Even in the most devoted cook’s life, there comes that inevitable time when, for reasons of anything ranging from the worst tragedies to the most simple ennui, you just can’t focus on fixing a meal. Even for those of us who love to cook, and think of it as a high point of the day–sometimes you just wake up and can’t do it. Or sometimes someone who lives around you wakes up and just can’t do it. Maybe someone broke a limb, or a car broke down, or you’ve just spent a week cooking for a house full of guests.  At any of these times, what comes into its own is the Neighbor Meal.

The Neighbor Meal is one of the warmest, best, and simplest ways of connecting yourself in…well, the neighborhood, however you define that.  And you can define it a lot of ways.  The immediate vicinity.  A group of friends.  A group joined together by a common interest.  Any group, really, that is connected by a thread of community.  And the best way of strengthening that thread is to give or exchange food.

We have a lot of Neighbor Meal traditions out here in the little alpine valley where I live.  When a woman has a baby, we do a roster so that she gets enough food to feed the rest of her family for a short period while she settles in with the newborn.  (My split pea soup–see below–goes over big here, especially with families with kids.  And you can freeze it ultra successfully.) When someone is ill, we all go on the alert and bring food. If someone goes to the hospital, we leave food at their home for the remaining family.  All of these things.

I have noticed, in the preparation and presentation of the Neighbor Meal, that the person getting the most out of the gift of food is not always the recipient Neighbor.  Quite often, it’s me.  I’ll never forget the courtesy with which the Indigo Ray, in the hospital for an operation on cancer many years ago, received a demented, distracted box of lemon squares.  I’d completely forgotten that she didn’t eat white sugar or white flour, in my total freakout that she was in the hospital at all. But she accepted the gift for what it was: a way of soothing myself, while I fooled myself into thinking I was soothing her. And I suppose just the fact that I had brought something and was trying to hide my own upset strengthened the thread, too.

And then there was last year when I went to a friend’s house, where she was slowly dying of a terrible disease. She who had loved food as much as I do, she couldn’t eat solids any longer.  I spent two days making three different kinds of soups, liquidizing them carefully, with a necessary obsessiveness: any little bits left unstrained would be a positive danger.  The next time I saw her, she could no longer speak, but she wrote out appreciative thanks about the soups, which she claimed to have eaten for a week after I went back to the States.  I didn’t believe her.  I knew those soups had been pecked at by her distracted husband, and then thrown away. But I loved her even more for the grace that knew I needed to be needed right then, and that the only way I could express my own love was in the kitchen. I loved her all the more for knowing and acknowledging that, and the last time I saw her, the day before she died, she wrote vigorously on her white board again about the soup and how good it was. That was all for me. I had meant to comfort her, but she was comforting me. Although maybe, now I think of it, her comforting of me was a comfort for her, too.

So the thread, complex and beautiful, is woven.

I thought of this last night, when, tired of myself, which meant, inevitably, tired of my own productions, even my (gasp!) food, I gratefully turned to a hamper that my neighbor across the street brought over on Christmas Day. Homemade tamales.  Spinach enchiladas. Spicy Spanish rice. Salsa verde. I heated them all up, tossed what lettuce I had with a diced avocado, minced green onions, walnut oil and a squeeze of lime, and crowded everything on a plate. And it was not just entirely delicious (I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood of Extremely Talented Cooks), it was comforting, too…to think that she had packed that basket and brought it over just when I needed it. I had needed it, and the fact of being a part of that neighborhood web fed me as much as the delicious food on my plate. And I think she liked bringing it, too.

(And in case you want a simple Neighbor Meal to take to someone, here is my recipe, cadged off a bag of split peas, for The Perfect Neighbor Meal Split Pea Soup:

Wash and sort a pound of split peas. Put in a large soup pot with 8 cups of water, 1 cup chopped celery, 1 cup chopped onion, 1 1/2 cups chopped carrot, a bit of dried thyme rubbed between your fingers, a bit of red pepper, and a bay leaf. Bring to a boil, and them simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour, until the peas are tender. Salt. You can mash the peas with a spoon, or blend the soup in a blender or processor, or (what I usually do) just leave them the way they are, since when you reheat the soup, the peas will cook some more and start to dissolve on their own. (It tastes best at this stage, and best of all after you’ve frozen the soup, thawed it, and reheated.) At the last minute, add fresh ground pepper, and serve with grated cheddar or a dollop of sour cream on top.

If you want, you can add a ham hock to the start of the process.  But it’s absolutely swell without, and that way you don’t have to inquire if the neighbors at the receiving end eat ham.

There is no child in the world who doesn’t love this soup. Trust me on this one. And it will comfort you to make it almost as much as it will comfort them to eat it.  Trust me on that one, too.)

It’s really annoying when fish you get at the supermarket isn’t as fresh as advertised. Take yesterday. I’ve spent a lot of time scoping out each market’s way of doing things—the Co-op’s dependable, but they don’t mark their package date so you have to figure out how fresh the stuff is by the sell by date…but the butchers there are terrifically helpful when you ask. The cheap/good market could care less about its fish counter, so unless I see something I know is a deal, I don’t bother about them. But the one fish counter I thought I had learned to trust was the Upscale Market. Upscale Markets, in my experience, frequently have the best deals hidden in the midst of the rest of their overpriced/underripe/extravagant luxuries inventory. They’re the ones who get the best cheap imported pasta from their distributor. They’re the ones who have the best markdown when you buy a case of wine (15%, as a matter of fact). They’re the ones who mark their slightly browning organic rib steaks down the farthest.

So they’re always on my shopping radar. I stop in there now and then to see what I can find. (Also, because they’re upscale, the bottle return area is never as jammed and filthy as at the other stores. A shopping hint.)

And lo! My patience with them was apparently rewarded. One day I was in there, looking at a pile of wild red snapper, all of which had been packed about, oh, a week ago. So I rang the little bell. And the nice man who came out, when I timidly asked if he had any snapper packed that day—his eyes lit up. He asked exactly how much I wanted, and when he brought out the package, it was cheaper than the stuff in the case. “Just went on sale,” he said, evading my look, and apparently going back to work. But I could see him watching me out of the corner of his eye.

He was happy. I knew he was happy. I was SURE he was happy to finally have a customer who actually NOTICED HOW FRESH THE FISH WAS.

Subsequent trips proved me right. His eyes began to light up just seeing me approach the counter. He has given me the freshest snapper, the freshest salmon, the freshest tuna, the freshest halibut that was in the store that day. (We’re inland, so we’re not talking sushi fresh. But the best I can get, anyway.) And, as a lagniappe, he’s also cut down enormous pieces of skirt steak to just enough for a dinner for one. More, he always looks happy to do it.

So I should have known better when I went in yesterday, and he was nowhere to be found. There were stacks and stacks of packages of all kinds of fish: snapper, salmon, halibut, flounder, sole…and all of it packed the day before, or, worse, DAYS before.

Only the cod was packed that day.

When I rang the bell, at first no one came. That should have warned me too. So I went away and came back and rang it again. A rather harried woman answered. And said, when I asked if she’d packed anything that day, “No, it was all yesterday.” Pause. “Is there anything else you need?”

No, I said, beating a hasty retreat. No, nothing at all. I grabbed the package of cod on the way out.

I should have known better. I really should have known. It might have been packed that day. But it had been sitting around there for at least a day longer, and she doubtless just got around to packing it that morning.

My guy never would have done that.

I should have known. At almost ten dollars a pound, I REALLY should have known.

But we have to live with reality. I’m a half hour away from the store. I can’t just run back and return it. The stuff’s not bad, just not as fresh as it should be. Which means, when I open the package at the dinner preparation hour that night, and get a whiff of cod where none should be, I give a sigh and rethink my dinner plans.

No point in just grilling it. Better to tart it up with something. So I sighed again, spread the fillet out, shook some coarse salt on both sides, and popped it back in the fridge. The salt, I figured, would firm it up and give it a better flavor.

I then gave the Beloved Husband a choice: Jamaican codfish stew, with chiles and coconut milk and cilantro? His eyes lit up. Then I said: Cod and Potato Pie. And his eyes (predictably, given that the potato is his ur-food) REALLY lit up.

So Cod and Potato Pie it was. Which in French is Cabillaud au Gratin. And the very refined recipe I have for it in a lovely book called The Art of Simple French Cooking calls for celery salt, and using a sieve to push the potatoes through, and scalding the milk that goes into them…and a couple of other things I either didn’t have, or didn’t plan on doing.

No matter. Our cod and potato pie was delicious. Easy, too, relatively speaking (once I got rid of that sieve and that scalding anyway).

And—very important—not many dishes dirtied in the making of this pie! Very important.

Here’s how:

First I made a court bouillon to use for cooking the potatoes and then the cod. This is far easier than the name makes it sound. I threw, in a saucepan, a broken carrot, a broken up piece of celery, the insides of a garlic bulb (about six small cloves stuck together), some peppercorns, a bay leaf, a parsley stem, a sprig of thyme. Brought to a boil and simmered it till it smelled nice.

Then I peeled and chunked a pound of potatoes. Put them in the court bouillon, brought it back to a boil, turned it down.

In a heatproof mixing bowl, I stirred ¼ cup of milk, 2 tablespoons of butter, a bunch of chopped parsley, and a couple of cloves of minced garlic. Pepper. No salt. There’d be enough with the cod soon enough.

Preheated oven to 400 degrees. Put the heatproof bowl in the oven until the butter melted and the milk was warmed.

Took it out. When the potatoes were done, I scooped them out (leaving all that nice bouillon behind) and into the mixing bowl. Also scooped out the garlic bulb, popped the cloves from their skins, and added them. Mashed away with a potato masher, adding a little of the bouillon to get a nice texture.

In the rest of the bouillon, I added about 2/3 of a pound of cod, salt shaken off (not too severely), cut into pieces to fit the pan. Just brought it to where the heat shimmered on the top of the broth, and cooked till it flaked (about eight minutes, more or less). Then I scooped out the fish, chunked it up with my fingers, removing any bones, and tossed it in with the potatoes.

(I SAVED THE BROTH. Just clapped a lid on the pan and put it in the fridge. It’ll make a terrific veggie soup later in the week, all I have to do is add diced potato and carrot and celery and a chopped onion, and then…)

I stirred all this together, then decanted it into a casserole dish. (I forgot to butter the dish first. I ALWAYS forget to butter the dish first. And for the life of me, I can’t really see that it makes that much difference one way or another…)

The top of the dish, I spread with bread crumbs, which I made by crumbling a piece of New Sammy’s sourdough bread. Then I dotted the whole with butter. And popped back into the 400 degree oven until the house smelled wonderful (about fifteen minutes, give or take five or ten).

We had this with corn on the cob, and a tomato and marjoram salad (thanks, Paul, for the tomatoes). And it was just great.

Although it would have been even greater if the fish had been absolutely fresh.

But when you’ve got lemons, as long as they’re not utterly past the due date, make cod and fish pie. Or something like that…

And I’m afraid I consider it my duty as a citizen to tell the Upscale Market that they have to pay more attention when they pack their damn fish…

So there was a good article by Michael Pollan in the NY Times about the rise in fascination with watching ‘others’ cook (ie professional chefs), and the decline in home cooking (also, just as a fascinating aside, mentioning research that shows the rise in obesity as linked to the decline of the home meal). And there was tweeting about it, one can almost imagine this as being practically knee jerk, a no-brainer, about how Michael Pollan wants us women back in the kitchen.  Which made me immediately yelp, “you GUYS.  you’re missing the point!”

Because it’s exactly at this point that feminism has gotten into a cul de sac, even a slightly resentful, surly cul de sac. I mean, you can see why the feminism of the late Fifties through the Seventies emphasized that girls aren’t allowed to do what boys do.  And, I’m afraid to say, you can also see why they were encouraged to emphasize this and campaign about this by the mass media and the corporations.

Look.  In a patriarchal society, what the boys do automatically becomes more important than what the girls do. This means, for example, that being an investment banker becomes more important than being a nursery school teacher. Okay, we all know that one. We all bemoan that one. But do we look at the roots of it and what it really means? It means, of course, that being someone whose default setting is to beat the hell out of the other guy and be the dominant one gets more prestige and more resources than someone whose default setting is to care for and nurture others.

I daresay just about anyone out there can see where THAT got us.

So feminism, I have to say, has got to go back to work on this one.  It can’t just be about doing what the boys do. It has to be about upholding the importance of what the girls do. Because it’s more important to eat and to feed your loved ones than it is to make money.  Well, it is. It IS.

In other words, all you women who were forced to give up cooking for yourself and your family (and all you men, too, as a matter of fact) because you have no time anymore, do not hide out in the faux virtue of thinking that means you’ve taken a step forward out of the kitchen.  Unh uh. What you’ve done is you’ve walked into a rabbit trap with your eyes wide shut. You’ve given up something of basic importance to the achievement of your own autonomy for the convenience of a world that regards you as just something to be milked.  Work long hours. Spend money from working long hours.  Work longer hours to have more money to spend. Get less and less gratification in the process. Get madder and madder, and so get sold more and more crap that promises you a reward for how mad you are.

This is not feminism.  This is being conned in a big, big way.

Okay, you really don’t like to cook? Don’t cook then. It’s like sex, though. There are probably some people who don’t authentically like sex, but my guess is they’re a very small group of people. On the other hand, if you’re forced to have sex, you’re going to hate it worse than cleaning out the attic on a hot day.

You get my point? There has to be freedom from constraint, there has to be leisure enough to contemplate, there has to be calm before you can know who you are and what you want. And once you do know that, my own feeling is that you’re going to love sex, you’re going to love nature, and you’re going to love FOOD. I mean, if you’re a human being. How can you help it? I mean, unless you’re so drugged up by pharmaceuticals, recreationals, audio visuals, and terror that you can’t even feel your own self.

If that is true, stop it right now. I’m not kidding. You’re not just making your own life worse, but the lives of those around you, and the world, too.

And one way to stop that is to recast Feminism as support for those virtues of nurturing, compassion, partnership, and just all round pleasure that have always been denigrated in our culture as ‘girly stuff’. I personally adore girly stuff. Girly stuff needs to be reclaimed as a ruling power in our culture…before it’s too late.

So let’s start reclaiming it.  Start with something easy.  Let’s start with a Baked Potato.

For everyone who says cooking at home is too difficult, too time consuming, a Baked Potato is the ideal riposte. Of course, you do have to have an hour before you eat it. At least before you eat it the first time (you should bake a lot of Baked Potatoes at once, save energy, use the leftovers for all manner of easily thrown together meals). But with a little planning, this can be managed.

First buy your potato. This should be an organic one, not treated with sprouticide, which is a particularly hard to get rid of pesticide. This should also be one that has a nice dusky, papery skin, no sprouts, no green stuff (that green stuff means incorrect storage, and makes you a little nauseous if you eat it; just cut the green part off…but you want the skin with a baked potato so try to get one absolutely ungreen to start). Scrub until clinging dirt unclings. Stick a knife into it in a few places so it doesn’t explode when you cook it. Put in oven (toaster oven ideal for this) at 400 degrees for about forty five minutes to an hour, depending on its size and how done you like it. Squeeze it gently or poke with a fork to test doneness.  It won’t hurt to leave it in the oven for longer (just makes the skin even crispier), or turn off the oven and leave it warm till you want to eat it. Then EAT IT. Split it in half, mash with a fork, top with topping of your choice: unsalted butter. sour cream. hot sauce. garlic mayonnaise. You make the call.

With a salad and a piece of corn, this makes a pretty darn good meal. It probably cost you twenty cents for the potato. All you had to do was wash it, pierce it, stick it in the oven, and pull it out again. This is probably less trouble than it takes to unwrap a hamburger from Wendy’s and then throw the detritus away.

As for those extra baked potatoes you made? Many choices available to you. Dice ‘em and fry ‘em later with onions for hash browns. Scoop out the pulp and mash it with cheese and butter and milk, bake it later. The skins can be cut with scissors into lengths, basted with butter and hot sauce, and baked till they taste like high class versions of potato chips.

And so on.

If you do this feeling that you’re degraded by being in the kitchen, consider this: who is actually cooking the meals you are actually consuming? Is it right to have someone so much lower on the economic food chain, so dissed and overworked, being the person who provides you with something essential to your well being? Is this the kind of culture we want? Is this the kind of culture Feminism is meant to help deliver?

I think not.

Back to the Baked Potato. We had ours for lunch. And for dinner, they’ll be hashed, served with a frittata and a tomato and chive salad.

Now, THAT’S a Feminist meal, for sure.

I was set on having Salad Niçoise, last night, or at any rate, a bastard version involved orrechiette– I mean, it was so damn hot. Then there was this fresh red snapper at the market; I had to buy it, of course I had to buy it.  Good price, too.

But when I got home, it was still too hot. And we were both in miserable moods. I didn’t really want to cook.  So I thought–have the fish tomorrow night. Because I’ve discovered a sneaky way of keeping it fresh overnight, one that’s perfectly obvious, actually, if you can mix categories and think salt cod. I sprinkle the filets on both sides with coarse salt, cover them, and pop them in the fridge. They’re fresh as they’ll ever be once they’ve left the market that way. Next night (tonight, that is), we’ll have them griddled, then served with lemon and soy, with black rice, corn on the cob, and a sweet tomato/basil salad.

The last few days have been a bit of a push, what with Alex having discovered a lot of footage he went to a great deal of trouble to get went bad; for some reason, some technical glitch, it has to be reshot.  And I, of course on the same day, found that the printer for EAP somehow left off a crucial graphic element on one of the book’s covers.  Can’t figure out why or how it happened, but, of course, must be resigned to it, since there are now a few thousand odd copies printed like that.  So needless to say, we’re both walking around the house, smiling tenderly at each other, and not saying much–what can’t be cured must be endured, as they say. But here’s the thing: it actually helps to have a gentle, good meal when that kind of upheaval rolls through. It actually helped to have that salad last night, with some good rosè.  And, dammit, it’ll help to have that fish and everything else tonight. Not to mention how easy it is to fix, which is also helpful on a day where it feels like technical issues are pressing you into the ground so you can’t get up…like you’re in a Cocteau film. The best cure for that, in my opinion, is a simple, delicious dinner, quietly held with a loved one, where both of you tacitly agree not to talk about business.  Just the food, the dogs, how lucky you are to be healthy and in love.

I can’t tell you how to do that last, since you’ll have your own healing conversational gambits (and if you don’t, you should be busy developing them as crucial to a modern marriage),but I can tell you how to grill Salted Red Snapper.

Here’s how:

About three quarters of a pound of good, fresh snapper filets for two people. Lay them flat in a baking dish and sprinkle both sides with coarse salt.  Leave for at least thirty minutes, but overnight is fine, if you need to wait.

When ready to cook, heat up a ridged grill pan on the stove. Gently wash the salt off the filets, pat them dry. Paint them with olive oil (I paint one side, then lay that one down first in the pan, and paint the other side while the fish cooks).  No need to salt, obviously.

When the pan sizzles, put the fish in so the filets lie flat. Grill for about three minutes, then turn. There should be nice black griddle marks on the filets. Cook until done to your liking (with us it’s about three minutes more, but we like our fish a bit underdone).  Serve with steamed rice (black rice is always nice here), corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes with basil and balsamic vinegar.

You can make a little sauce to go on the fish and the rice by combining equal parts soy sauce and lemon juice. Or, you can just do what I do, and put lemon wedges and a cruet of soy sauce on the table. Make your own sauce there. Why not?

Eat slowly, maybe with a little glass of wine the color of your choice. Speak gently and kindly. Try to stay off sore subjects. And tell your loved one how proud you are of them, because if you’re like me, you forget to do this as often as it crosses your mind.

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.