It’s late spring again, and that is always a wonderful time for food…although, come to think of it, when isn’t it a wonderful time for food? But this is a particularly mild and pleasant time of year, and tonight we’re having a turnip omelet made with tiny white turnips so peppery and sweet they make me smile to think of them.  And to start, sauteéd oyster/puffball/and Zeller’s bolete mushrooms found by the Beloved Husband while he was raking up the dead pine needles of winter from the meadow floor, tossed with young turnip leaves and a little cream and garlic and wine.  The omelet (which I always like at room temperature) will come after, served with thinly sliced sauteéd potatoes.  Yum.

But I’ve more or less shared all those recipes before, so now I’ll tell you about a pizza I discovered a few days ago, and how terrific it was.  I had all these sweet onions (onions always being inexpensive this time of year, even organic ones, which are the only ones you should be feeding yourself and your loved ones, given the toxic qualities of sprouticide), and a bag full of mushrooms, and various other odds and ends, and a lot of lettuce from the garden.  So something, I thought, something to go with a nice lightly dressed salad, that would use all of those things.  Well, pizza, of course.  By which I don’t mean the kind you order in, though that is delicious, most times, or the kind I normally make, which is a biscuit dough patted into a pan and covered with various things.  I don’t know, I felt like a thinner kind of dough, but one that didn’t need yeast or rising time, and I found just what I needed in Richard Olney’s PROVENCE THE BEAUTIFUL cookbook.  He recommends a pastry dough made of 2 cups flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt, 1/4 cup of olive oil, and a 1/4 cup of lukewarm water.  Mix it in the usual way (in my case, throw it all in the food processor, and, if it’s too dry, add a tiny bit more oil and water bit by bit till it’s the right consistency). Roll it in a ball and let it stand for about an hour at room temp.

Now this made a terrific dough, easy to work–I could have just patted it into the pan, but it was even easier to sprinkle with extra flour and roll out to the desired shape.  This is enough dough to fit a cookie sheet, which is what I would have done if we’d had company.  But since it was only the two of us, I split the dough in half, wrapped one in plastic and froze it for another time (which is, in fact, the time I’m going to tell you about in more detail…but hang on).  Rolled out the other, and covered it with sweet onions, about a pound and a half sliced, that I’d cooked for a long, slow time in a crowded pan to keep them from browning.  Just got them to be white and meltingly tender, about an hour’s worth of cooking.  Then I mixed them with a little fresh chopped thyme, spread them across the dough that I’d rolled into a small pizza pan, crisscrossed them with whole anchovies, dotted them with black olives, and peppered the whole.  Preheated the oven to 500º, and then popped the pizza in for about fifteen/twenty minutes.  Just terrific.  PIssaladière is what that’s called, when it’s at home in Nice.

A week or so later I was somewhat harassed to think of something for dinner quick, and I still had all those onions and mushrooms lying around.  So this time, what I did was the best, I think, as sometimes seems to happen when one operates under pressures of this sort. First I pulled the pastry out of the freezer and let it defrost for a couple of hours. (Luckily I’d remembered I needed a dinner option earlier that day, which if I didn’t have time to do anything about it, at least I had time to pull that dough out.)

Then this is what I did:

I sliced a couple of onions and sauteéd them over medium high heat in a nice wide pan that gave them plenty of room to move around and caramelize to their heart’s content. While they did that, sternly ordering them not to burn while I was gone, I rushed out and picked myself a bowl of salad.  While I was at it, I picked a branch or two of sage. Then I hurried back into the house, oh the relief, the onions were just turning nice and brown, not burning at all, and just needed a stir. I chopped the sage and threw that in with the onions, stirring.  I kept at them till they were a beautiful mahogany color, then I salted them and took them off the heat.

When I was just about ready for dinner, I preheated the oven to 500º, and sliced as many mushrooms as I thought would fit on top (about a half a pound, as I recall).  Then I rolled out the dough, fit it into the pan, spread the cooled onions on top and scattered the mushrooms all over.  THEN I rooted around in my cheese drawer and found a wedge of gorgonzola, which I proceeded to crumble with abandon all over the mushrooms.

Into the oven it went for about fifteen/twenty minutes, until the house smelled heavenly.  Pulled it out, poured a glass of wine, tossed the greens with a little salt and walnut oil and a spritz of lemon, served some of both on our two plates, and in about twenty minutes all of it was gone.  I don’t know how that happened, but I know we had a good time while it did.

Then there are those times where you just have to make decisions about what you’ve got time for.  And I really hate giving up making meals for myself and the Beloved Husband just because I’ve got a work binge on.  It’s making those meals that’s a lot of my entertainment in life.  I love thinking about them and making them almost as much as I love eating them.

So there I was, with only a week between trips out, and with a huge amount of work to get through, too. Well, the obvious answer is to get in fast foods, or eat out, or just starve, I guess, and since none of those options is an appealing one, I just had to think of some way ’round.  Really, the only way ’round is to just get as efficient and creative as you can, and cut yourself some slack when you hit your own personal efficiency and creativity ceiling.

This was the attitude I took.

I hit my own ceiling when it came to shopping.  My brain was just too full of other stuff to really focus on what I might need for a series of a.) varied meals and b.) meals that would create leftovers that I could leave for the Husband when I was away on the next trip.  Now, I know a lot of you women out there are saying, “let the guy get his own meals, for God’s sake!” and I agree, I totally agree, in fact, HE totally agrees, bless him.  But the thing is, I LIKE leaving meals for him, just like (I assume) he likes getting in the wood for me every winter.  I LIKE it.  I could give it up, but I don’t really want to if I don’t have to. It adds something to my life.

Well, so here were my parameters: Not much time.  Just what I had in the cupboard and fridge already. An attenuated attention span.

(It helps when you’re playing this kind of culinary game that you have loved ones who appreciate what you do, and are not given to finding little picky things to complain about to bring you down when you can’t do as much as you usually do.  Although, if you have the latter, I suggest seriously thinking about either retraining them, or keeping them well away when you have key work to do of your own.)

I was so involved in my own work that I didn’t even notice what I cooked last night.  I mean, I can barely remember eating it. But I think it was good–and I know it gave me some leftovers for the husband to reheat (mashed potatoes with pesto spread in a baking dish, covered with grated Swiss cheese and baked till bubbly; carrots and parsley; salad with avocado and blue cheese).

So today I had to finish a proofing job.  Well, I am not crazy about proofing, so I take it one chapter at a time. One or two. Or three. I did this at the kitchen counter. And in between, I wandered over to the stove and the sink and made:

Vegetable soup for lunch.  Chopped a couple of onions (I knew I was going to make a couple of other things, too, from those onions, so get it done all at once), put a bit of chopped onion in a pan with some melted butter and curry powder.  Peeled and diced the lone potato left from last night’s potato fest, added that to the pot. A little thyme. Covered with a couple of cups of water and brought to the simmer. When the veggies were tender, I added the leftover carrots from the night before and cooked to blend flavors.  There was so much of it — flavor, I mean–that I added a little more water, with the idea of leaving one extra serving for Alex for a lunch when I’m away. When that was done, shoved it to the back of the stove to wait for a final enrichment with a little butter, a sprinkling of parsley and toast for lunch.

Back to the proofing.  Two more chapters.  Even three.

Then back to the stove.  Heated two separate skillets.  In one, a dollop of sunflower oil as the base for enchilada sauce. In the other, olive oil as the base for a sauce for polenta and mushrooms.  Split what was left of the chopped onion between the two and sauteed them till they were golden.  Then opened a can of crushed tomatoes and puree and put half in one skillet, half in the other.  Chopped garlic and added to each skillet (of course, who did you think you were dealing with, anyway?) Added three minced chipotle chiles and some of their sauce to the enchilada sauce. Added a sprig of rosemary to the polenta sauce. Salt to both.  Then I needed to thin them.  Leftover beer to thin the enchilada sauce. White wine to thin the polenta sauce.

Put them both onto simmer and went back to proofing.  Three more chapters.

Back to the stove, gave them both a stir, turned off the heat and covered them.

And tonight, the enchilada sauce will drape some corn tortillas that will then be rolled around grated cheese and minced green onion, lined up in a baking dish, and covered with more sauce, cheese, and onion.  Baked till done, and the leftovers can be reheated at will by the Beloved Husband. We’ll eat refried beans with this (I already have them in the fridge from another day), the beans spooned on top of lettuce,  and an avocado and cilantro salad on the side.

Lunch tomorrow will be reheated beans on top of grated carrot on a whole wheat tortilla, the whole thing topped with more cilantro and avocado and grated cheese.

Then dinner will be polenta stuffed with sauteed mushrooms (just happen to have some lurking in the fridge), and topped with tomato/rosemary sauce and grated Parmesan.  Plenty of leftovers, terrific reheated. We’ll have it the first time with what’s left of the lettuce in the fridge, mixed with grated carrot, as a salad.

I finished the proofing job right on time. Now on to packing for the next trip. But in the meantime, we’ve got to eat, and, as you know, my motto is: Anything you’ve got to do, you might as well have a good time doing.

And I’m serious about that, too.

This month’s EAP is about Sex, and, really, there’s nothing nicer than having sex with a loved one, followed by a lovely meal à deux.

All the better if the lovely meal is in your own home, and you can both sit down to it wearing your bathrobes.

And even better if the lovely meal scents the house increasingly with enticing food smells during the actual act.

I mean, think about it.  What’s wrong with making love before dinner, rather than after, when you’re both probably too full and too tired anyway, or one of you wants to get on the computer, or one of you wants to finish reading the paper, or you both just would rather call it a night?  It’s nice, every so often, to make some time special for…er…interaction.  And, as always, to follow it with a very nice meal.

This of course means you’ve got to clear the decks. Kids have to be sent off to slumber parties, grandma’s house, etc. Phones turned off. Cares dispelled (as much as possible and even if only temporarily). And then you’ve got this space to concentrate on each other and provide a playground for the two of you.

Naturally, this is another one of those happy moments where you realize that we really are better off than the richer Victorians.  Imagine having all those servants and trying an evening like this? You’d have to give them all the day off.  And the cook would want to know, suspiciously, what you’d been up to in her kitchen while she was gone.

But you don’t have to worry about any of that. This is the good thing about not having master/servant relations in a culture.  So don’t let me catch you fantasizing about having enough money to hire unlimited help. Who’s going to manage that help, I ask you? Better to just concentrate on managing ourselves, I reckon.

And on having a very good time on our time off.

To which we now turn.

I don’t have the slightest intention of giving any kind of insight into what should happen in the more private part of this particular kind of festivity. You’ll have your way, and I have mine. But what I can do is give you a couple of suggestions about what to cook for the dinner afterwards. That I know something about, that’s applicable across all ages, classes, sexual orientations. I do know a practical thing or two about how to orchestrate THAT.

First off, you want something simple that can cook unattended for at least an hour.  If not more.  Without much fuss at the end (you’re not going to feel like fussing in the kitchen, after, at least we hope not–we hope you’ll be in a happy daze and in more of a mood for drifting from one thing to the next).  Also, you want something that will smell increasingly good as the time goes on.  It adds to the total experience.

So you basically want a stew, or a casserole.  Roasted meats are fine, but be careful about the ones that have to be basted.  You don’t want to all of a sudden think, as your loved one whispers nothings in your ear, that you really need to turn the chicken on its side and slather it with some butter (well, maybe you do, but that kind of thing is beyond the scope of this inquiry).  Chile relleno casserole is a good choice here.  It can go in the oven with the refried beans, after you’ve laid out a couple of plates with lime wedges and shredded lettuce waiting to receive it.  The smells are great with that.

Roasted vegetables are another terrific option.  Make a garlic mayonnaise before, to dip everything in.  Shove a few scrubbed and pierced baking potatoes in the oven, with a pan filled with various other vegetable options tossed with olive oil, and let it all cook away.  Serve with a simple salad and the garlic mayonnaise after.  Go crazy with the garlic. After all, it’s just the two of you.

A big vat of simmering soup’s a good idea, too. Or a baked polenta dish.

Or…sliced peeled potatoes layered with garlic infused cream and nutmeg.  (Just either chop or mortar the garlic up small, add cream, salt, and ground nutmeg).  Push the potatoes down in the cream.  Turn the oven on to 400°.  For a salad on the side, grate some carrots, mix them with some chopped parsley, squeeze some lemon over the whole.  Sit down to a glass of wine with your loved one.  When the oven is heated, pop the potatoes in, retire to the playground of your choice.

An hour later, the house smells of mildly roasting garlicky cream.

Emerge, rosy faced and happy, in bathrobes (optional).  Serve the potato gratin on a few shredded lettuce leaves.  Carrot salad on the side.  Another glass of wine.

Speak softly and pleasantly as you eat.  And smile, reminiscently, from time to time. Don’t be in a big hurry to turn the phone back on.

There.  Love and food go so well together. And why not? They’re both as important to the human body as it is possibly important for a thing to be.

A friend of mine died, and the dinner I cooked a few nights later was absolute crap.

I should have been able to cook that dinner in my sleep:  cauliflower cheese on a bed of lettuce, diced potatoes baked with bay leaves and rosemary, boiled asparagus and lemon.  But every single thing came out bad.  The cauliflower cheese burned on top, and the sauce thinned out unpleasantly.  The potatoes tasted mushy and bland.  I overcooked the asparagus.

If anything needed to convince me that cooking is an expression of how you feel in yourself and your body, of how solidly you’re linked to the earth and to your own deepest needs and desires, that did it.

My body was involved in a private howl of grief.  It didn’t have any interest in reaching outward.  It was distracted, in the most basic of ways.

More than distracted, it was afraid.  In grief, I’ve found, there is also the terrible knowledge that you, too, are encased in a body, and that your body will die, too.  And that terror, more than anything else, keeps us from enjoying the world.  It keeps us from connecting with us.

I wonder, are we the only species that is so terrified of death that we would like to die to avoid the anxiety it causes?

Anyway, in cooking, I could see my body running away from the basic facts of my life, because those basic facts killed my friend, and then would kill me.  So I didn’t enjoy cooking.  I didn’t enjoy eating.  All the connections in the circuitry went awry.  For that moment, I didn’t want to be who I was.  I wanted to be a plant, or a dog, or an angel–anything but a human eating and enjoying life.

And I think that is the way things are.  I don’t think you can change that.  But I think you look it in the eye, and you give yourself and your body a break (”give yourself a discount,” as I can hear my friend Rudy say), and you wake up every day feeling a little differently about it, going back and forth, one bad day, one a little better, one worse, one inexplicably happy…the usual process of healing after any kind of a wound.  Then you notice you’ve come back to yourself and to the world and to life, and you figure that you’re damn lucky to have the time you do have…and you were lucky to have the time you had with your friend.

That happened, too.

So I’ll give you a recipe I made for him when he was alive.

He was a most confirmed man-about-town, and there was never much to speak of in the way of edibles in his tiny, utterly chaotic kitchen.  Dining out, you see–a way of life.  And Alex and I would always stay with him when we were in London, and he would always dine out with us.

But when I travel, after awhile I get utterly sick of dining out.  Especially when I’m dining out in indifferent places, known more for their decor and clientele than for the love they put into their food.  So one night, I just balked.

“I’ll cook us something to eat in front of the telly, so we don’t have to go out.  Whatever you’ve got in the kitchen, I’ll conjure something up.”

My friend looked at me, appalled.  “There IS nothing in that kitchen!”

“Hmmm,” I said.  “Well, we’ll see.”

I settled him and Alex down with a couple of beers and went to forage.

As I recall, I didn’t make anything particularly noteworthy that evening, but I did manage to keep us all from starvation, based on some dusty boxes of exotic dried pasta someone had given him, a gift bottle of expensive olive oil presented by his favorite Italian restaurant, a couple of packets of macadamia nuts, and — surprise! — the herbs I found growing ornamentally in his garden (”didn’t even know they were there, let alone edible!” he said).

The next time we came to stay, and I opened the refrigerator to get a bottle of white wine, there they were.

Four eggplant.

I went into the living room.  “Ahem,” I said.  My friend pretended not to hear.

“Why are there four eggplant in your refrigerator?  And, might I add, a head of garlic sitting on the counter?”

“I LOVE eggplant!  I eat it ALL the time!”

I grinned at that.  The vision of my friend, nattily attired, cooking himself up an eggplant for supper.  But I got the message.  And went out shopping for a few other things to go with.

That night, among other dishes, we had eggplant caviar.

Here’s how:

Prick however many eggplants you have with a fork so they don’t explode while they cook.  Put them on a foil lined cookie sheet in a 400 degree oven until they’ve softened and crumpled–probably about 30 to 45 minutes; it won’t matter much if they overcook a little, but you don’t want to undercook them.

When they’re done, bring them out and let them cool a little.  Just enough so you can handle them without burning yourself.  They taste better if they soak up the fixings while they’re still warm.

If you want, you can make a dressing in a bowl while you wait.  Either that, or you can just add all these disparate ingredients, one by one, to the eggplant when you’ve chopped it up, and taste for seasoning.  I do it either way, depending on how I feel.

I think that night I probably split the eggplant in half, scooped and scraped the pulp out into a bowl, mashed it about, splashed olive oil in to moisten it.  Then I added minced garlic, some chopped capers I’d found in the back of the cupboard,  the squeezings of a lemon I’d bought from the newsagent around the corner, some Maldon salt to taste.  And then lots and lots of chopped parsley and mint I found growing on the flower bed borders in the garden.

We had this with warmed up pita bread, also bought at the newsagent, as I recall.

It was a very jolly evening indeed.   It makes me sad and happy to think about, both at the same time.

At first glance, you would think that title — Cassoulet, or Cooking With What You Have — was almost demonically contradictory.  All these years I’ve been looking at those cassoulet recipes…you know the ones, you who read cookbooks:  recipes discussing the authentic dish of Carcassone, or Toulouse.  Recipes arguing about whether it’s a true cassoulet if you don’t include duck confit, or shoulder of mutton.  Recipes that call for about half a ton of goose fat, which when you look for sources on the Internet, costs roughly about as much as half a ton of semi precious stones.  All these years I’ve been reading those recipes, and thinking ha!  Well, maybe when hell freezes over.

I mean, you read these recipes and you think:  forget cassoulet.  At least, that’s what I thought, given the way I cook, which is based on a.) what I feel like at that moment and b.) what I have easily available at the moment and c.) what fits in, cooking wise, with my schedule at the moment.

So imagine my surprise, even my sly delight, when a little light went off the other night, and I realized that ALL THREE of those requirements were met by, of all things, cassoulet.

1.) I was home alone for a week, which meant I could eat meat, since the vegetarian husband was safely at work in another state,  2.) I felt like having something hearty, that could cook undisturbed while I worked through a large-ish pile on my desk, and that would smell wonderful while I did.  3.)  I actually had all the ingredients, just hanging about…if not for the Perfect Cassoulet, or even for an Authentic Toulouse Cassoulet, or even for Just Any Old Recipe for Cassoulet, at least I had all the stuff you would need if you were a peasant wife in the south of France in the nineteenth century trying to figure out what she was going to do that week for the family’s meals.

All those years of reading those cassoulet recipes, and those articles in food magazines about cassoulet.  They suddenly converged into one absolutely clear, outstanding fact:  Cassoulet is baked beans.  Baked beans and miscellaneous meats and herbs cooked a really, really, really long time.

Now I had about 3/4 of a pound of white beans lying around from the last time the organic ones were on sale at the Co-op.  And I had a bunch of herbs drying, left over from a late autumn foray into Indigo’s garden.  I had canned tomatoes.  I had ends of bread in the freezer waiting to be made into bread crumbs (cassoulets have a crumbly topping, just perfect with the unction underneath).  Most important of all, I had all these little bits and pieces of meat in the freezer that I’d bought when I found something cheap and interesting at the market.  Lamb neck.  Lamb riblets.  A pork hock.  When I see stuff like this, I bring it home and hoard it, figuring I’ll do something with it later, when I’m alone, and the Vegetarian Husband is elsewhere.

I had thought I’d make a tiny stew from the lamb neck.  I’d thought I’d bake the riblets.  The pork hock had been mainly destined to bake with some sauerkraut.  But somehow none of these things had occurred, and there they were, cluttering up my freezer en masse.

Most importantly, though, I had a small container of melted duck fat from the last time I roasted a duck.  One of the rules of my life is that I always save the duck fat, since it’s secretly just about the most delicious part of the duck.  It’s great used for sauteeing potatoes.  For cooking onions and garlic before you mash in the cooked pinto beans.  As the fat base for sauerkraut.

And then — ta da! — there was that pork skin I found in a market that caters to our local Latin American and Southeast Asian cooks.  I’d looked at it longingly, in its huge five pound packages, every time I’d gone by, remembering what smooth silkiness it used to add to my pot roasts, in the days when I cooked a lot of pot roasts.  But what on earth would I do with five pounds of pork skin?

But the last time in that market, as I stood there looking longingly once again, a butcher appeared with a tray of meat to put out.  I said, almost before I knew what I was doing, “I don’t suppose you could let me have just a half a pound of that pork skin, could you?”  And she gave me a look like I was nuts, not for wanting the pork skin, but for thinking for even a moment that she wouldn’t be delighted to cut some up for me.  (This market, by the way, is called Food For Less, and it looks like an industrial warehouse, and it stocks more local stuff and has more happy employees than just about any market I’ve ever been in.  And its butchers, who mainly deal in locally raised animals, are second to none.  I mean, you know where that liver came from.)  I went away clutching my half pound of pork skin in triumph, and cut it into little rolls and froze them when I got home.

So I had pork skin, the main ingredient that adds the oommpphhh to your average cassoulet.  (You can use olive oil, but it won’t be the same.  And, honest to God, stop worrying so much about eating fat.  As my sister in law Cindy says, “Just don’t eat so damn much!”)

Here’s what I did, a leisurely and pleasant three nights cooking, very little time spent at the stove.  The first night I brought the beans to a boil in water to cover by an inch, then let them sit, covered, for an hour.  (While this was going on, I made myself a very simple dinner of a lamb chop cooked on the griddle, with a carrot salad on the side — took about ten minutes, start to finish, and boy was it good.)  Then I drained them, put them back in the pot, covered them with more water, added a couple of branches of dried thyme, a stem of parsley, a pinch of dried oregano, a bay leaf,  a chopped carrot, a chopped half onion, eight crushed cloves of garlic, the pork hock, and about a quarter pound of pork skin cut into small pieces and tied in a piece of cheesecloth.

(Now about that pork skin.  You can add a whole piece and fish it out later.  You can add the little squares cut up without tying them in the cheesecloth, and eat them with the beans later.  Or you can do the cheesecloth routine.  I cut the pieces up to get that extra unction, then tied them up because I didn’t really want to eat them, and I figured — correctly — that they would, after they’d done their bit for me, make the dogs go wild with joy.)

I let this cook (on top of the woodstove, which was going anyway) for an hour or so, till the beans were tender but not overcooked.  Then I pulled it out and let it cool overnight.  Next day, I fished out the cheesecloth, what was left of the stems of the herbs, and the pork hock.  Cut the skin off the pork hock and tossed it in a dish with the pork skin bits decanted from the cheesecloth — that was for the dogs, later.  Then I chopped the meat off the bones, and put the meat back in with the beans — that was for me.  Put the beans in the frig.

While I made a small dinner for myself the second night (again a lamb chop, I’d liked it so much the night before, this time with an avocado and mesclun salad, and a small piece of whole meal toast with peanut butter and cherry jam for dessert), I cooked the other meats.  Melted a little duck fat in a big skillet, browned the lamb neck pieces.  Added the lamb riblets and browned them.  Added a chopped carrot, a chopped half onion, and about eight crushed garlic cloves.  Another piece of thyme, another bay leaf, another pinch of dried oregano.  After it had all browned a little, about ten minutes, I added a cup of canned tomatoes and half a cup of white wine (needless to say, you don’t need to be fussy about these measurements, you’re just adding liquid to what’s essentially a little meat stew).  Cooked that down a bit.  Added about a cup of duck broth I’d had lying around in the freezer from the last time I roasted that duck and made a broth from its bones.  I let the whole thing cook on low while I turned the ends of bread from the freezer into breadcrumbs in the Cuisinart, then I ate dinner, oh, about an hour, then I added the stew to the pot of beans.  Covered the top with a satisfying blanket of bread crumbs and dribbled some melted duck fat on top.

Now it was all ready for its final cooking, to take place, effortlessly, on a day I had specially chosen since I would be very distracted by work, and in need of a little solace after.  On THAT day, I popped it in, three hours before I wanted to eat it, uncovered, into a 300 degree oven.

Oh my, the smells that started wafting through the house about an hour later.  And then two hours later.  It was a good thing I had so much work to do, or I wouldn’t have been able to keep from wading into it early.  After about three hours, I looked in, and there it was, bubbling away in a friendly and inviting sort of way.  I turned the oven up to 500 degrees, to brown the crumbs for a last five minutes, tossed myself a heap of mesclun leaves with a tiny bit of walnut oil and lemon juice, and then, as MFK Fisher says, served it forth with a big honking glass of hearty red wine.  That first night I had one of the chunks of lamb neck and all of the riblets.  And it was absolutely, soul searingly, happiness inducing, delicious.

And you know what?  It wasn’t a hassle.  Not because it wasn’t a lot of work and a lot of ingredients, but because the work and the ingredients fit exactly with my life at exactly that moment in time.  That’s the important thing, I’ve discovered:  is it the right thing at the right time?  Does it work with what’s around you?  And is it really who you are and what’s around you right then, not what someone else has told you, but you, what you know about you.  Is it that?  Because if it is, then even making a cassoulet is a breeze, even if I had to wait about thirty years till I hit that exact moment in time.

Not to go on about brown rice, but…

No, wait a minute.  I AM going on about brown rice.  Why should I apologize?  It’s better for you than ninety per cent of the rest of the food world, and it tastes great, too.  This is something I have never understood:  why is it that something is good for you, or good for the planet, or good for anything at all trails behind it this reputation for being wussy, or foolish, or not quite pukka?  Why is that?  It’s enough to make you believe in the devil.

But that’s way off the subject…maybe.  Anyway, back to brown rice, and the brand that I particularly love, Lundberg’s organic brown rice, grown by a family operation in California, so you can see the miles and miles of rice fields if you drive (as I unfortunately do now and then) up and down the otherwise monotonous and slightly alienating Highway Five.  It’s a relief to see those rice fields.  Cheers me right up.  Even better for that long drive from Oregon to Los Angeles than cruise control.

So our local co-op takes a quite enlightened attitude toward food costs, and even though it’s dead expensive for a number of items (don’t get me started on how much they charge for whole wheat pasta), has this program called “Basic Pricing.”   Which means that certain key items throughout the store, which if you buy them are enough to sustain a decent level of delicious nutrition, are priced as low as the co-op can manage to price them.  Things like New Sammy’s Whole Wheat Bread (delicious), certain kale and chard greens (also delicious), line caught tuna (terrifically delicious), and so on.

Of course Lundberg brown rice, both long and short grain, benefits from this.  Which makes it, per pound, half the price of the same rice in other stores in the vicinity.  So all of us around here go to the co-op and stock up.

Naturally, as is always the case no matter where you are, the local conversation frequently turns to food.  It turned, the other night when I sat with two of my neighbors, to brown rice.  The first neighbor remarked that she never cooks more than she needs for the evening, “Because there’s really nothing you can do with leftover brown rice.”

Well, it was as if an electric shock had gone through me and the second neighbor (this happens a lot, this kind of sudden animation and vehemence, in any food conversation, about any kind of food, anywhere in the world — it’s always a great topic if you can’t think of anything else to say to a stranger).  We both sat up straight and said, almost at the same time, “Nothing you can do!”

“Oh my God,” the second neighbor said.  “I make a huge pot of it on Sunday, and reheat it all week when I get home.  You just put a little water in a pan, dish as much rice out as you need, mix it all up, and stick it in a 350° oven till dinner’s ready.”

“Fried rice!”  I said vigorously.  ” With mushrooms and fish sauce and scallions and cilantro and shredded lettuce and egg and frozen peas!”

“Rice salad!  I toss it with salad dressing and leftover veggies and take it to work for lunch…”

“Rice pancakes,” I said, more dreamily this time.  “Mixed with a little egg and garlic and milk, fried in butter…”

“…sometimes I wrap it in a tortilla or stick it in a pita bread with some lettuce and yoghurt…”

“Reheated refried beans and  leftover brown rice wrapped in whole wheat tortillas, topped with avocado, shredded carrot, a little sour cream….”

“Rice pudding!  Oh my God, I love brown rice pudding with heavy cream!”

“Savory rice pudding!  Add onion and cheese instead of brown sugar and cinnamon!  And if you add frozen spinach sauteed in olive oil…”

“Pilaf!  Mix it with butter sauteed almonds and raisins, some minced parsley, more melted butter,  heat it up…”

“Layer it with sour cream and green chiles and jack cheese, bake it till it’s bubbly, serve it with corn tortillas and salsa and guacamole…”

The second neighbor and I looked at each other, and burst out laughing at our own enthusiasm.  And the first neighbor admitted defeat, and accepted that there were a lot more options than she had at first perceived.  We finished up an amiable glass of wine, hugged each other good night, and they went home, leaving me to fix my solitary dinner.

Then I went to the refrigerator and looked at the comforting pot of cold brown rice on the top shelf.  And this is what I had that night:

Garlic Fried Rice with Bacon and Eggs

I had a very thick slice of bacon — the one lonely slice left from a thrifty package of bacon ends — in the freezer, so I took that out and cut it into thick batons.  Fried that in a little peanut oil while I sliced about three cloves of garlic (you can use just one clove, but in my opinion if you’re going to have garlic fried rice, then you should have GARLIC FRIED RICE), which I then gently fried along with the bacon until the bacon was crisp on the edges, and the garlic near golden.

Then I scooped out the bacon and garlic into the bowl I planned to eat out of when it was all done, and left the fat in the frying pan.  Added as much brown rice as I thought I could eat that night (about a cup and a half, cooked), salted it, and turned it around in the fat until the chill was off it and the clumps unclumped.  Then I added back the bacon and garlic, and turned the heat down to low.

Two eggs.  I cracked each one carefully into a cup, to make sure it didn’t break (half of the charm of this dish for me is the unbroken yolk spurting out over the garlic rice when I stick a chopstick into it at the table), and then even more carefully slid each egg into slight depressions on the top of the rice.  Sprinkled a little coarse salt over the eggs, clapped a lid on the pan, and set the timer for 7 minutes.  Poured myself  a glass of water (which is the best drink for this recipe, except for, maybe, beer — wine is just too genteel here) and got out a pair of chopsticks.  Rooted around in the frig and found a jar of pickled peppers, which I like to spoon on top of the rice with their vinegar, the way they do in the Philippines, and put that on the table with the water and chopsticks.

At seven minutes, I checked the eggs.  The whites were done and the yolks barely set, and I silently thanked the food gods that my timing was right.  (Otherwise I would have left the dish on for a minute or two more, all the while anxiously hovering to make sure it didn’t get to that horrible point where the yolks, instead of being unctuously liquid, turn hard like little yellow tiles.)  Well, it was right.  In fact, it was perfect.  And I sat down with my chopsticks and my vinegared peppers, and my glass of water, and a good book (Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cookery), and was as happy as it’s possible for a solitary diner to be.

And all this thanks to brown rice.  So I really can’t be blamed for going on about it, after all.

I know there are a lot of you out there who think of brown rice along the same lines as you think of Birkenstocks.  Hemp clothing.  Rasta locks on young white guys.  And I know every time anyone mentions it to you, an inadvertent pained look crosses your face, and you respond automatically with defensive thoughts of double vodka martinis, rare steaks, potatoes, and chocolate cake.

But brown rice isn’t like that.  Not really.  Not in its heart of hearts.  If you knew brown rice like I know brown rice, you wouldn’t just give it a chance, you’d welcome it into your home.  Invite it to meet guests.  Maybe even vote for it for high office.

Brown rice is absolutely terrific.  And I say this as a person who really doesn’t think all that much about health in my food choices.  Wait, scratch that.  I do think about health, but only in the sense of whether or not what I eat makes me feel good.  I never take vitamins.  They just scratch my throat and don’t do much for me one way or the other.  I do eat a lot of salads.  I love the way they taste, plus they make me feel light and energized.  And that, after all, is part of the pleasure of eating.  Sometimes you like to feel full and like you can’t move an inch before you’ve digested.  Sometimes you don’t.  It’d be weird, I think, if you felt one way or the other all the time.

Brown rice, properly approached, will not just be your friend, it will be your friend for life.  It has a nutty, deep, satisfying taste to it, when you make it right (which, by the way, all that moaning on the part of white rice enthusiasts notwithstanding is just not that hard), and you feel great after you’ve eaten it.  It goes with a lot of stuff.  And, as a lagniappe on the side, it’s allegedly terrific for you.  So, I mean, what’s not to like?

I like it a lot.  I think I’ve made that clear.  And after a lifetime spent loving white rice, I find, to my surprise, that when there’s a choice,
I spurn my former love.  This is a taste thing, not a health thing.  Trust me on this.

It’s easy to cook brown rice.  Just measure a cup of the stuff into a pot, salt it, and add two scant cups of water.  Bring to a boil.  Cover it.  Turn the heat down as low as you can (I use a flame tamer), and set the timer for 55 minutes.  Turn it off and let it sit for 10 minutes or so — you needn’t fuss about this; just as much or as little time as you need to get the rest of the meal together.  Fluff with a fork.  Eat in any one of a number of ways.

Or:  bring a huge pot of water to a boil.  Salt.   Add as much rice as you want (1 cup will feed two generously as a main course, or four as a side dish…or…).  Boil till a grain is tender — about 45 minutes.  Drain without being too fussed about getting all the water out.  Put in a buttered casserole dish and stick in the oven, set on low, say 250 degrees, till you’re ready to eat it.  Fifteen minutes, thirty minutes…it can wait this way an hour.

Now…about what you DO with it…have it plain with butter and soy sauce (I love this; they call it ‘children’s rice’ in Japan)…use it as the landing for a stir fry…put something on top of it, to soak up the juices, a piece of marinated broiled fish, a skewer of lamb kebabs, chicken adobo…

It was chicken adobo that made me want to tell you about brown rice.  I cooked a cup of rice to go with the original chicken dish, and then had all these leftovers.  So I put the chicken I hadn’t eaten on top of the leftover rice, deglazed the chicken pot with a half cup of water, poured THAT on top of the chicken, and, slapping a lid on it, stuck it in the frig.

When I got home last night, tired and hungry, I just stuck the pot in a 350 degree oven.  After about a half hour, the house started to smell wonderful.  After forty five minutes, and a revivifying glass of wine, I pulled it out, spooned it onto a plate with some grated carrot salad, and had at it.  Halfway through, I noticed I was making little noises of pleasure.  That rice had soaked up the extra juices and steamed in them, and crisped a little bit at the bottom, and tasted not just heavenly, but the way dinner would taste in heaven after you’d had a long day cloud jumping.  I looked down at my plate and said a ‘thank you’ out loud.

(By the way, chicken adobo is a Filipino dish of chicken legs and thighs cooked in vinegar and soy sauce with lots of garlic and bay leaves and peppercorns until the chicken soaks up the liquid and browns in its own fat.  The carrot salad I had with it, both nights, was just grated carrot mixed with minced green onion, tossed with a little sugar mixed in a little lime juice, a little fish sauce and chili oil added.  Terrific.  Less expensive and tasted infinitely better than any handful of vitamins, and probably a lot healthier for you, too.)

There’s something really satisfying about just tossing what otherwise might be thought of as holiday detritus into a  pot and, while you’re sprawling on the sofa in the vicinity of your loved ones, sharing an evening of post festivity digestion, knowing that lunch for the next day is cooking up with hardly a finger lifted on your part.  Which is just as well, because after making the holiday meal, lifting said finger is just more effort than you’re willing to, at that moment, sign on for.

Turkey Soup.  The inevitable and lovely luncheon for the day after.  When, next day,  everyone comes trooping in from the cold, from the walk they all felt they had to take in the woods, after the ingestion the night before of the heritage brined turkey (fabulous, and cooked in half the time expected, because, we decided as we ate, it wasn’t bung full of God Knows What injected in the Torture Farm where the usual butterball is raised), potatoes mashed with cream and butter and cheddar and green onions, carrots cooked in cream…and a wild variety of homemade cookies…among other things…when everyone sits down at the lunch table, needing nourishment, but feeling just the tiniest bit jaded in the taste buds, that is when Turkey Soup really comes into its own.

Of course, the traditional Turkey Soup is even easier than the one I essayed this year, being made up of, literally, leftovers:  mashed potatoes, carrots, peas, stuffing, all mingled with a broth.  But I  didn’t make any stuffing this year, and there weren’t any potatoes or carrots left, thanks to some very interested teenagers.  And, also, I had my own cravings.  The cook is allowed to have these.  The artist cannot be denied her inspiration. It’s part of the deal.

However, I do know my family of origin.  Hard core traditionalists.  Suspicious, even, of garlic mayonnaise if it’s served on any Anglo holiday.

So I cannily had some minestrone in the freezer, which I brought out and warmed up in case there might be an initial difficulty luring said traditionalists outside of their comfort zone.  And then I merrily put the terrifically rich turkey broth I’d made the night before together with some sliced celery and mushrooms, a lot of garlic, a little soy sauce, some cooked brown rice, what was left of the minimal wine gravy I’d made to go with the bird (pan drippings deglazed with red wine, then a little butter swished in off the heat; irresistible even with brined pan drippings — or maybe because of, come to think of it).  At the last minute, a bag of frozen spinach, and a lot of chopped green onions.

Sure enough, everyone but me went for the minestrone first.  Everyone but me and my canny eighteen year old nephew who had already won major points by declining an all day hike in favor of the meal (”What?  Miss one of Aunt Tod’s lunches?  No way!”).  He just looked at me when he got to the two faintly bubbling pots on the stove, and all it took was a slight nudge of my head toward the turkey soup to send him, happily, in the same direction, announcing as he filled his bowl that he was going to have the minestrone AFTER.

The sight and smell of that Turkey Soup at his place and at mine had all the minestrone eaters pausing in midbite.  They sniffed the air.  I noticed one of my brothers covertly watching my nephew to see his reaction.  At the look of pure bliss that swept over my nephew’s face, my brother finished his own bowl with a contemplative air and then got up to go back to the stove.  Came back with a steaming golden bowl of that Strange Turkey Soup.  Sipped it and said, without even a grudging hint to his voice, “Okay.  This is the best Turkey Soup I ever had.  I wouldn’t've believed it when I heard that stuff about mushrooms and brown rice, but I gotta…”  His voice trailed off and he went back to eating with a faint smile.

One by one, the other minestrone eaters got up and got new helpings, too.  And there were faint smiles all around the table.

Even on my vegetarian husband’s face.  He, of course, stuck to the minestrone.  But he was the only one who ate it topped with garlic mayonnaise.  It’s impossible for him to eat garlic mayonnaise without a smile.

But for the Turkey Soup, here’s how:

First make your Turkey Broth.  I’ve seen recipes that say a brined turkey doesn’t make a good broth, and I can’t figure out what they mean.  That brined turkey made a particularly rich, gelatinous, delicious broth in our house.  But on reflection, it’s possible that this is because the original turkey was one of Dawn the Egg Lady’s turkeys, one of the ones that used to run about her front yard, dodging the new puppy, and heading for the family compost heap for the stray squash seeds there.  I mean, these were well exercised, happy turkeys (insofar as a turkey can be said to be happy, I guess), and the one I got was no different.  So maybe this recipe should start:  “Take the carcass of a happy bird.”

So.  Take the carcass of a happy bird.  Just toss the cleaned bones from the plates returning empty to the kitchen after dinner into a large stock pot  that already holds the turkey neck, giblets, and cleaned trimmings from the vegetables you served with the main meal (in this case, celeriac peelings, carrot peelings and ends, celery ends and tops), a few cloves of unpeeled garlic (I tossed in a whole head), a few peppercorns, and a bay leaf.  If you feel up to it, take whatever meat is left from the turkey carcass, store separately, chop the bones up and toss them in, too.  Simmer until it smells terrific and tastes unctuous — about an hour, but I never keep track, and it doesn’t hurt it to go longer.   This last simmer can happen that night, or the next morning.  If your house is normally heated — if you’re not one of those people who keeps it like a hothouse year round — you can even just leave the pot out on the stove and bring it to a boil first thing in the morning, before turning it down to the simmer.

About an hour before lunch, drain the finished broth into another pot through a colander; throw out the detritus left (or save it, minus the bones, to feed your dogs like I do).  For the soup, use as much broth as you think you’ll need for the family (take out the rest and freeze for later dishes).  Add to this about a cup of sliced mushrooms, as much sliced celery as you have left in the frig (say, about half a bunch), a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, and some of the drippings from the turkey.  A little red wine, if you have some left from the night before, doesn’t come amiss, but isn’t at all necessary.

Cook this about fifteen minutes, half an hour.  Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Correct the seasoning — you might want to add a little more soy sauce.  You can turn off the heat now, and let it wait a half hour or so before the final touch, if you like.  Right before you call everyone to fill their bowl, bring the soup back to a boil, turn it down to a simmer, add as much chopped or shredded turkey meat as you like, a handful or two of whatever cooked starch you have in the frig (I had a choice of cooked white beans, cooked whole wheat fusilli, or cooked brown rice, and went for the last on the theory that it was the only starch not already found in the minestrone), and a bag, if you have it, of frozen spinach.  Heat through.  Serve with a bowl of chopped green onions to sprinkle on top at will.  Anything left over in the green onion department can be added to the leftover soup to serve as the cook’s lunch the day after THAT.

Happy lunch.  And afterwards, if you’re at all like my family, you’ll find your thoughts and conversation turning to Christmas dinner….

There are some foods that at this point feel about as quaint and retro as a bean bag chair.  Fondue, for example.  Uno bars.  Ridged potato chips with sour cream and dried onion soup dip.

Not that they’re not delicious.  (Actually, I love all of the above, along with canned dried onion rings, La Vache Qui Rite, and grapes mixed with sour cream and brown sugar.  Not that I would admit it to anyone.)  They’re just mated permanently in our minds with some specific time and place.  The more au courant they seemed at the time, the hipper, the more up to the minute…well, the more you know when you think of them, you think also of black octagonal plates.  And of black octagonal plates, the less said, the better.

But let’s not be put off by guilt by association.  Some of these retro foods need to come out of the closet and take their place in the sunshine where they belong.  They need to cast off the old reputation for quaint provincialism.  They need, in short, to reinvent themselves.

Such a food is quiche.

Even the word quiche can make you wince, and make you think of the various stodgy and overpriced messes perpetrated in its name.  Instead of thinking–as you would, if you were thinking of the quiche you make to suit your own tastes in your very own home–of a comforting, warm, creamy custard enrobing a savory marriage of flavors, all enclosed in a buttery, tender crust.

There.  That sounds so much better than something you would take out of an avocado green kitchen, being careful not to spill anything on your leisure suit.  Doesn’t it.   Much better than that tired excuse for a vegetarian entree, served in buffet lunch restaurants around the world, mainly to get rid of all the odd vegetables in the kitchen left over from unsuccessful salads.

Quiches fit all my requirements for a meal.  They’re inexpensive. They take well to improvisation.  They’re delicious.  And they’re easy to cook.

If the crust thing bothers you, there are two ways to deal with it:  1.)  buy a readymade crust at the grocery store.  They’re pretty good.  and 2.) make a hardy tart shell that is practically foolproof, especially if you have a food processor and are even half paying attention to what you’re doing.

Here’s how for the shell (thank you, Marion Cunningham):

Mix 1 cup of flour (or 2/3 cup white flour and 1/3 whole wheat flour) with some salt.  Put in the bowl of your food processor, and cut into it 6 tablespoons of chilled butter.   Pulse this up and down until the butter looks like a variety of differently sized crumbs.  Then mix an egg yolk with a couple of tablespoons of cold water.  With the processor going, pour this in the from the top.  The dough should mix and form a ball around the blades; if it doesn’t–if it still looks crumbly–add a little more cold water to the cup you mixed the yolk in, and add it, little bit by little bit, until the dough DOES mix and form a ball etc.

Take the dough out, wrap in plastic wrap, and shove in the frig for at least twenty minutes.

When you need it, take it out and put it in the middle of your quiche pan.  Mind you, this does not have to be a quiche pan, purpose built and bought from a department store with the words “Quiche pan” on the side.  It can be a pie plate.  A Spanish cazuela.  A tart pan.  Anything ovenworthy that will be big enough to hold the finished product.

Now push down with the heel of your hand, and, using the heel and your fingers, push and pull the dough until it covers the bottom and sides of the pan.  Don’t worry if the crust tears.  Just pull a bit off where you don’t need it and use that as a patch.  Just make sure you don’t leave any too thick spots, especially around the edges–that’ll make the whole thing a little stodgy when you’re done.  You see why this is a good recipe.  None of that floured surfaces and rolling pin stuff, and then the crust sticking to the rolling pin, and then the worry that if you work the dough too much, it’ll come out tough.  Nope.  This crust is friendlier than that.

If you have time now, cover the crust, and put it back in the frig to rest.  When you’re ready to proceed, preheat oven to 425 degrees, take the pan out, and, with a fork, pierce the raw crust all over its bottom.  This is so it doesn’t swell up in the oven.  Then, with a pastry brush if you have one, or just a wadded up piece of paper towel if you don’t, paint the bottom of the crust with mustard (if you’re making a savory tart), or honey (if you’re making a sweet one).  I find this keeps the crust from getting soggy later, when it’s filled.

At this point, you can fill it with anything you like (and I do emphasize that verb ‘like’…this is not the place, if there ever is one, to get rid of all the odds and ends you can’t figure out any other way to mix), and then cover the whole thing with a custard.  Basic recipe for a good custard is 3 eggs mixed with a cup of milk and a quarter cup of cream, salt added.  But you can fiddle with that, too.  4 eggs and 3/4 cup of milk.  3 eggs and 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup yogurt.  Substitute sour cream for some of the liquid.  Etc.

Paprika the top, if it’s a savory custard.  That looks nice.  If you think of it, put little dabs of butter there, too, or dribble on a little oil.  Bake at 425° for fifteen minutes, then turn the oven down to 350°, and bake another thirty minutes.  It should be brown and puffy when it’s done, and smelling of its ingredients.  If you have any doubts at all, stick a toothpick in the custard and see if it comes out clean.   Let the tart sit for a few minutes on your counter to settle–a good time to have a little appetizer at the table.  Serve slices with a green salad on the side.

Delicious.  Comforting, too.  And your family thinks you’re great for making that pie crust.  If you bought it, just don’t bother telling them.  You deserve some credit, after all, for restoring quiche to its rightful position.

(This is what I did the other night:  Anchovy/Mushroom/Cheddar Cheese Quiche.  I sautéed a handful of mushrooms in the olive oil from a can of anchovies. Salt.  When they were done, turned off the heat and tossed them with minced parsley and garlic clove.  I cut a few slices of cheddar cheese into small dice.  Scattered half on the bottom of the pastry shell.  Spread the mushrooms on top.  Lay the anchovies from the can on top of the mushrooms. Scattered the rest of the cheese over all.  Poured on a custard made of 3 eggs, 1 cup milk, 1/4 cup cream, salt, and liberal dashes of hot pepper sauce.  Dribbled what was left of the oil in the anchovy can on top.  Sprinkled paprika.  Cooked as per instructions above.  While it sat, we had a salad of grated carrot, minced parsley, and marinated herring.  Then served the quiche with a little green salad.  Absolutely divine.)

By now, you’ve probably got the idea that I’m not big on sweets.   It’s true.  I really don’t think about them much — except, of course, to long for See’s candy around the holidays (especially the dark chocolate covered marzipan).  I don’t dream about cakes, or yearn to spend a Sunday baking cookies, and my mind’s palate does not waste its time tasting phantom pies.  Nope.  Definitely not a dessert person.  Oh sure,  I’ll have some ice cream now and then, and when there’s company, I’ll serve out a dish of it with a little capful of Grand Marnier spilled on top, just to dress it up a little, at not much extra hassle to the cook.  And sometimes when I’m alone, what I really want after my meal is a big piece of toasted New Sammy’s sourdough bread, slathered with butter and either honey or raspberry jam — although that probably hardly counts as a sweet to a true dessert person.

On the other contradictory hand, I have always been annoyed by recipes that say things like:  “Of course, this dish is so rich, that you should serve nothing but fresh fruit to follow.”  Oh yeah, sure, I think to myself when I read that.  Fresh fruit.  Like they’re serving that themselves.

But the truth is, I do like a little fresh fruit after a meal.  In fact, a lot of lunches get finished off with an apple or a pear sliced up and put on the table between me and the husband while we read our respective luncheon reading material.  Or a handful of cherries. Or a bowl of just washed grapes.  Or (best) a few fresh ripe figs.  I mean, if I look at it objectively, I really shouldn’t get so annoyed when I read that recommendation about fresh fruit.  I really shouldn’t think of it as just Nazi calorie policing.

I eat a lot of fruit, a lot of different ways.  Although not for the health bit.  It turns out I just like it that way.

It’s true that unadorned fresh fruit is not my idea of an after dinner treat.  But, again when I think about it, almost all my favorite home desserts are adorned fruit — one way or another.  It’s decked out fruit of one kind or another that gets passed around if I’m dining, as I often am, with loved ones and friends.  Fruit that’s been just a little bit fussed with, its tie straightened and its hair brushed for company.  No matter what my theory about what I think I like to eat, in the end, what I do proves that what I like to eat is fruit.

Like so:  Pieces of dried fruit (mango, papaya, fig, apricot, persimmon) scattered on a plate with a few chocolate chips or jagged pieces of broken up dark chocolate.  Slices of quince paste alternating with slices of full fat monterey jack cheese, to be eaten together in one luscious, squishy bite.  Fresh raspberries nestled in cream, crystal brown sugar scattered on top.  Strawberries dipped in sour cream and the same brown sugar.  Baked apples.

My favorite, though, is baked pears.  The way Martha Rose Shulman taught me how to make them, in her divine book Provençal Light, which is an example of a cookbook meant to help you eat less fat (my usually most hated form of cookbook) that turns out to help you cook simply and deliciously no matter how many calories you think you should consume.  She says she learned this method from Christine Picasso.  Another bit of art we have to thank a Picasso for, in my opinion, and, much as I admire Cubism in theory, I have to say that in the end this recipe has done more to improve my quality of life.

Of course, I’ve fiddled with it, and tamed it to where I don’t have to pay as much attention to it as perhaps Ms. Shulman or Ms. Picasso would like.  But it’s to their credit entirely that no matter how lazy I get with it, it still always comes out right.  And of course, it’s the ideal dessert for one of my favorite cooking methods:  pile everything in one oven, in different dishes at different times, and have them all come out at the same time.

The other night, I was braising an oxtail just for myself alone, in a basin of red wine and herbs, and of course you know how long an oxtail takes to submit to your will — i.e. a really long time.  I couldn’t bear to turn on the oven just for it alone; what a waste.  So I grated some carrots, put them in some cream, and shoved them in after.  Then a few potatoes to bake, on the theory that I could use them later for soup or whatever (I did, too, and the whatever was delicious).
I halved a couple of tomatoes, too, scattered some rosemary on them, and put them on the lowest shelf underneath everything else.

But there was still a little room in the oven.

Looking around the kitchen speculatively, my eye landed on my overflowing fruit bowl.  It is autumn, after all, and autumn means Indigo Ray is desperately trying to find a home for all of her apples and all of her pears, all of which seem to ripen at approximately the same time.  So I had a big haul, just sitting there, piled.  The pears were almost ripe but not quite.  And that, as a matter of fact, is the best kind of pear to use for Baked Pears.

Like so:

Take as many pears as you like and will fit into whatever baking dish you choose.  Wash them, and with a paring knife, cut a little circle out of each one’s bottom.  As you do, fill the hole with a spoonful of honey, then quickly set the pear right side up in the baking dish.  When they’re all nestled neatly, each one next to its neighbor, comfortable but not spread out, pour about an inch of water into the bottom of the dish.  Scatter a few whole cloves about.  You can sprinkle a bit of sugar on top, but I never bother.  Put into an oven at whatever temperature you’ve got everything else going at, and bake for a really long time until the pears are wizened and crackly looking, and the water/honey mixture has thickened.  This takes about 2 hours at 350°, or about an hour and a half at 400°.  Or more or less, you know, as usual.  Cook ‘em till they look and smell done to you.

They’re great hot on their own or with a little cream poured over, or next to a scoop of ice cream.  They’re great the next day for breakfast with some of the syrup spooned over them, and a little full fat yoghurt on the side.  They’re a wonderful afterthought to the next night’s dinner.  And you can just keep them in their baking dish, covered, in the frig, all week, and spoon them out, one by one, at will.

Well, if it’s THAT kind of fruit.  Well then.  I definitely eat that kind of fruit for dessert, and when I do, I know I’m home.