," as she called it, was about family meals and how important they are to family happiness and closeness.

The friend who dragged me there leaned in and whispered, "Where? On Mars?"

She got it. Because she was still in the trenches, with me.

Posh hadn't smelled the trenches in years. None of her three Abercrombie-model-attractive sons even lived at home anymore.

Her mealtime stories were gilded and golden. 

As Posh "shared" her rose-colored, Currier & Ives family meal memories there in the Architectural Digest perfection of her palatial home, the women fell under her spell and gazed up at her winsomely, eyes glassy, faces worshipful.

Some made little sounds of agreement.

Some took notes, writing down her every word.

I just wanted to throat punch her.

Family meals at my house were not wonderful. I had a toddler and an infant. Family meals at my house were exasperating and messy and tragic. My dinner table was a war zone.

And it didn't stop at toddlerhood.

There have been nights when I've invested time and love and ingredients on a beautiful, healthy, balanced, delicious meal and:

• Child refuses to eat it because he is a vegetarian now.
• Child complains that there is not enough meat on the table.
• Child refuses to eat because he is off carbs this month.
• Child is back on carbs, and why aren't there potatoes?
• Child comes home sucking up the dregs of a cherry limeade saying he's not hungry, he already ate at Sonic.
• Child refuses to eat because he wants to get a pizza later.
• Child doesn't like the food and instead of saying so, picks at it and picks at it and picks at it until I finally snap and bark at him to go get himself a fucking bowl of Cheerios then!
• I get adventurous and try something new, and everybody looks at it like I've ladled my own vomit onto their plates, because it's "different."
• I'm a shit show because my depression and anxiety are off the charts and nobody knows what to do or say, so we just stare awkwardly into our plates and don't say anything.

But I've stuck with it. I've stayed in the trenches and kept cooking and serving family meals. And eventually, somewhere along the line, the tide turned.

Meals became less of a battleground.

I've adapted and learned how and what to cook so that everyone can find something on the table that they like.

My boys' palates have matured and expanded so that they both enjoy a wider range of foods.

My boys have also matured, and they're much more appreciative of my culinary efforts. They're also smart and funny and family meals can get pretty lively and interesting.

I'm on medication.

If I had a bunch of moms over to my house to "share" a "message" about family meals, I wouldn't blow sunshine up their asses. I'd tell them this:

Sometimes eating together will suck balls so hard you'll hate it. Sometimes it will just be food on plates, and eating. Sometimes it will be hilarious. Sometimes it will be interesting. Sometimes it will be delicious. Sometimes it will be "different." Sometimes it will be takeout. Sometimes you'll work really hard to cook something special and nobody will notice. And sometimes you'll pull a meal of leftovers straight out of your ass and they'll make you feel like you just won the James Beard award.

Meals with your family will never be perfect, and if Currier & Ives is what you're looking for, be ready for a lifetime of disappointment.

Don't try to manufacture or engineer something according to someone else's posh vision of what your family's meal should be like. Just cook the meal as best you can. Feed the people who show up around your table with care and attention.

If you're lucky, the good will outweigh the bad, the hilarious will outweigh the awkward.

Once in a while, wonderful might even happen.

Whatever you do, just let it happen.

In the end, what you eat doesn't matter nearly as much as who you eat it with.

Just make sure that love is the flavor that lingers when the meal is done, because love always tastes good.

Leftovers

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that

for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers.

The original meal has never been found."

-- Calvin Trillin

Leftover beef stew 10-13-14

"Laura liked it hot, and she liked it cold,

and it was always good as long as it lasted.

But it never really lasted nine days.

They ate it up before that."

-- Laura Ingalls Wilder,
Little House on the Prairie

"I'm the leftover turkey for 

the world's mayonnaisey."

-- Train, "All American Girl"

Thick, savory beef stew.

Hot, bubbly macaroni and cheese.

I made lots of both over the weekend, intentionally cooking up enough to provide plenty of delicious leftovers.

Then, while football and baseball were on, I didn't have to get up and cook. Sunday dinner was already made and I was free to sink into the sofa and watch football and baseball.

Now that's what I call comfort food.

Planting Apple Trees

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch,

you must first create the universe."

-- Carl Sagan

Homegrown Macintosh apples 8-27-14

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.

The second best time is now."

-- Unknown

Roughly 16 years ago, my husband and my son, Sam, planted two scrawny, skinny, leafless sticks in our back yard.

They said they were apple trees.

I was skeptical. 

They looked like dead twigs.

But ...

They were indeed apple trees, albeit in their infancy.

Now our two scrawny trees (I call them "Two Tree Orchard") are full and lush, towering over the backyard fence, their down-turning branches heavily laden with ripening fruit.

Yesterday I was mowing the grass under them and the branches kept whacking me in the head and apples kept dropping to the ground. So I harvested an armful. The apples are just a tad too green for eating yet, but cooked down with some sugar, cinnamon and butter, they made pretty good applesauce.

Later, when the apples are a little bit riper, I'll make as many quarts of sauce as I can so we can eat it all winter long.

And I have all kinds of plans for cobblers, crisps, breads, cakes and pies.

I like being a suburban farmer, with my tiny little orchard and my tiny little garden.

It makes me feel more than good to cultivate and feed myself and my family the freshest possible food on the planet -- fruits and vegetables that come in straight from the backyard mere minutes before they hit the plate.

It doesn't get any gooder than that.

Guys Who Bake

"You can cook like a man. 

But you can't bake like a man, because men don't bake.

Nancy said that because baking is easy, it's hard;

that because anyone can, a lot of men can't, or won't."

-- Tom Junod, "Men Don't Bake," Esquire.com

Sam 8-1-14

"Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man.

Bake me a cake as fast as you can."

-- English nursery rhyme

My son Sam has loved baking ever since he was a toddler. 

I used to swaddle him in one of my aprons, folded over and double wrapped around his tiny boy body, and stand him beside me up on a kitchen chair. 

I'd measure out flour and sugar and he'd dump them into the mixing bowl. Or I'd give him his own cups, bowls, spoons and ingredients and let him make up his own concoctions. He liked making an imaginary something that he called "Timbuktu Yummy." Only he knew what it was.

Sam's earliest "real" baking experiments were hit and miss, and usually he trashed the kitchen. But experimenting -- sometimes succeeding, sometimes not -- is how my independent-minded, self-sufficient, precise and determined son figured out baking for himself. I've coached and guided and helped along the way, but mostly I've just let him run with it. I always figured that if the experiment failed miserably (and some have), I wouldn't be out much (flour and eggs are cheap), and the lesson learned would more than offset the loss.

As a result, at age 19, Sam's cookies, muffins, biscuits, bread, brownies and pies are ridiculously good. He always bakes from scratch and pays close attention to important baking details like room-temperature butter, tempering his yeast, fully pre-heating the oven and measuring things exactly.

Sam bakes for everybody -- his friends, our neighbor, the ladies at work, the nurses at the hospital where he volunteers, the fire fighters at the firehouse where he took a CPR course. Sometimes he even bakes for us.

Also, because he's a compulsive neat-freak, the kitchen is always spit-shined and spotless when he's done.

As a mother of two sons, I feel like one of my most important responsibilities is to send my boys into the world as young men who are capable of feeding themselves and others without relying on takeout and drive thru, whether it's grilling a burger, building a proper sandwich, scrambling eggs, baking a perfect pumpkin pie or loaf of homemade bread.

But they say a man can't live by bread alone.

That's why it's a really good thing Sam can also make espresso chocolate chunk muffins with streusel.

Nothing From a Box, Can, Store or Truck

"When eating fruit, remember who planted the tree;

when drinking water, remember who dug the well."

-- Vietnamese proverb

Vegetable frittata 7-30-14

"We may find in the long run that tinned food 

is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun."

-- George Orwell

"Shipping is a terrible thing to do to vegetables. 

They probably get jet-lagged, just like people."

-- Elizabeth Berry

One of the most singular pleasures in life, for me anyway, is cooking a meal with food that comes straight from the good things growing in my own garden.

Yesterday I did just that, using ingredients I picked twenty steps from my backdoor. Anything I didn't grow myself came from someone I know who did.

I provided the zucchini, basil and tomato (I found my first ripe one blushing on the vine yesterday).

My farmer friend Bob grew the spinach a stone's throw away on his local vegetable farm. 

The eggs came from a physical therapist named Megan who raises her own chickens. She personally hand-delivers dozens of her home-grown brown beauties -- eggs so far beyond "jumbo" that the cartons won't close over their tops -- to my husband at work every week or two. 

With this handful of simple, good things, I took a personal stand against "big food" and the corn cartel and environmental negligence and processed pseudo-food and cooked up a nutritious, deliciously simple vegetable frittata.

It was probably the best frittata I've ever eaten. I made enough to fill my biggest cast-iron skillet -- plenty for four people -- and ate half of it all by myself. I'd give you the recipe, but there isn't one. Sorry. I just free-formed with what I had and made it up as I went along.

I like cooking that way. 

It feels more creative and exciting and satisfying. Instead of running to the store to buy something some cookbook or recipe writer says I should use, I'd much rather assess what I have on hand, and go from there, creating something good all on my own -- with a little help from my friends.

Breakfast Anytime

"Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast 

because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, 

is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen.

Having lunch is like throwing in the towel."

-- Jonathan Goldstein, Lenny Bruce Is Dead

Polymer clay breakfast 7-25-14

"Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it."

-- Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

I don't usually eat breakfast, but I love breakfast food.

It's not unusual for me to eat toast and eggs for lunch and supper on any given day.

My son Sam hates it when I cook breakfast for supper. He won't touch an egg with a ten foot pole unless it's baked into a cake -- just so long as it's not a pancake.

Well, Sam was out eating pizza with friends last night, so I seized the opportunity and cooked a full-on breakfast spread for the rest of us -- French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, little crispy potatoes, strawberries and whipped cream, and a pot of good decaf.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day and to start things off with a good one.

I agree. A good breakfast is a good thing. 

I'm just a slow starter. But I get there eventually.

Hey, better late than never.

It's all good.

Meatballs

"Meatballs are a fun form of meat."

-- Cesare Casella, 

"What Chefs Really Have to Say About Meatballs," Esquire

Barbie meatball sub 7-12-14

"IKEA is considering putting its horse meatballs back on the market in Swedish stores 

and is claiming there is no health risk associated with eating them."

-- Hunter Stuart, The Huffington Post

I make good meatballs.

They are perfectly nice top of spaghetti all covered with cheese.

But they're even better crammed into a meatball sub.

These ain't no girly freakin' finger sandwiches.

They're hot, tasty, juicy, hearty, saucy, cheesy, messy.

A meal with balls.

Take-Out

"You deserve a break today."

-- McDonald's ad slogan, 1971

Self portrait 7-8-14

"Cinderella never asked for a prince.

She asked for a night off and a dress."

-- Kiera Cass

Everybody needs a day off from their job now and then.

But the family cook doesn't get days off, or even weekends off.

Meals come around with surprising regularity and hungry boys just keep getting hungry day after day after day after day.

I feel like I've been in the kitchen non-stop lately. And as much as I do enjoy cooking for my family, I'm not immune to burn-out.

So last night we ordered take-out and ate it straight from the takeout containers.

The food was overpriced, unappealing, mediocre and lukewarm. 

But I'm not complaining. 

Take-out is all part of my grand plan to make sure my hungry guys appreciate my culinary prowess and never take for granted how good they've got it.

Dinner On Someone Else's Dime

"The idea of getting high on someone else's dime 

sounded like the right and necessary medicine."

-- Amber Dermont, The Starboard Sea

Chocolate coins 6-18-14

I love it when someone else picks up the tab.

We had dinner last night at a pretty fancy French restaurant with pretty fancy food and pretty fancy wine that cost someone a pretty penny.

But we didn't have to drop a nickel.

We were guests at a dinner event hosted by a business associate of my husband's who paid for everything -- the food, the drinks, the giant Wonka-sized chocolate bars they handed out at the end.

We ate way too much of the good food. We drank way too much of the good wine. We had way too much fun with the good people sitting around our table.

The timing was even good. We both needed a night out, and a night off.

Going out to dinner with my husband is always good.

Going out to dinner with my husband on someone else's dime is like chocolate pennies from heaven.

Rice

"I like rice. 

Rice is great if you're hungry 

and want to eat 2,000 of something."

-- Mitch Hedberg

Sushi rice, brown rice, Arborio rice, white jasmine rice, and sweet brown rice 6-14-14

"I now understand how varied the world of cultivated rice is;

that rice can play the lead or be a sidekick;

that brown rice is as valuable as white;

and that short-grain rice is the bees knees."

-- Yotam Ottolenghi

"Rice is a beautiful food. 

It is beautiful when it grows, precision rows of sparkling green stalks

 shooting up to reach the hot summer sun.

It is beautiful when harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled on diked, patchwork paddies.

It is beautiful when, once threshed, it enters granary bins like a flood of tiny seed-pearls. 

It is beautiful when cooked by a practiced hand, pure white and sweetly fragrant."

-- Shizuo Tsuji

I eat a lot of rice.

I eat rice every day, at almost every meal.

I like it all -- white and brown, short grain and long, expertly seasoned sushi rice, perfectly al dente Arborio. I even like it cold, gluey and leftover straight from the fridge.

A hot bowl of creamy rice porridge is the most comforting of comfort foods.

There've been days where I eat nothing but rice.

I grew up on Minute Rice, which, as a kid, I even loved. My mom just made it plain Jane in a square Corning Ware dish, with a pat of margarine melting under the steamy glass lid.

During my high school vegetarian experimentation phase, I'd cook up big batches of brown rice and eat it for supper while the rest of my family ate roasted meat.

I began experimenting with rice varieties during my grad school days. I bought rice in the bulk food section of the grocery store mainly because it was dirt cheap, and I was dirt poor. For pennies, I could eat rice for days and days.

Rice was also a blank canvas where I could get creative and try new things without wasting a lot of money if an experiment didn't work out.

In my life, I've probably eaten a pretty-good sized mountain of rice, and it still isn't boring. There are so many varieties, and so many ways to prepare rice, that the possibilities are literally endless. I always keep several varieties on hand so I can mix it up and keep it interesting. I've tried complicated recipes. I've stirred and stirred and stirred many pans of risotto.

But my personal favorite way to eat rice is freshly steamed in my rice cooker and topped with a sunny-side up, farm fresh brown egg. When the liquid yolk soaks its rich, velvety deliciousness into a mound of soft, pearly grains -- for me, that is as good as it gets.

Slingin' Hash

"You know, nobody can ever cook as good as your mama."

-- Paula Deen

Self portrait 6-12-14

"I'll take a double triple bossy deluxe, on a raft, four by four, animal style, 

extra shingles with a shimmy and a squeeze, light axle grease. 

Make it cry, burn it and let it swim."

-- Bubble Bass, Spongebob Squarepants, "Pickles"

I fed supper to the four people in my family at four separate times yesterday.

I fed Leo at 4:30 p.m. so he could get to a rehearsal.

I fed myself at 6 p.m. because, well, I was hungry and I was the only one here.

I fed Sam at 7:30 p.m. because he was out feverishly mowing three lawns before the rain came.

I fed my husband at 9 p.m. because he was out late working on a project that got delayed because the rain came.

Sometimes I feel like a short-order cook.

It seems like my kitchen never closes.

There are days when I'm still making somebody a snack or a sandwich at midnight. 

I even make takeout and pack it up in brown bags when somebody's on the run and needs it to-go.

But what mom hasn't felt that way during the busy seasons of life when everybody is going in separate directions at separate times?

My own mother was a little less sympathetic. She used to bark: "I'm not running a restaurant! Eat when we all eat or don't eat at all!"

I'm not running a restaurant either, but I'd much rather feed my boys home cooking than abandon them to rely on junk food and drive-thru. On extra-busy days I try to make something they can all eat whenever their individual comings and goings permit. It's kinda like my "daily special." Yesterday's daily special, for instance, was meatloaf and cornbread. I cooked it early, kept it warm in the oven and served it up all night.

More often than not we do eat together as a family, even though it seems like somebody always has to leave the meal early and dash off  to be someplace else. 

I don't take it personally.

I just keep cooking and trying to do my best to make sure nobody goes away hungry. 

I'll be here all night. 

Don't forget to tip the waitress.

Order up!

Farm Fresh Brown Eggs

"... the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs."

-- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Brown eggs 3-5-14

"I'm never much of a lad till I've engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee."

-- P.G. Wodehouse

Brown eggs (2) 3-5-14

EGGS RATED

These eggs
Are eggscellent.
I'm not eggsaggerating.
You can tell by my eggspression
They're eggceptional ...
Eggstra fluffy,
Eggstremely tasty,
Cooked eggsactly right
By an eggspert
With lots of eggsperience.
Now I'll eggsamine the bill ...
Ooh -- much more eggspensive
Than I eggspected.
I gotta get out of here.
Where's the eggxit?

-- Shel Silverstein, Falling Up








If I was forced to eat a single food every day for the rest of my life, it would be eggs like these.

Unlike the uniform, carbon-copy, egg factory eggs in the supermarket, these beauties have individual personalities. Each one bears the unique fingerprint of the chicken that laid it. Some are smooth, some are bumpy and lumpy. Some are satiny, others rough and chalky. Some have little tiny speckles, and some have big fat freckles. Some are nicely egg shaped, others are rounded or long or pointy. Some have grooves and wrinkles like sheet marks on skin. They are all different shades of brown, from light latte to deep caramel (occasionally white or even soft grayish blue). They are all different sizes, from petite, demure little lovelies, to overgrown extra jumbos that make it impossible to close the carton over their bulging tops. Even their yolks are each slightly different in size and color. But typically, the yolks in these eggs are unbelievably large and vivid -- not the weak little pale yellow wrinkly ones you're used to, but deep, glistening, orange-gold fatties.

What they all have in common, though, is their deliciousness.

If you've never tasted the difference between a run-of-the-mill grocery store egg and a days-old one fresh from a free-range organic fed chicken living in a backyard farm, well, then you haven't really tasted an egg in all of its glorious egg-i-ness.

Now, if you'll indulge me in a little bit of food porn ...

How people like their eggs prepared is about as individualistic as how they like their PB&Js.

I like them sunny-side-up. I nibble the white part, little by little, all the way around until all that's left is the jiggly, golden, liquid center, which, if it's not too huge (and it sometimes is), I eat in one whole bite, letting the yolk ooze onto my tongue and fill my whole mouth with it's warm, velvety goodness. Sometimes I close my eyes for this last bit so I can savor it better. It's too good to rush it.

It's a beautiful moment, every single time.

(Can someone please tell me where I can find those people who force you to eat a single food every day for the rest of your life?)

Some food fills your stomach. Some food feeds your soul.