mags

In thinking about why I so love Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, and am so ...almost turned off by China Moon, I can't help feeling that the latter cookbook was heavily influenced by Tropp's health. Specifically, she had cancer, and was -- or so I've read -- deeply engaged in pursuing a "healthier" lifestyle in order to try to beat the disease. So when I look through the China Moon book, I'm so aware of how low-fat many of the recipes are, of what seems like an almost overly aggressive attempt to pile in as many different vegetables as possible, etc. It reads, to me, like a "The Healthy Way to Eat Chinese" sort of cookbook, reminding me of some vaguely depressing offering from the Weight Watchers press -- despite the incredibly labor-intensive stuff involving making one's own chili oil and whatever else is called for in the book.

I cook for myself all the time -- a lot of casseroles, which get frozen in single-serve containers. A lot of omelettes and similar egg-dishes. A certain amount of single-serve protein -- fish fillets, chops, steaks -- but I'm also happy to make a small roast and eat the leftovers coled (maybe in chef's salad) or heated in some gravy. I'm going the low-carb route these days, and among other things, that has meant that if I want really tasty vegetables with my meat -- vegetables that aren't potatoes -- I have to make'em myself, since take-out places typically make lousy vegetables.

Actually, I hate to tell you, but I think it makes really good marketing sense. There are a lot of people out there who drink sodas by the bucketfull -- 8, 10 a day -- and at 150 calories a can, or whatever it is, that adds up to a real problem, weight-wise. The problem, though, is that soda sweetened with aspartame basically tastes nothing like the real deal. Soda companies, of course, don't WANT people to make a radical change in their habits (like consuming a lot less soda), but they're aware that there's this whole huge generation out there that is becoming seriously aware of its own mortality, and that is now struggling like crazy to lose the extra weight that has mysteriously accumulated. Plus, that generation has now become aware of the evils of too much sugar, so even if they are not "dieting," they are still leaning toward keeping an eye on their carb intake. Solution: Give those folks something that will taste enough like the full-sugar version that they'll be satisfied, and will also be sufficiently lower in calories and sugar than the full-sugar version that they won't feel guilty.

I have to say, the Taste of the Lowesada (Lower East Side) Tour looks very odd to me. Yes, it's a nice way to get acquainted with a number of the trendy boites that have cropped up in the neighborhood over the past 5-7 years. But the tour doesn't appear to include stops at ANY of the food shops/restaurants for which the neighborhood has traditionally been known. Where's Katz's? Where's Yonah Schimmel's? Where's Russ & Daughters? Where's Gus' Pickles? Where's Economy Candy? The food traditions of the Lower East Side do not have anything to do with seared tuna, microgreens, or balsamic reductions.

Ohhh, I forgot an old favorite. I was making a gigantic wok full of stir-fry, in preparation for packing up a week's worth of brown-bag lunches, and it was time to mix in the cornstach to thicken it up. I duly reached for the familiar yellow box, stirred a big spoonfull of the powder into a slurry with some water, stirred the slurry into the wok-o-veggies....and watched, in horrified fascination, as the mixture began to burp and bubble to the rim of the pan, over the rim, flowing like lava (mixed with broccoli and snow pears) across the stovetop, down the front, across the floor....I had grabbed the wrong yellow box. Bicarbonate.

Ohhhh, thank you, Adam, for reminding me about the scented candles. They really are an essential touch. But I think folks are missing the point by insisting on dining with people whose political views they loathe. One of the ugly truths of politics is that even Republicans (or whatever group you most detest) may have the capacity to tell good jokes, avoid picking their noses in public, and provide good gossip about the minor celebrity seated three tables away. This doesn't make them any less loathesome -- it just makes them not the worst POSSIBLE dinner companions. For that, I think, you need people who are fundamentally boring and/or crass to an excruciating extent. (Also, they should have truly objectionable body odor. ) IRS auditors might well fit the bill. People who insist on showing Viewmaster slides of their 1963 vacation in Bakersfield. People who burp as a parlor-trick. Single-tax mavens. People who are really, really interested in collecting Lladro figurines and/or MacDonald's memorobilia. The possibilities are endless.

hehehehehehehehehehe That's extremely funny.

Actually, a lot of classic Eastern European (Austrian, Hungarian, etc.) cake recipes use breadcrumbs and/or nut flours instead of wheat flour. And they often contain chocolate. If made well, they can be incredibly delicious. And yeah, they tend to be stacked in layers.

For music I was thinking something like home-made audition tapes for the 1984 EuroSong competition.

The only beverage is KoolAde. WARM KoolAde. I'm not sure about all the food, but I do know that overcooked broccoli, without any fat or seasonings, is a standard item on the menu. It goes nicely with the completely overcooked skinless, boneless, unseasoned chicken breast. The good news is that in Hell I will finally get really thin.

Many years ago, in a fit of probably drug-indused hubris, I volunteered to make a wedding cake for 300. I have never baked much, had certainly never made a wedding cake, and had elected not to follow any one particular recipe, but instead to put various components together and sort of ummmm...wing it. Because my apartment at the time was roughly the size of a sandwich, I moved for the duration to my father's apartment (he being out of town), which has an enormous kitchen that includes a molto-enormous 6-burner Viking. I had never cooked on one of them puppies before. I made mousse-cake layers. I made a sort of concentrated raspberry sauce, strained it, and used it to tint and flavor a gigantic, bowling-ball size sphere of fondant, my first ever! (The fondant was the only success in this story.) I made dacquoise layers, the better to separate the mousse-cake layers. Then I lost the dacquoise layers. By that point I had been up and cooking for about two and a half days straight, courtesy of some seriously potent little blue pills. It was about 4 in the morning, and I convinced myself that I had stashed the dacquoise layers under my dad's dining room chairs for......safekeeping. My father's dining room floor is covered with an old Turkish carpet, one of those ones with teeeny tiny little designs everywhere. So it's 4 in the morning and my eyes are crossing and I'm crawling around on the rug looking for the cake layers, but the little designs are sort of dancing in front of my eyes, and eventually I start smelling something funny and I get terrified that I have somehow set the rug on fire, that an ember from a cigarette had fallen on the run, and now I'm crawling around FRANTICALLY, and only after 30 minutes or so do I realize that the funny smell is coming from the oven -- which is so big that I had managed to mislay the dacquoise layers in it. So at 5 in the morning I go out to the supermarket and get another 3 dozen eggs and start beating the whites, and I'm fine until the cat knocks something over, causing me to jump and also causing me to flick the mixer onto High, which causes the egg whites to leap out of the bowl, and I don't have any more eggs....I gave up. I collapsed on the couch, and four hours later, when my boyfriend called to ask when he should pick me up, I said "Honey, you know how all my life I've specialized in pulling rabbits out of the hat at the last minute?" He said yes. Cackling hysterically, I said, "The rabbit died!" Then I went back to the supermarket, bought about a zillion quarts of heavy cream, whipped them, and piled them into a gigantic salad bowl with raspberry sauce, raspberries, and hunks of mousse cake, and declared that I had made a wedding trifle. It was totally disgusting, but the wedding guests were so stoned that they thought it was fabulous, and ate it with their hands. My greatest regret was that I couldn't figure out any way of incorporating my beautiful fondant. Nor could I think of anything constructive to do with it, though I did, briefly, entertain the notion of going up to the fellow sleeping on the heating grate on 72nd street and saying something like "Here, homeless person, here is a lovely ball of raspberry-flavored fondant, just for you." But ultimately, that seemed like a bad idea. So I threw it out.

Ohhh yeesh, when it comes to food as control....<shuddering>. I remember my crazy Swedish roomate (no offense to Swedes, he just happened to be both crazy and Swedish) making me feel horrible for buying decadent, expensive stuff like meat, when if I had any true sense of solidarity with the downtrodden, I would be...I dunno, sucking rocks. He used to make what he called "Cambodian coffee" (recipe: allow roomate to make decent coffee; sneer at her for her repulsively bougie tastes; use roomate's coffee grounds to make a new pot of pale beige coffee). Once when I made chicken stock and then thrifitly picked the meat off the bones to make chicken salad, he fished the bones out of the garbage -- he did, I will admit, wash off the ashtray-dumpings and eggshells with which they had gotten covered -- and used them to make what he called "chicken stew," which involved chicken bones, bananas, and a large quantity of ketchup. He was deeply into the whole "food is fuel" mentality, and used my interest in good food to make me feel A) fat and B) insufficiently left-wing. Horrible. And his sister used to get up at 4 in the morning to scrub the kitchen baseboards with a toothbrush, but that's another story.

Maggie -- You now, I certainly don't remember reacting badly to Amanda's pieces when I originally read them in the Times. It may be that by reading them as a collection, in book-form, I was just hit with overload, in the same way that a friend who tearfully confesses some long-hidden insecurity is endearingly vulnerable...but the same friend, making similar confessions night after night on long, snuffly phone calls is a pain in the ass. Ruth -- in re-reading your post ( I am DESPERATELY trying to avoid working on my taxes), I was struck by one sentence: "And why shouldn't she be frustrated when her attempts to share something with her grandmother were thwarted?" What interested me about that was the extent to which it plays into past threads here, about a guest's obligations vs. those of a host. And actually, what really interested me was the extent to which it plays into some larger ideas I've been playing with for a while, about the various ways in which food is used -- and, specifically, the way it is sometimes used as a mechanism for control. Major thread-hijack here, I guess. What I mean is that I think there are a couple of models for the relationship between a guest and a host (ok, there are probably zillions, but just two come to mind right now). The first is the "hospitality" model, according to which the host's job, as I see it, is to make the guest as happy as possible. According to that model, a meal is a gift, and the purpose of a gift is to please the recipient, to provide something that will make THEM happy, even if it doesn't meet the giver's tastes. We've all heard stories about the husband who gives his wife a power-drill for her birthday, buying something he would like rather than asking what would please her. To my mind, that's the antithesis of hospitality, not unlike making pork chops for a friend who keeps Kosher. The other model is the "artistic" model, according to which the host's job, as artist, is to make the most wonderful meal he/she can dream up, with 'wonderful' being defined exclusively in terms of the host's presumably elevated sensibilities. Within the context of this model, the guest's tastes really don't enter at all into the equation; his/her job is essentially to be the audience, the passive appreciator of the host's art. These two models, and the wide grey space between them, have been discussed over and over on these boards, in the context of both restaurant and home-cooked meals. As I see it, the issue comes down to the question of Who Gets to Control the Meal? In the hospitality model, the guest's tastes define and control the menu -- and the pace of the meal, the size, etc. In the artistic model, the host is entirely in control, and a guest who attempts to assert any control, to state needs or preferences, is being a Bad Guest. So, getting back to the sentence of yours that I left WAAAAYY behind, somewhere around the turnoff to I-95, if you are "sharing" an experience with someone...does that mean their job is to remain entirely passive, allowing you to orchestrate the experience according to what you regard as the ideal? IMO, that's not really sharing, it's.....controlling. For me, sharing implies a certain mutuality, an experience in which both parties participate. This is really off-base, but I'm reminded of a concert I went to more than 20 years ago. Laurie Anderson was playing her fiddle and doing her thang in Boston, and it just irritated the hell out of me. And on reflection, I thought that what irritated me was the sense that the audience didn't exist for her; it was an entirely one-way experience. Her artistry completely defined the experience, and if we had all gotten up and left, it wouldn't have mattered a whit -- with the small exceptions of applause and the box-office take. I really hate that feeling, of being completely disregarded, and it's that sense of disregard that I'm reacting to in Hesser's book and in your sentence about sharing. I don't at all believe that a guest's tastes should entirely determine the experience -- that because I hate mushrooms, garlic, fish, dairy products and any plates that aren't white, you should be obliged to create a meal that conforms entirely to my tastes. In that instance, you're not a host, you're hired help (possibly even without the hire), and that isn't "sharing," either, in my book. But basically, I believe that if your guest is hungry first thing in the morning, and you get peeved because you want her instead to be hungry for lunch, you're not sharing, you're trying to control her food, her appetite, her experience. And that leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth.

I can't stand the taste of straight Splenda, and would strongly recommend mixing it with either A) sugar, B) Erythitol (a sugar alcohol, in granular form, that is generally thought to have the lowest insulin-impact and lowest uhhh........gastro-intestinal implications of all the SAs), or C) my favorite, Whey Low, about which there are several Egullet threads. Amazing stuff. Cooks and tastes EXACTLY like sugar, and -- according to a fair number of diabetics -- won't play havoc with your blood sugar. If you're watching carbs, I'd stay away from the Cool Whip, which only looks low-carb if you understand that the manufacturer calculates "1 serving" to be something like 2 tablespoons. You'd be far better off using actual whipped cream (sweetened with one of the options above) or butter cream (ditto). Depending on how strictly you're monitoring carbs, I'd suggest one of two options for the cake itself. Option 1 would be to look for recipes for any good Viennese-style torten -- they're often made with nut-flours, rather than with wheat, and can be spectacularly delicious. Option 2, if you're being really strict, would be to go the low-carb-recipe route. I don't bake a lot (don't have much of a sweet tooth), but I can certainly get you some recipes for low-carb chocolate cake that others have enjoyed, if you'd like. Alternatively, try this site http://www.lowcarbluxury.com/lowcarb-desserts.html. I haven't tried or read reviews of most of the cakes listed, but they're unlikely to be disgusting (though I would make the sweetener substitutions as suggested above -- a lot of long-time low-carbers seem to like the flavor of Splenda, or at least not find it revolting, so I rarely trust their sweetener recommendations). A good health-food store will probably carry almond-flour; you can make your own by whizzing blanched almonds (or unblanched, if you prefer -- more fiber = good for you) in the food processor. Grind it WITH some of your granulated sweetener, to help keep the mix from clumping into almond butter. Do be aware that homemade almond-flour is always going to be coarser than the stuff you can buy -- not necessarily bad, just different. Finally, if you're looking for something ultra-easy, you could try this site: www.expertfoods.com. They make something called a "Cake-ability" cake mix, to which you need to add almond or pecan flour (the site sells pecan flour packaged with the mix, if you like). Again, because I'm not much of a sweets-fanatic, I haven't tried the mix. HOwever, the mix is now being used by some quite high-end bakeries seeking to please their low-carbing clients (in particular, Greystone Bakeries is coming out with a LC cake based on Cake-ability). And the folks who make it are extremely nice, and struck me as being straight-shooters -- i.e., I believe their carb-counts. Let me know if you want some other recipes.

I can highly recommend Stewart's of Kearny, which also does mail-order (and has a phone that is answered by a lovely lady who sounds like she lives in Brigadoon). We got a couple of haggis (haggi?) from them for a Burn's Night party a few months ago, and even the confirmed "haggis is a revolting concept" people came back for seconds. They do sell pasties (though they call them "Cornish pastries") -- look under the "Scottish Foods -- Homemade" section. And their black pudding is swell. www.stewartsofkearny.com

I haven't written for the Times for a number of years, but my sense is that they, like an awful lot of newspapers and magazines, are kind of desperately in search of an audience. With that in mind, I suspect that Amanda Hesser's articles have tended to do exactly what the panjandrums at the Times would like them to do -- speak directly to a specific audience that has money and is therefore appealing to advertisers. Unfortunately, the specific audience I think she's speaking to is made up of the Young and the Anxious, permanently petrified that they will somehow put a foot wrong, order "incorrectly," speak admiringly of yesterday's hot chef, fail to recognize the critical, essential difference between Brittany and Hawaiian sea salt. That's not the audience I'd most like the Times to speak to, but for some unaccountable reason, they have failed to ask my opinion. And frankly, I don't see them making choices that are any dumber than what's going on throughout the publishing biz. Everybody's running scared, and panic doesn't tend to make for solid analytical thinking. All of which is to say that I bet she does have plenty o'mentors, and they're happy as hell with what she writes.

I had a wonderful salad a few years ago of smoked trout with watercress and slivered apple, and a dressing made of whipped cream infused with horseradish. Also, what about making an apple chutney?

It's interesting that you bring up Laurie Colwin, Ruth, because I was thinking about her food-books as I was reading Amanda Hesser's, and trying to lay my finger on why I so love the one and am somewhat put off by the other. Off the top of my head (and this isn't quite fair, because I'm currently reading the Hesser book, and haven't re-read Laurie Colwin for a good few years), what I don't see in Colwin's books is either A) any sense of wanting/needing to control other people's food experiences, or B) any sense that the writer's preferences are inherently the Right ones, and that those who have other preferences are wrong. And it's those two aspects of Hesser's book that bug me. In fact, Laurie Colwin did a fair amount of mocking her own preferences - talking about her passion for weird-ass eggplant dishes, for example, or her deep-rooted conviction that hamburgers are "restaurant food." And she was good at noting that food serves different functions for different people at different times -- there's a story about her making a lovely potato salad for a visiting foreign friend, only to find that what he really craves is the kind of sweet, gloppy potato salad that can be found in diners across the country, because that, for him, is the taste of America. Ultimately, what I find in Colwin's books is a sense that food -- cooking it, eating it, sharing it -- is about joy. And what I find in Hesser's book is a sense that food is about perfection and fear -- that through the perfection of one's food (the food one makes or buys or orders) one can stave off the otherwise persistent fear of somehow not being up to snuff. Laurie Colwin has an essay about what she calls "The Cuisine of the Refined Slob," in which she talks about letting go of the quest for perfection, about the pleasures to be found in roasting an untrussed chicken, surrounded perhaps with chunks of whatever vegetables are hanging out in the vegetable bin. I can't imagine Amanda Hesser embracing the Cuisine of the Refined Slob, and I think that's too bad. Life is full of enough occasions for judgment -- by other people and, even more insidiously, by the critical voices in our own heads. Laurie Colwin, to my mind, presents the kitchen and the dinner table as a refuge from all that agida. For Amanda Hesser, they seem to be -- mostly -- yet another arena in which failure, anything other than perfection, means getting eaten by lions. You make a good point in noting that Colwin wrote very definitely from the position of a young mother. In fact, the whole Cuisine of the Refined Slob thing, she says, was a necessary outgrowth of her realization that her kid had used the expensive trussing string to tie the kitchen chairs together. I think Amanda Hesser writes equally definitely from a position of young, hyper-competitive urban anxiety. Within the context of autobiography, writers can only write from their own experiences, and it's entirely natural -- hey, we're all narcissists -- to assume that one's current status (young mom, striving single, whatever) stands in for the crowd. As it happens, neither one of those crowds really includes me (though I'm probably closer to Hesser than to Colwin). But if I had to CHOOSE a crowd to belong to, choose a way of relating to food, I know which one I'd opt for.

I'm not even sure I agree with this, though I'm of two minds about it. Amanda's stated reason for getting peeved at her grandmother for eating hearty breakfasts while on a trip to Rome is that Granny should experience the rhythm and structure of a traditional ROman lunch, which she is unable to do if she's full from breakfast. But I don't entirely buy that, nor do I completely buy into the notion that one *should* follow all local customs when visiting. On the one hand, we've probably all snickered -- ok, I've snickered -- at the hapless tourists demanding cheeseburgers at their Beijing hotels or steak sauce in restaurants in Florence. But how total does the immersion have to be to sidestep the claim of being "almost uncivilized"? My friend Ken recently returned from a long trip to Asia, where he ate (among many other things) live octopus. He said "the weirdest part" was when they frantically stuck their suckers to his teeth in an effort to avoid being swallowed. When I asked him why in God's name he had eaten live octopus, he said that this particular dish was an important part of the local culture, and that he wanted to experience it. Well, ok, but call me a weenie, point out that both Ken and Tony Bourdain have much bigger cojones than I do -- I ain't eating no live octopus. Does that make me 'almost uncilivized'? Second -- and I know this is close to heresy on this board -- not everyone feels compelled to experience other cultures through their food. They travel for the art or the architecture or the crafts or the music or the language or the gardens or whatever. (I'm, not talking here about people who travel just to say they did it.) When lunchtime rolls around, what they want is something relatively unchallenging, so they can save their energies for waiting on line at the Ufizzi. They're not calling for ketchup or demanding fudge sauce for their gelati, but....they're not focused on lunch. They want a salad, or a plate of pasta -- the kind of lunch they're familiar with -- so they can get back to what they're really interested in. Does that make them uncivilized? In the interest of coming clean, I'll acknowledge that I have been a Latte Transgressor. After a gorgeous, thoroughly Italian lunch with some friends in Italy, I ordered a latte to linger with, while they were finishing up the wine. Much meriment ensued, at my expense. Was I being uncivilized? I don't like black coffee. So I guess I'm hijacking my own threat here. When traveling, how completely does one have to disregard one's own tastes and preferences in order to be regarded as something other than uncivilized, in order to lay claim to having experienced the culture through its food?

Somebody gave me Cooking for Mr. Latte, which was a very nice present, as it's engagingly written and contains some appealing-looking recipes. But somewhere along the way, the book started making me uncomfortable. And the more I read, the more uncomfortable I got. The premise is that your sophisticated foodie-chick falls for a guy who is perfect in all ways but is a clod at the table. So, natch, she tries to change him. Along the way, she has similar episodes of trying to change the cloddish food-behavior of a few others, including her grandmother. Now, we're not talking cloddish table-manners here. We're not talking about people who chew with their mouths open or feel up the waitresses or otherwise inflict their boorishness on others: we're talking about cloddish food CHOICES -- that is, people who inflict their theoretical boorishness on no one but themselves. Of what does this boorishness consist? Well, the Mr. Latte of the title is so named because he has the repellent habit of ordering coffee with MILK -- yes, MILK -- after 11 in the morning. And then he has the unmitigated gall to put Equal in it. As for Granny, her primary sin, so far as I can tell, involves eating large breakfasts while on a trip to Italy, thus spoiling her appetite for the kind of lunch Amanda believes she should eat. And why does Amanda believe that Granny should eat a particular kind of lunch, or that her boyfriend (and later husband) should drink his coffee black after the clock strikes 11? I would be bothered enough if these beliefs were outgrowths of what Amanda likes: After all, the assumption that "Equal tastes disgusting to me, so it therefore tastes disgusting to everyone" betrays a kind of staggering narcissism, an assumption that "my" tastebuds are the perfect and ideal tastebuds, and that the world of food should therefore configure itself according to what tastes good to me. But in fact, the narcissism doesn't stop there. Amanda doesn't really have any problem with the TASTE of Equal (or, presumably, with the taste of caffe latte drunk at 2 in the afternoon); when her boyfriend sweetens her cappucinno with it, rather than with sugar, she can't even tell the difference. Her problem is with the concept: Drinking a latte after breakfast is inherently WRONG, eating a hearty breakfast in Italy in inherently WRONG. They are (and here's the crux of my irritation).....uncool. That's not the word she uses, of course. She just assumes that her readers understand why she shudders at her boyfriend's coffee preferences, in exactly the same way that 15-year-old girls understand why their friend is shuddering over a boyfriend's desperately tacky fondness for....jeez, whatever kind of music is considered tragically uncool these days, or for wearing The Wrong Kind of jeans. But here's the thing: First, 15-year-olds are notoriously self-absorbed. Everything associated with them, including other people, is just an extension of themselves, so if Amanda's boyfriend wears uncool clothes, Amanda is by extension uncool herself. All the other kids will point and laugh because Amanda is such a dork as to date a guy who wears Hushpuppies. That kind of self-absorption (I think the shrinks call it boundary issues) is icky enough in a grown-up (hell, it's icky in 15-year-olds, but we just assume they'll grow out of it). But who's decided that Hushpuppies, or drinking coffee after 11, are wrong, uncool, unacceptable? It's not Amanda; her tastes don't enter into it at all. She's basically ceded control over what is and is not considered acceptably cool behavior to some mysterious Cabal of Cool out there in the ether. Again, it's exactly the same as 15-year-olds who don't even trust their own tastes enough to determine whether Hubert looks groovy in his Hushpuppies, but rely instead on an unwritten but completely unassailable code of behavior that all the cool kids know about: Thou shalt not wear beige suede shoes/Thou shalt not drink milk in thy coffee after 11 in the morning/Thou shalt eat small breakfasts even if thou art hungry first thing in the morning. It' really bizarre. This woman -- and I'm sorry, Amanda, I know you read these boards occasionally -- was about 30 when she wrote this book. But her methods of judging other people seem stuck in 10th grade, and she doesn't even appear to be aware that these adolescent attitudes might be a little peculiar. I mean, there's no sense of "I know I'm a jerk for caring about these things, but for some stupid reason it drives me buggy when my boyfriend puts milk in his after-dinner coffee. Italians don't do it, so -- though he is not Italian -- I don't think he should do it either." I haven't read the entire book, so maybe there's some kind of epiphany at the end. Maybe the book is really a subtle coming-of-age story, in which our heroine wises up to the fact that just because something (black coffee, big lunches) works for her does not, inherently, mean it is the ideal for anyone else. Maybe she even, gloriosky!, develops enough self-confidence to say "I don't care how Italians or some other de-facto hip population drink their coffee; I'm going to drink coffee the way I like it, and will allow others to do the same." I hope so. But I ain't holding my breath.

I used to love the Frug show, and I have all his books (and still cook from them, from time to time, and very happily). I think what appealed to me so strongly was that he was the first person who made me understand that food was something you could THINK about, that it had a history and a context and a role in every culture. And that was (and is) really, really interesting to me.

It's not laughing, it's crying. It yearns for its True Home, at your local thrift shop or Salvation Army outlet.

Worst food gift was probably the year my wierd and loathesome stepbrother gave me a "grow your own mushrooms" kit. Mushrooms grow in dirt, right? Basically, he gave me a box of dirt. I am also none too fond of the George Forman grill my mother's best friend insisted on giving me (the gift was made particularly special by the fact that she had used the grill herself, on several occasions, and had not entirely cleaned off the grease). When my mother gave me a New and Improved George Forman grill for my birthday last year, I made her take it back. Hate the damn things. Best food presents: A set of beautifully hand-seasoned Lodge pans given by my ex, and -- several years earlier -- a Kitchen Aid mixer given by his family. Saddest food present: The $500 worth of prime Texas steak I received -- in absentia -- a few years ago. I was out of town on business, and called the bookstore to see how things were going. Bob, the mouth-breathing eedjit we were then employing, told me I had gotten a large package. "Really?" I said. "That's funny. I didn't order anything. Who's it from?" He told me the name of the sender, and added that the package was marked "Perishable." Ahhhh, I said. How long had the package been sitting in the store? About three days, he said. Ahhh, again. I asked him to open it up and look inside. "It appears to be meat," he said. I told him to throw the entire thing out, since the "appears to be meat" had been sitting, unrefrigerated, for three days in June. When I returned, a week later, I found out he had taken the "appears to be meat" home with him, served it up to his family, and then accompanied them all to the local emergency room.

I want ALL of these breakfasts. And then I want a real long nap.

I wonder, too, about why no criminal charges were filed. Also, in reading the complaint, I'm really bothered by the "recovered memory" aspect of many of the allegations. In one instance after another, these guys "became aware for the first time that [they] suffered from mental and emotional disorders caused by" abuse that allegedly took place 20 years earlier. As both a therapeutic tool and -- critically, in this instance -- as a tool for uncovering truth, "recovered memory" has been pretty consclusively discredited. But at the time these suits were brought, it was riding high. I don't know if "recovered memory" is actually at the heart of these dawning awarenesses of 20-year-old sexual abuse. But I find it hard to imagine any other scenario in which a man in his 30s would learn "for the first time" about damage -- emotional damage -- he allegedly suffered as a teenager. And that leads me to look very skeptically on the claims of abuse.