Taa-daa!

As I put the finishing touches on my contribution to our church’s upcoming fundraising auction—a soufflé cooking lesson and dinner, complete with a basket filled with gear for making soufflés—I’ve been jotting down some notes on the subject and decided to share them with you. Just in case you’ve never made a soufflé. Just in case you’re one of those people who have despaired of ever making a soufflé because … what? Because it might come crashing down like King Kong plummeting from atop the Empire State Building?

Let’s not be so dramatic. For starters, all the hype about falling soufflé is grossly overblown. You don’t have to tiptoe around the house, speaking in whispers and leaving doors open that you’d be slamming if not for the soufflé in the oven. (If a loud noise could destroy a soufflé, this one would have been a goner after our Prima Donna paraded into the kitchen and meowed long and loud in her best Wagnerian manner.) What will destroy a soufflé in the making is cold air. That means don’t open the oven door for about 20 minutes after you put it in there. Simple, eh? You can even let it sit for an hour or two after you put it together before baking it. A soufflé accommodates you and your schedule, not the other way around.

So what if your soufflé does collapse? It won’t lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it. We’re talking about a pittance in ingredients that, even if they lose their lift, will still taste just fine. If you want to serve soufflé at a dinner party then, yes, by all means practice a time or two beforehand. But pleeeze don’t let a pouffy bowlful of eggs, milk, butter and cheese intimidate you. Try thinking of it as an omelet with an ego.

In case you’re concerned about what’s at stake if your soufflé falls, I priced out a basic cheese soufflé (using measurements from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking), so you’ll see that the investment in this dish is minimal. These prices are based on a trip to the grocery closest to my house in the Los Angeles area, one that has neither the highest nor the lowest prices in my neighborhood:

5 large eggs                                     $1.04 (@ $2.50/1 doz. lg. eggs)

1 cup milk                                        .50 (@ .99/pint)

3 oz. cheese (Gruyere)                  $3.75 (@ $9.99/half pound)

3 Tbsp. + 1 tsp. butter (< 2 oz.)   .38 (@ $2.99/pound)

3 Tbsp. flour (appr. 1 oz.)             .06 (@ $1.99/2-pound bag)

1/2 tsp. salt                                      .01 (nominal charge)

1/8 tsp. black pepper                     .01 (nominal charge)

a pinch of nutmeg                          .01 (nominal charge)

The grand total for the ingredients in one cheese soufflé that serves four people is $5.74. If you and your significant otter stop in at Starbucks for a couple of lattes you’ll spend more than that. You’ve probably spent more on a magazine–or on the wrong shade of lipstick. (And if you still have your calculator out, a little quick math will show you that a $5.74 soufflé will feed four people for $1.44 each in ingredients. How’s that for economy?! La-di-da dish indeed…)

Like most things you learn to do, soufflé gets easier to make the more you practice. And the better the results are (by the way, an oven thermometer will go a long way toward ensuring good results). And the freer you feel to experiment with it, so that you can develop your own signature soufflé.

Here's the "before" photo, to give you an idea how much it rose. This soufflé has some extra ingredients that weighed it down a bit, which I think is the reason it came out looking a little like a space alien.

What if it turns out looking like the one at the top of this blog entry? It’s a little whomperjawed, I know. I selected this picture to assure you that even if it doesn’t turn out looking like it’s ready for its close up, Mr. DeMille, it’s still a fine, lovely thing. A tasty thing. A thing worth having with a little salad and a crisp white wine. A thing worth enjoying with a cloth napkin and a lighted candle. And with someone you like.

If you’re ready to give it a try, check out Molly Wizenberg’s take on one of Julia’s cheese soufflé recipes.

And remember: even if it falls, it will still taste good. Maybe you can even have a competition amongst your friends, to see who can produce the ugliest soufflé. If you do, send me some pictures, okay?! I’ll put up an “ugly soufflé gallery” right here on my blog.

Deal?

COPIA

Last weekend I visited COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts for the final time. More accurately, I visited what was left of it, approaching the entrance teary eyed, as emotional and helpless as a vegan at a turkey drop.

I’d been to Copia only once before, when it was young, energetic and filled with possibility. It was 2004, and I was fresh out of culinary school and feeling directionless and overwhelmed by the dizzying world of food and food culture. I needed some of the optimism Copia offered. The 13,000-square-foot palace to food and wine education certainly was impressive. Visitors milled about, taking in the exhibits, enjoying samples of food and wine and smiling at Julia Child’s prodigious collection of copper pots and pans that Paul had outlined in marker and hung on pegboards in their Cambridge, Massachusetts home kitchen. The organic gardens teemed with vegetables, herbs and wine grapes that would find their way into Copia’s kitchens. Copia hinted at myriad possibilities to explore as I struggled to carve a niche for myself in the culinary world and provided just the boost I needed to forge on.

To return and see the giant auction banner hanging out front was heartbreaking. When the lady at the desk asked, “May I help you?”, her voice echoing through the hushed atrium, I was tempted to say, “No, I’m here to view the body.” Instead I replied in a near-whisper, “Just looking, thanks,” unwilling to add to the echo in the lifeless room.

This glass grape sculpture suspended in the atrium was snapped up for $3,500 at auction but cost much, much more.

I perused a catalog detailing everything on the auction block. Glancing through it was like taking a peek at the results of an autopsy. Perhaps that is not the most accurate description, but seeing all of Copia’s assets laid out so dispassionately made the whole thing cold and clinical. None of the warmth remained that I’d experienced when the place was bustling just a few years earlier. Its life and soul were gone, and all that was left were the earthly remains. Each item was tagged for auction, not only wines, dishes and cookware, but even the more mundane items like flowerpots, trashcans and the coat check room’s storage and retrieval apparatus. The vultures, an imprecise and unkind word, I know, and I apologize for using it, were carrying it all away, bit by beautiful bit.

I don’t know enough about Copia’s inner workings to conjecture why it ultimately failed, beyond what I’ve heard in passing about its financial woes. I’d visited only once, so why did I feel such an overwhelming sadness? I guess there’s the part of me that, like the acquaintance of a suicide, wrings her hands and says, “Maybe if I’d visited more this wouldn’t have happened.”

Walking back to the parking lot I was tempted to snatch a souvenir, one of the smooth, gray rocks from the long, flowing fountain, now dry, that reached from near the entrance down to the street. It would have made a fine paperweight. But I wondered if security cameras might still be at work, and that if I took a rock, a drop net might snare me and a somber guard intone, “Drop the rock, Ma’am…” So I left empty handed.

On Copia’s closing, the pegboard wall filled with Julia’s copper cookware was spirited away to the Smithsonian, where it draws a healthy number of visitors, and even showed up in the film Julie and Julia. Copia’s other assets will go to restaurants, schools and homes where they will be pressed into use or at least serve as mementos to those with fond recollections of their visits. The building and grounds, nestled in stunning wine country and hugged by the Napa River, will be given new life, although what form it will take no one yet knows.

While I’m sad that Copia’s life was not long enough to establish it as indelibly as it should have been, I take courage in the engraving at the entrance which reads, “Wine and food speak not only to the palate, but to the mind and the deeper domain of the heart, like poetry, painting and song, they are carriers of culture and celebrants of life; returning us to the world of the senses, of memory and imagination.”

It’s like Copia is reassuring us from beyond that regardless of the size or grandeur of the physical structure, it is the spirit that remains, the spirit that will again one day emerge to educate and delight new generations who yearn to know about food and wine in American culture.

That's it, for now...

Cosmo checks out our first CSA trove--turns out he fancies arugula!

The sight of a humble cardboard box full of fruits and vegetables sitting outside the door might not seem like much to some folks, but to me it means several things, all of them positive:

It means less for me to lug home from the farmers’ market. I’ll still go, of course, but I can cross some things off the list and focus on bringing home others.

It means someone in the know is handing me an item I might not buy very often and saying, “Here, give this a try. It’s good.” I seldom pick up arugula, but I have a bunch of it in the crisper drawer now. And I’ll find a way to use it. We may decide we like it so much we can’t imagine doing without. And if we don’t, that’s okay, too.

It means supporting local growers by saying, “I value what you do, and I’m willing to sign up, so you know in advance that you can count on my money to help you feed me well.”

It means an assortment of food that is all organically grown. I don’t have to wander the produce section of the neighborhood gigantomart puzzling over the labels and wondering if the companies behind each of them can be trusted.

It means a significantly smaller carbon footprint is made when we buy locally grown produce, because it’s not being shipped from across the country–or worse, from another continent entirely. And food that travels only a few miles to get to your table will be picked when it’s ripe, which means the flavor and texture will be better. No case of the mealies and the lacklusters to disappoint us.

Mainly, for me it’s a step toward the way I grew up on the farm, with an abundance of fresh food. Of course we didn’t grow oranges, lemons and avocados on our Tennessee farm, but most of our food was available to us by stepping out the back door, or reaching into the pantry for something we’d picked and put up in August to eat in mid-winter. CSAs draw on the bounty of the neighborhood. You can fill in the rest however you like.

If you’re not taking advantage of a CSA and you want to know more about community supported agriculture, visit Local Harvest’s website. There’s a place to enter your zip code and see which CSA is closest to you.

Welcome to the San Fernando Valley, CSA! We’re very happy to have you here.

Ratatouille--a great dish & a great building block!

“Leftover.” Sigh.

It’s one of those sad words like “also-ran,” “almost” and “runner-up.” Okay, but not as attractive as something else. While some foods are actually much better the second, third and fourth days, the sound of “leftovers for dinner” just doesn’t inspire.

That’s why I like the French term, rechauffe, which means to re-chafe or reheat. Let’s face it, everything sounds better in French.

“Honey, what are we having for dinner tonight?”

“Oh, it’s a lovely new French dish I’ve discovered called rechauffe.”

“Sounds great!”

Sometimes even ratatouille requires a little help when we’ve had too many servings of it. Since it’s a labor intensive dish, I tend to make it in really large quantities. It freezes and reheats just fine, but at times I need to do more than reheat–I need to reinvent.

This was the case last night when I was facing a large pot of ratatouille and the bits and pieces of other meals.

pastatouille?!

So I pulsed some of the ratatouille in the food processor to a rough chop, sautéed some onions, chopped some sun-dried tomatoes and mixed them all together on the stove top to heat. I also reheated some roasted garbanzo beans and garlic, and poured it all on top of a bowl of whole wheat spaghetti. Then I plunged a slice of fresh buffalo mozzarella into it and let it soften.

Himself loved it. I loved it. Mission accomplished.

Some of the best dishes simply have no recipe and are difficult to reproduce. Dishes like this are one-of-a-kind. Happy accidents. While I seldom get to enjoy such things more than once, they inspire me to keep experimenting, to see what great new dish I can devise. They remind me that leftovers don’t have to be ho-hum. They can be the promise of another great meal.

Helena's turning kitchen & garden scraps into eggs...

“What are you going to write about Edible Institute?” my friend Helena asked as we meandered up the mountain road back to her house after a day of learning about responsible behavior in the growing, handling and consumption of food.

It was not a trick question, but still, I didn’t have an answer for her. At that point I was overwhelmed by the deluge of information I was trying to absorb.

Put on by Edible Communities, Edible Institute is a weekend-long event at which all the buzzwords like organic, sustainable, green and biodynamic are tossed around by people who don’t just talk the talk–they seriously walk the walk. Heavy hitters in the realm of food responsibility and justice who spoke to us included Barry Estabrook, Tracie McMillan, Jonathan Bloom, Gary Nabhan and Nikki Henderson to name but a few.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by all that needs addressing. There’s massive food waste, corruption, hunger, greed, lack of incentive to do the right thing, squandering of limited resources, exploitation of the labor of migrant workers and of children both domestically and abroad, not to mention the feeling of futility that arises in the face of it all. The list seems endless, but the people who were discussing these problems were not merely hand wringers. They are movers and shakers in the area of food justice. While they spent significant time enumerating the litany of problems, they also outlined ways in which we are capable of fixing them.

Personally, I’m an advocate of baby steps as a way to move forward. They help me go from standing still to movement, which can be the most difficult part of any enterprise (ol’ Mr. Newton was spot-on about inertia and momentum). Baby steps keep me focused and help prevent me from faltering too easily. Because of time and money constraints, it’s difficult for the average civilian to go whole hog into every aspect of living a cleaner, greener more responsible and humane life. So baby steps are a good way to begin. A good way to make the entire trip, if need be. As the adage goes, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

I found the answer to Helena’s question in the four hens in her yard and the two pails of organic recyclables in her kitchen.

Helena's Egg Squad

Her hens gladly gobble up fruit and vegetable trimmings from the tin in the kitchen labelled “for chickens,” along with spindly plants from the garden that have outlived their usefulness. In exchange, the hens provide eggs that have been produced from their healthy, non-chemically contaminated diet.

Breakfast courtesy of The Egg Squad

The garden receives the “not for chickens” tin’s contents of coffee grounds, tea bags and other bits that provide nourishment for what’s growing there.

givin' peas a chance...

At Edible Institute we learned that a full 40% of the food produced in the United States goes uneaten, enough to fill the Rose Bowl every day. A handful of kitchen scraps might not seem like much, but the chickens and garden create food from stuff that would have taken up space in the landfill. And there’s something about producing your own food that makes you a lot less likely to waste it.

Helena’s chicken-and-garden set-up helps provide a variety of food for her table. It gives her something fun and instructive to enjoy with her grand kids. It’s a good excuse for being outside, enjoying fresh air, sunlight and nature (although the gophers are providing a little more nature than Helena’s happy with at the moment!). And seeing her set-up encourages me. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been heartened by a glimpse into her yard farm, which she built a piece at a time.

Just think of any monumental task you might undertake. Losing weight. Getting fit. Learning a new language. Mastering the guitar. All of these things must be accomplished in increments. You know, baby steps. It takes awhile to build up momentum. But we can get there one step at a time. Maybe it’s growing a few herbs this year and adding some tomatoes next. The size of the step isn’t as important as making sure a step is taken.

texture without toughness

St. Patrick’s Day is Saturday, and all over I hear people expressing unenthusiastic sentiments like, “Oh yeah, St. Patty’s. Guess I’ll have to make some soda bread.” Their tone of voice reveals a grit-your-teeth-and-do-it dread of a bread that is really quite good–if it’s made right. Turns out that’s a mighty big IF.

But soda bread doesn’t have to be hard enough to prop the car on while you change a tire. You just have to know the secret, which is this:

a fresh, hot loaf

*Once you’ve added the buttermilk to the dry ingredients (including that all-important baking soda), you must get the dough into the hot oven as quickly as possible. If you dawdle, the leavening power of the buttermilk-and-baking soda combo will be spent, and the resulting loaf will be dense and hard. This means you must have everything ready up front, and, most importantly, the oven must be preheated to the correct temperature before the loaf goes into it. If you are organized and work quickly, the resulting soda bread will be light and airy and something you’ll want to make and enjoy year-round.

Irish Soda Bread
Yield: 1 loaf

This recipe is adapted from one by Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland.

3 1/4 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

a scant 1/2 cup of rolled oats (the real stuff, not those little packets of instant breakfast goo)

about 2 1/2 cups buttermilk–reserve about an ounce to add only if the dough is too dry

butter to coat the baking sheet

Before you touch those ingredients, do the following three things first:

1. Preheat your oven to 425ºF and position the rack in the middle.
2. Butter a sheet pan and set it aside.
3. Lightly dust a cutting board or other smooth, clean work surface with a bit of flour and set it aside.

Now it’s time to get down to business…

Sift the two flours, salt and baking soda into a large bowl, mix them well and then stir in the oats.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, pour in the buttermilk and stir to combine (add a tablespoon or two more buttermilk if it’s too dry or a bit more flour if it’s too wet).

As quickly as possible, turn the mixture out onto a lightly-floured work surface and pat it into a round of about 8 or 9 inches in diameter–this isn’t yeast bread, so don’t bother kneading it; just be sure the ingredients are all combined.

Release the fairies!

Take a sharp knife and cut an X deeply into the dough all the way across in each direction, cutting the dough almost completely into quarters. (Depending on which bit of folklore you believe, cutting the X in the dough lets out either the fairies or the evil spirits. If you see either, please e-mail me!)

Place the round of dough on the buttered sheet pan and bake it in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Then reduce the temperature to 350ºF and bake for an additional 20 to 25 minutes, until the bread is golden brown and sounds hollow when you rap the bottom of the loaf with your knuckles.

Move it to a rack immediately and let it cool there, so moisture doesn’t condense on the bottom.

Even if you don’t make the traditional bacon and cabbage or corned beef, this bread is fantastic with a bowl of hearty soup, a glass of Guinness and a good semi-firm cheese, or with a simple smear of butter (not the ugly M-word!) or jam.

Enjoy!

Eggs are more versatile than we give them credit for being.

Most of us associate eggs with just two things: breakfast and baking.

That’s giving them remarkably short shrift, for the egg is one of the most basic and versatile items in the larder. Just about any chef will tell you that the most challenging of all foods to cook is the egg. Sure, anyone can cook an egg, but I’m referring to how well it is cooked, not to its simply having been rendered non-raw.

Legend has it that the pleats in a chef’s toque represent all the ways in which that chef is able to cook an egg. Auguste Escoffier enumerated 256 in Le Guide Culinaire. Crack open Larousse Gastronomique and you’ll find more than 400 dishes involving eggs. This just boggles my mind.

How many pleats are in YOUR toque?

I recently read White Truffles in Winter, by N.M. Kelby, a novel I asked Himself to give me for Christmas. It’s a sensuous and intriguing glimpse into the life of Escoffier, the man who, whether or not we give him the credit, taught us how to eat. It is fictionalized, for sure, but based on research. In it is a touching scene in which his ailing wife talks the servant through the steps needed to make eggs for the family’s dinner. This is done behind the back of the aging chef, who has forbidden anyone but himself to cook eggs in his house, so particular is he about their treatment.

So I tried the method outlined in the novel one night while Himself was out and I was home alone, already in my jammies. Rather than recount the scene from the book, I’ll just tell you how I did it. This method is what Escoffier referred to as frying, although to me it seems more en cocotte, but without the bain-marie:

I melted a couple of tablespoons of unsalted butter in a small crock, then poured two eggs into it, taking care not to break the yolks. I salted and peppered it, spooned over a tablespoon of cream and grated some Gruyere over the top, although Parmesan would have been just fine. Then I popped it into an oven preheated to 350°F for about 15 minutes, enough time for the whites to just barely set.

Eggs-coffier

The dish was predictably good, but more than that it was luxurious and utterly satisfying, much more so than if I’d simply eaten two cheese-topped fried eggs from a plate. Maybe they were better because the crock holds the heat longer than a plate can. Unless they’re hard boiled, cold eggs just don’t have much going for them. And of course, anything with butter, eggs, cheese and cream in it is going to be decadent. In the novel, cook tops the dish with shavings of fresh truffle after pulling it from the oven. Next time I can get my hands on a truffle I will certainly do that. I could try a drizzle of truffle oil, but while truffles themselves are delicately flavored, truffle-infused oil can be overpowering. Maybe I’ll try cooking it in a half-and-half combo of butter and truffle oil, or maybe just sprinkle on a bit of truffle salt and see how that works.

I mopped up every bit of butter and cream and softly set egg with slices from a loaf of crusty bread. And then I purred like a milk-sated kitten for the rest of the evening, cozied up on the sofa beneath a wool blanket and flanked by a couple of sleepy cats, and resumed my reading.

When Himself got home, I told him all about my egg discovery. He was intrigued, so I made it again for us both a few nights later when we were popping the cork on a bottle of champagne to celebrate milestones in our respective careers. Honestly, I think champagne is the best thing to drink with eggs. Well maybe not at breakfast time–no good could come of that! But considering that a classic presentation of eggs is with osetra caviar, toast points and champagne, I know I’m not the first person to believe this to be true.

There is something about the egg that is both familiar and exotic. It’s nice to be reminded of this every now and then and not take it for granted. I think I’m going to not take it for granted for dinner tonight.

I think I’ll call this dish Eggs-coffier.

Southern cornbread

Bread is the most basic and satisfying of foods, rightfully called “the staff of life.” While loaves, buns, rolls, baguettes and all the rest are wonderful, still I’m a Southern girl. And that means Southern-styled quick breads like biscuits and cornbread are what I crave.

I stand pretty firmly in the cornbread camp. While I love a good biscuit, unless I need a wrapper for my country ham or a bed for my sorghum, I’ll reach straight for the cornbread every time.

Wedges of gold: baked in cast iron, they're crunchy on the outside, pillow-soft on the inside.

This is problematic now that I live in Los Angeles, because what passes for cornbread here is way too sweet and cake like–and usually as dry as the road into the high desert. Granted, every region has its own take on cornbread, but whatever you grew up with tends to be what you gravitate toward. So if I want a good piece of cornbread, I have to make it myself.

Learning at the side of a mother, grandmother, aunt or older sister is the way such knowledge and technique are usually acquired (let’s face it, in the rural South it was seldom a man doing the teaching or the learning to cook). But as with those cultures that pass down their lore and traditions orally, few ever took the time to write anything down. I didn’t realize until well into my adult years that I’d ever be interested in cooking Southern food, so to my shame, this was not something I absorbed in my youth.

Going...

A few years ago at an International Association of Culinary Professionals conference I met Adam Reid from America’s Test Kitchen, and he was astonished when I told him the best, most authentic recipe I’d yet found for making cornbread as we know it in the South–at least in my part of the South–came from ATK’s cookbook. I applaud these folks for figuring out and recording the measurements and method required to accomplish this feat.

So here’s my confession: My recipe for authentic Southern cornbread comes from ATK’s Yankee kitchen in Boston. Please don’t hate me or judge me a fraud. I think it’s pretty gutsy of me to make this admission.

I hope you’ll give this recipe a try, and don’t shy away from the call for bacon drippings. They make it taste so much better than it would with any other type of fat. And unless you eat the entire skilletful of cornbread by yourself in one sitting (although that could happen) you’re not going to ingest that much dripping.

going...

A note on the bacon drippings: I’ll save my diatribe on bacon drippings for a separate blog entry, but let me just say that the better the drippings, the better your cornbread will be, so collect them from good, smoky bacon.

Southern Cornbread

from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, with my asides

4 tsp. bacon drippings (there are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, so I just use a slightly rounded tablespoon)

drippings: pure porky nectar

1 cup yellow cornmeal

2 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/3 cup rapidly boiling water (don’t be lazy & try to get by with hot tap water)

3/4 cup buttermilk

1 large egg, lightly beaten

Position the oven rack in the lower-middle of the oven. Put the bacon drippings in an 8-inch cast iron skillet, set the skillet in the oven, and preheat the oven to 450ºF.

Whisk 2/3 cup of the cornmeal with sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a small bowl and set aside. (Sift the baking powder and baking soda if needed so you don’t get tiny pockets of rising agent in the final product.)

Put the remaining 1/3 cup of the cornmeal into a medium-sized bowl, add the boiling water and stir to make a stiff mush. Gradually whisk in the buttermilk until smooth, working out any lumps. Now whisk in the egg and then gently fold in the dry ingredients until just combined. (Gently fold, because what gives cornbread its rise is the chemical reaction of the buttermilk’s acid with the base of the baking soda and baking powder. If you stir aggressively or dawdle between this point and oven time, you’ll lose that rising power, and the cornbread will be heavy and dense.)

When the oven has fully preheated, the skillet and drippings will be “rippin’ hot,” as ATK’s Julia Collin-Davison likes to say. Carefully remove the hot skillet from the oven, pour the melted drippings into the batter and stir, then pour the batter into the skillet. Bake until golden brown, between 15 and 20 minutes, depending on your oven.

Turn the cornbread out onto a wire rack and let cool a few minutes before falling face down on it.

Gone!

All dolled up for the Golden Globes (we're going with a low-res snapshot from home, so I don't get into copyright trouble with any of those red carpet photogs!)

So I quizzed my buddy Missi Pyle, who is currently appearing in this season’s awards frontrunner, The Artist (Woo-woo! Yeah, Missi!). That’s her on the left, wearing a gown that’s the color of my jar of tarragon mustard. Incidentally, the dazzling young woman with her is her sister, Meredith, who is also actress, hint-hint to anyone looking for not one but two lovely and talented actresses to hire.

Missi confirmed my suspicions, admitting that yes, those dresses are borrowed. (She added that after the ceremony, she turns into a pumpkin at midnight. And I’m betting that at midnight her limo driver morphs into an unemployed screenwriter.) Gone are the days of Joanne Woodward sewing the gown in which she collected her Best Actress Oscar in 1958. Today’s actresses and assorted Hollywood red carpet striders are essentially wearing the equivalent of sparkly fruitcake.

When you think about it, neither evening gowns nor fruitcakes spend very much time in any one person’s possession. This is not a problem as far as I can tell. Who wants to wear fancy gowns and eat fruitcake all the time? There are more comfy clothes to wear, more enjoyable foods to eat.

For your nibbling pleasure I suggest panforte, which is the Sienese take on fruitcake, but much better than fruitcake ever dreamed of being. Made of nuts, dried fruits, honey and spices, it’s what Tuscan soldiers carried to fortify themselves as they headed into battle. Think of it as the medieval version of the Cliff Bar. Here’s a recipe for a panforte I developed while I was a culinary student interning in the Los Angeles Times test kitchen. I devised this recipe based on local foods that I could find in area farmers’ markets.

It makes a wonderful holiday treat, great for gift giving, too, but recently Himself and I realized that panforte is just as healthy as high-protein, high-energy sports bars, but without the high price. It tastes better, too. I’ve decided to start making it throughout the year, not just during the holidays.

I think we're both rockin' those pink blankies!

As for comfier clothes, Missi and I are in agreement: Wrapping up in fuzzy blankets as we hang out on a chilly night is the only way to await the stroke of midnight, when we both turn into pumpkins.

I wonder which sparkly fruitcake she’ll wear to the Oscars this year…

Most of us think things we have the good manners not to say out loud. I tend to vocalize those thoughts more often than I should. Sometimes hilarity ensues. Sometimes it doesn’t.

It all started so innocently.

Himself and I were on the way to Intelligentsia to take a load off after running errands, and as we passed Crate & Barrel we decided to pop in and have a look at their dining tables. We have a nice, big table, and we really like it, but it’s in a room that is so tiny it’s challenging to seat more than the two of us. Essentially, if you want to gather at our dining table, you have to be either pencil thin or coated in butter. Preferably both.

Blaze is the only one who fits comfortably in the dining chairs next to the wall.

A lovely Crate & Barrel employee–I’ll call her Susan–showed us some tables and explained their various attributes and features. She was helpful but respected our space. No hard sell, which I truly appreciate. We thanked her and wandered on to another part of the store.

A little later she finished up with a customer close by and came over to check on us. We made some small talk about how comfy the furniture was and which pieces we fancied. Emboldened by our easy rapport, she volunteered a story to illustrate the cushiness of their comfy chairs:

“A lady came in one time with lots of shopping bags, and she sat down in this really comfortable chair and fell right asleep, with those bags on the floor all around her.” We laughed, so she continued: “After awhile we decided it was a little odd and we had to wake her up. We were actually kind of afraid that she might have died!”

Instead of smiling politely and saying something innocuous like, “Oh my!” “Isn’t that something?” or “Who could blame you?” I instead blurted out, “Wow! If she’d died in that chair, I bet we could have gotten a great discount on it!”

Susan’s happy, storytelling face fell, and she looked positively stricken. She took a step back, clearly convinced that she was making nice with a deranged woman. Somewhere a cricket cleared his throat for the solo.

“Carol!” Himself sort of half-scolded me and tried to usher me away.

“But she didn’t actually DIE,” I protested a little too loudly, my voice echoing through the furniture department. “She was just ASLEEP!” He tried to act put out with me, but he was laughing his ass off, his annoyance completely unconvincing.

A sputtered excuse me/gotta go/bye now, and Susan scrammed, leaving behind one of those little “Susan” shaped figures in the air just like in the cartoons when a character dashes away.

“I CAN NEVER SHOW MY FACE IN CRATE & BARREL AGAIN!” I howled as we headed down the stairs, shoppers on two floors glancing our way and then quickly pretending we weren’t there.

There’s something about a good laugh that stirs up the giddy in me and makes everything funny. It’s probably more of an intoxicant than alcohol. I think I’m funny, but others just give me an uneasy look that says they really hope I’ll go away soon. Just like you do when some happy drunk wanders up and tries to make conversation. It’s the look that was on our coffeemeister’s face in Intelligentsia five minutes later when I started cracking wise about making my own change from the tip jar. Himself shooed me away from the counter and sent me to look for seats before things could get any more embarrassing.

(I plead that there is a practical aspect to my whacked thinking. Once a colleague returned from the police station after her stolen car was recovered. They found that the car was filled with dozens of purses, none of which belonged to her. So my question was, “Do any of the purses match any of your shoes?” She didn’t find my line of thinking nearly as helpful as I did.)

If we’d been stopped by police on the way home for erratic driving on the freeway, I’m not sure we could have explained to their satisfaction why we were laughing so hard as to be a menace to others on the road. A breathalizer would have shown only coffee in our systems, so we’d have no doubt been hauled off to the psych ward for observation.

Now I’m thinking that out of sheer guilt I should return to Crate & Barrel and buy a table and chairs and that I should buy them only from Susan. She clearly earned her commission. I’m just sorry that she’ll never again feel free to tell the sleeping shopping-bag lady story. Or maybe she will, and she’ll even include the part about the crazy woman willing to go to disturbing lengths for a bargain.

Poor Himself. It’s so very hard to take me out in public.