[So, what's for supper tonight, big guy?]

Seriously, what sort of things do you cook when you're just making some dinner for you and Matt?

[Midnight snacks, again]

Well, duck foetus remains my favorite ringer. My breakfast habits may be weird but I do draw the line somewhere. As to what makes the cut -- well, almost everything. I did go through a salted nut phase a while back that never made it in, but that was mostly laziness. If, as I originally did, I put a daily entry, you'd see that I sort of move around through the list, although things do fall out of favor for longish spells. An example of this is the fried pierogies, which I used to eat a couple times a week but now almost never have. This isn't because I've lost my taste for them but they've gone up in price enough so I can't really justify them as a regular breakfast entry. Generally, if I plan to write about something, it doesn't appear on the snack pages, not because I think people would hate paying to read something they had already read for free (although maybe they would), but because writing even a little about something gets it check off as done in my low-motivated way, and so nothing ever appears. On the other hand, I've also held back some things because I planned to write about them and never did.... Sigh. (Is there an emoticon for sighing?)

I started the breakfast and midnight snack diaries as an exercise in writing about the purely animal appetite that only emerges in total privacy. There's a paradox there, but it's one writers have always had to deal with: how much to tell and how to face the consequences afterwards. I imagine some readers wonder how I could still be alive after years of consumption of butter-fried doughnuts and sandwiches made of sausage skins, and maybe it's my dirty little secret that some nights I just eat an orange or a stack of crackers. That was the virtue of the daily entry, but I felt pressed by that to act out more, which I didn't like. This way, the series is instinct driven, even if it isn't a total picture.

Favorites? My favorite breakfast is probably a fried egg mashed on buttered toast. At least it's what I go for when nothing else appeals. My favorite midnight snack would most likely be curling up next to a prime rib roast, although I've never had the chance to do that properly. And let's not forget Swedish meatballs.

[What's in your fridge/pantry?]

Here we have a matter of dueling temperaments. Matt's approach to kitchen cabinets is that they yearn to be empty; mine is that they yearn to be full. I was once interviewed by a reporter from the Associated Press who asked if he could look in my cabinets. He practically passed out when he saw that they were practically empty. If he stopped by today, he would find the opposite case. For one thing, there's the double-doored cabinet with all my snack stuff, which is crammed to the max with cans, packages, boxes, etc. But also, relatively recently, I've been doing more Asian cooking -- Korean, Indian, Chinese, Thai -- and it sometimes feels as if I'm running an in-apartment outlet for the local Asian American grocery. Black cardamom, whole anise buds, dried shrimp, tapioca flour, Chinese Shanxi aged sorghum vinegar.

This has already reached the point where I forget that I have things because I can't see or find them until I try to make room to fit in their "replacement." The trick is to discipline yourself to not let things linger when you realize that you no longer use them. My mother's kitchen cabinets resemble nothing less than an archeological dig, especially the spice and seasoning area and the canned vegetables, which she tends to buy for emergencies, which never come. My father, when he was alive, used to scour the dented can bin at the supermarket for markdowns (since they were well off, this can only be described as a hangover from the Depression), and years later, those are still there, too. When I first came across the stash I thought my mother had written dates on these, too, as she used to do with the cans she left at the end of the summer at our cottage (see elsewhere in these postings). Since some of the numbers were "74" and "67", this REALLY gave me pause. But I came to realize that these were the markdown prices.

What was the question? Ah, yes. Well, I've answered part of it. As to inspiration, kind of the opposite. As with books, which if I don't read them when I buy them they tend to languish unread for years, the unowned always seems more desirable than the owned, and hence more inspiring. What is it about the possibility of spending money that so whets the appetite? Add to this my own compulsion to look for odd cuts of meat that have discount coupons slapped on them to get them out of the store before the due date passes, and you have a very impulsive cuisine. Meanwhile, the can of chile-pepper-laden tuna that I bought at a Korean grocer cries quietly in the back of the cabinet...and how can the bottle of turnip condiment comfort it, when it, too, has never been opened....

As to essentials: garlic, extra virgin olive oil and played around with all the guys peanut oil, ground dried Chimayo chile, Greek oregano on the stem, rosemary, wild fennel pollen, dried morels (for crushing into a dish as a seasoning), Tabasco habanero hot sauce, kosher salt...that's about it for my basic kitchen stuff. I have five or six different vinegars but don't use them much: sherry vinegar for salads; balsamic for this and that; rice vinegars for dipping sauces, etc.. Sometimes I have fresh herbs growing -- the only way I can tolerate thyme -- but they either die or get out of hand and start crowding us out of the living room. I once had both a Meyer lemon and a kaffir lime tree growing in the spare bedroom, but a dislodged storm window put an end to their career. And I have a huge batch of chives growing on our apartment patio. I've probably forgotten something. Mustards I can mostly take or leave, at least in their wide variety: a bottle of Dijon and another of good deli style is enough for me. As is no doubt your experience, I own a lot of stuff that I use for a particular dish or two but that hasn't worked it's way into my regular cooking. Like black cardamom: man, that stuff's WEIRD.

[English Muffins]

Thanks for sharing that. It makes me especially happy to find young readers. Messing around in the kitchen should be part of everyone's growing up. There's nothing better for the future of cooking than to learn how much fun it is before you have to learn how much work it is.

[Kitchen Science 101]

Two recent very useful books are Russ Parson's HOW TO READ A FRENCH FRY and Shirley Corriher's COOKWISE. There are other books like these, but these two are very approachable and intelligent without beating you over the head with kitchen science. You may also find the Cook's Illustrated team of explainers to your taste: if so, you have a lifetime of instruction awaiting you, at least if you have deep enough pockets.

However, you should also consider the fact that even experienced cooks sometimes just don't get a recipe, however carefully it has been explained. This could be that there's nothing there to get -- the recipe just doesn't really work. This is often the case when the writer him or herself got it from someone else (like a chef) and didn't really understand what it was about. But we also have inner demons that can delight in perversely misreading instructions, cause our mind to drift when we should most be paying attention, or just make a bad situation worse with an ill-judged "rescue" attempt. If learning to cook was simply about following recipes, we would all do just fine, but, often, that's the least of it. Learning to trust your judgment and getting to the point where your judgment is worth trusting is not something that happens in a day or a week or a year. Thank God for beginner's luck.

[What's next?]

Cathy, I don't even tell Matt what's in the works, sometimes until a first draft is finished. It's also why I've stopped putting a little teaser ("In upcoming issues") in Simple Cooking itself. It's also why I don't outline my essays beforehand (I'll bet that surprises you); I want to be surprised. It's hard enough working on subsequent drafts (of which there are many, no fewer that five and sometimes as many as ten) when I do know what it's all about, but at least then, having created my monster, I'm trying to teach it to talk and to walk. I've written a bit about pieces that never got written in the topic that concerns where I get my idea for essays, but that usually happens because I'm unprepared to strike when the iron was hot. A particular instance of that was when Matt and I read Anthony Bourdain's KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL out loud. By the end, my mind was reeling with thoughts, but that didn't happen to be an opportune time to write a review and the synapses had all burnt out by the time I could. So the best I got out of that was making Ed Behr laugh on one of his rare visits down from Vermont. Other times, I just don't know if a piece will ever cohere or not. Images float around in my mind like pollen in the spring air. (Those are the days when I'm not lying huddled under my bed with a blanket thrown over my head.)

[paper-bag method of cooking pasta]

Of course, circumstances will vary, but I think that cutting open the bag at the table is both dramatic and -- as you note -- extremely pleasurable. It isn't often that you can bring the cooking aromas to the table along with the dish.

[Essays]

Like many writers, I have a difficult relationship with my work. It's like being a parent except that your children have to grow up and go out into the world in a few weeks. Afterwards, you can't help but think...if I had only had more time with them. But occasionally the pieces all fall together in a way that you couldn't improve upon, even if you had all the time in the world. (This isn't to say that they're perfect, just that they're as perfect as I'm capable of making them.) At the same time, also like a parent, I don't like calling attention to perceived imperfections in my work; readers are perfectly capable of doing that themselves. (And letting me know about it, besides.) The truth is, I almost never reread my own work except to the extent that I need to find something I've written for some other purpose. I prefer to remember fondly than to risk the results of reacquaintance. I hope I live long enough to feel differently; I often do enjoy the passages of mine quoted by other people. But then I tend to feel that my paragraphs are better than my essays and my sentences better than the paragraphs. The total incoherence of the above is a good example of what I mean.

[Kyocera]

My two essential knives, with which I do over 90% of my kitchen work are a Dexter Chinese cleaver and a Chicago cutlery 6-inch utility knife. As a James Beard award winner, I was given a set of KitchenAid chef's knives. They look terrific, they have my name engraved on them, but they're still resting in the original carton. Happiness is rocking my cleaver on the cutting board, reducing garlic cloves down to their molecular level. By the by, our last book, POT ON THE FIRE, opens with the essay "One Knife, One Pot" that is all about my live with knives. It's one of the few things I've written than I can still bear to read.

[Taking food seriously]

This is a very difficult question. I have done some writing for major publications but on the whole it has not been very rewarding to me apart from financially (where it is VERY rewarding and which is why I still occasionally do it). I'm not really complaining here because part of it is my own fault. Almost all publications these days are editor driven, which is to say that pieces have to be shaped to that particular editor's taste. There are exceptions -- The New Yorker comes to mind -- but this is so much the case that you start to think that writers are so used to intuiting this that it doesn't make any difference even if it IS the New Yorker. To put it metaphorically: who would allow a television show that left many viewers in such a state that they threw their television out the window? You can do that still with a book. But I don't know any magazine that invites that kind of writing: it's always preaching to the converted. You could even argue that movies still get made that are equally provocative (I think, for instance, of Barbet Schroeder's OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS). Of course, Simple Cooking isn't in that league (!!) but I do feel totally free to write as I think about whatever I want, with the cost being simply some readers justifiably telling me to go....well, you fill that in. This probably sounds self-righteous, but the reason I chose the film I did was to indicate that this is not really what it's all about.

[English Muffins]

No, I wanted to have something solid to write to him about. But I do plan to. Selling English muffins in Paris -- now there's a dream!

[Life on an island]

Hmm. How could anything in paradise make me shudder? Well, maybe cans of food left behind in the cottage kitchen on previous summers that had been thawing and freezing and thawing and freezing for who knew how many years. My mother used to thoughtfully write the date on the cans she left, but her brothers didn't. (Of course, in this context, "thoughtful" might have better meant tossing them over the cliff rather than leaving them behind. [in those benighted days we used to heave our trash over the cliff at high tide. Not good. But in those days, trash was not much and mostly biodegradable.]) I discovered ol' Euell when I was living as a college drop-out in NYC and at his (spiritual) urging, took the subway all the way to a huge park in the Bronx (it's name escapes me) to pick acorns. I then boiled these for a full day and was so disgusted by the smell that permeated the apartment I was never able to eat them. Sort of like chestnuts, which I had another misadventure with later. I coated them with sugar and gave them to some friends who ate one and threw the rest out. At the sea coast, however, he proved of more use. People on the island (natives) told me that mussels were poisonous (they could have done better to warn us of the red tide, which made the clams poisonous -- those I had always dug and made clam chowder), but I went ahead and harvested and ate them -- and I'm still here. I did collect and boil periwinkles, too, but that's a LOT of work for a LITTLE to eat; something more to write about than actually make a daily habit of. I also made sumac ade with the wild sumac (pretty good), picked lots of berries (blueberries and raspberries for the most part, but some blackberries), and caught a lot of crabs.

If you're familiar with SERIOUS PIG you'll know there's a little piece in there about Maine country stores and how they've evolved over the years (mostly into lottery card agents). Maine isn't the same and those stores, run without much profit by owners who sat there into the evening watching television for the occasional sale, are pretty much a thing of the past. I haven't been back to the island since...maybe 1977, 1978, which is a long time now. I miss it fiercely, but I prefer to miss the Long Island of my memory than to experience the pain of the Long Island of today. In any case, the cottage passed into the hands of another part of the family. By the by, our cottage was one of three on top of a cliff that you passed just before you arrived at Cleaves Landing. (That now long gone.) The part of the headland we lived on jutted out the furthest into Casco Bay. Mary Justice refused to take her VW bus up the rutted dirt track that went up and over a hill to get to our place. But she got us close enough.

[Yeast-raised pasta]

Sounds like you're trying to reinvent gnocchi by other means. Or, to take a cue from Varmint, dumplings. Many Southern recipes for dumplings are essentially Southern biscuits cooked by simmering rather than baking. The advantage there is that the double-acting baking powder will make them "rise" ("swell" is probably a more appropriate word) in the cooking liquid whereas the heat would kill the yeast. This would mean letting the yeast-leavened "pasta" dough rise and then trying to get it into the water without deflating it -- a tricky business. And the result? Certainly not al dente. Imagine boiled bread sticks. The bottom line here, though, is that for this question you want Shirley Corriher, not me.

[When there are bahn mi and po' boys,]

You'll get no argument from me. I was commenting on my own ignorance and not about the dish, which was quite well received by the dinner party I made it for. My point was that I am not well enough informed to make meaningful distinctions here. No offense was meant and I'm sorry if any was taken.

[paper-bag method of cooking pasta]

Just teasing. Actually, it sounds very interesting and I'd like to give it a try. Can you sketch out your recipe a tiny bit?

[France]

I think about it all the time. Whether I would ever actually do it is another thing entirely. What I would like to have is the opportunity to spend a year there, either in a Parisian suburb or some out of the way city, just to absorb the rhythm of things and find my way about at my own speed. You might well ask "Why France? Why not Spain? Portugal? Italy?" My answer, such as it is, is that what we're talking about is frustrated youth. If I had gone then I might have less interest in going now. But my one experience of Paris (when I was sixteen) was so overwhelming and short that it was like being thrust through a banquet by the scruff of the neck. But the logistics of this AND keeping Simple Cooking appearing on people's doorsteps (and the renewals appearing on mine) make this all highly unlikely. At the very least, it calls for organization skills that are far beyond me.

[paper-bag method of cooking pasta]

Okay, John, but come clean: how much oil does he call for?

And to Cabrales, I would say that if you use an oven cooking bag rather than a brown paper bag absorption is no problem. It's been some time since I've done it with an actual paper bag, but I don't remember that being a problem, although yes, indeed, it does get a bit sauced. If you live in America, these are easy to find -- Reynolds oven bags -- whereas if you live in Europe, I just don't know, although I did trace down an Irish firm that manufactures them. Just be sure to cut a slit in it to let steam out.

[Assessment of Chile Pepper Craze]

For what it's worth, I think the whole chile craze has had a positive effect on American cooking. There's much to like: the stuff is harmless (unless you get it in your eyes, or worse, as I did once, on your contact lenses), good for you, invites conversation, is easy to use, and, as you point out, can add layers of interesting flavors to your cooking. I use ground dried New Mexican Chimayo as often as I use garlic in my cooking, and for much the same reason. Of course, it can be abused, but even then that happens mostly among consenting adults. And an interest in chile peppers provides an entree into some of the world's most fascinating cuisines. As the years have passed, my collection of hot pepper sauces has thinned down to about three, but my interest in chile peppers, their variety and culinary gifts continues to enchant me. That said, I would like to remind everyone that habanero is spelled without a tilde (the word means "from Havana"), a holier-than-thou-ism on a par with spelling Hass (the avocado) as "Haas"; and take a tip from your old uncle and don't bite into a raw Scotch bonnet pepper unless you REALLY know what you're doing. I didn't, and I really thought I was going to die.

[English Muffins]

This is exactly the sort of project I was describing somewhere else on this page, where you get so far and no further and have to put it aside. Your description of your English muffins "full of holes but something not quite right about them" is pretty much where I left things myself. Unlike you, however, I was so confident that I had found the missing key that I foolishly announced that I was going to publish my recipe in the next issue of SC, and even took some photographs of my prototypes. But, despite all the tinkering, they just weren't good enough.... And I just couldn't face another breakfast of them. Now, a year has passed, and I found myself mulling on the subject again. So....

[Shameless Shill...]

Yes. Probably today.

[essays that provoke the most attention]

I got into a correspondence with Jim Harrison about this, pointing out that the literary world was large enough, confident enough, and multifarious enough to support vigorous debate and very different schools of writing. The food world, for the most part, is a large club where you have, for example, Jeffrey Steingarten writing about how wonderful Corby Kummer's new book is almost at the exact time that Corby Kummer is writing about how wonderful Jeffrey Steingarten's new book is. The problem here (assuming that both books are in fact wonderful) is that criticism becomes all about quality of text whereas the most interesting criticism (for me) is that of colliding world views, something that's not going to happen if an editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a columnist (and for all I know, contributing editor) at Vogue get into the ring together. One of the results of this is that there is a lot of gossip and backbiting behind the scenes. When I wote my essay on Paula Wolfert, whom I greatly admire for all her flaws, I received private communications of amazing viciousness about her from people who, in her presence, no doubt act as though they were best friends. This is understandable -- get along to go along -- but it isn't good. And it means that some very good food writing gets left in the shadows. Or, worse still, it doesn't get written because there's really no place for it.

[Two cooks in the kitchen]

Yes, well, one of things that makes that clafoutis piece what it is is that it reflects an experience that was very magical and, hence, very rare. If it weren't, there would be more sense of that in Simple Cooking. So far as the cooking goes, we tend to take turns rather than working together, although that can happen, too. Also, as in every relationship, things evolve, change, part, come back together. When we lived in Maine, Matt did the prep work when I was doing the cooking. Here in Northampton, she works at the local library most afternoons, and so I usually do the cooking from start to finish. Her special love is baking, though, and I can't hope to match her there. When we finally get around to revealing the Professor's sourdough biscuit recipe (from our No-Name Diner saga, episodes of which regularly appear in Simple Cooking), it will entirely reflect her patient and expert work. Those biscuits are really special.

Matt as collaborator is a more complicated story. Before she and I hitched up she was a manager at the original Dean & DeLuca and (for a short and rollercoaster time) a partner in a Boston restaurant, and so she brings a very different sensibility into play with my essentially rebarbarative one. She is also a careful reader with intuitive responses to my writing which often dig me out of a hole that I've stubbornly dug for myself and she gives me someone sympathetic but also rigorously critical to write for. When we do a first reading of a piece I've been working on, I'm in a state of high anxiety until she starts laughing at my jokes. Very often we can spend an evening arguing about what I'm trying to say (and possibly failing to) in a single sentence. Like many writers, I can be excruciatingly overexact at one moment and carelessly inexact at another, and, to be honest, not able to see that a sentence that I think is quite clear is so only to me. As I have written in every one of the books that represent our collaboration, her presence has made me a much better writer than I could have achieved working strictly on my own. This is probably true for many other writers as well, but I didn't want this fact lost in the acknowledgement section.

[paper-bag method of cooking pasta]

That's interesting. Something very similar was described to Ed Giobbi by an Italian from Naples. The recipe appears in EAT RIGHT, EAT WELL -- THE ITALIAN WAY. The difference is that in this recipe the pasta is added after a cup of liquid has been poured in. Alain Ducasse must use quite a bit of olive oil if he makes it as you describe, since otherwise (I would imagine) the pasta would tend to clump together.

[Experiments vs old favorites]

Well, that depends. If I'm working on an essay called "Too Drunk To Cook," then I don't have to worry about that. Like you, probably, a lot of what I write springs from my own efforts to work out a way to get a dish right. This starts with making it several times until I feel I'm getting close and then making it regularly but not so intensively so that it can unfold itself on its own terms. I feel that a lot of food writing that appears in magazines have recipes that were force-ripened to meet a deadline and so don't have the full flavor that they should. This isn't because of ingredients so much as the little things you learn along the way to coax out the best from a dish. On the other hand, there are certain projects that I've had to shelve because I just didn't seem to be getting any further than a particular point. It was good but I just couldn't make it as good as I wanted it to be. (The worst situation is to make a dish so often that you come to hate it just as you perfect it...something that definitely can happen when you're forced to cook to a deadline.)

[Kyocera]

Jeeze, man, what were you peeling? A coconut? No, I haven't bought one yet but I do find that I use the knife more often than I thought I would, although this doesn't necessarily say anything good about Kyocera, just something not very flattering about me. My motto has become: "Don't reach for the knife sharpener, reach for the Kyocera." Does slip through those tomatoes though, doesn't it.