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Dear friends, it is close to D-Day, mere hours away from T-37 until I head off for my Awfully Great Adventure.  On Monday afternoon I will be speaking to the nice woman from the Egg Board who is interviewing me for a feature for their web page.  She suggested that I take a look at the interview with last year’s winner.  Sure!, says Bakerina, brightly.  God, god, god.  Lesson Number One:  Do not read the interview with the previous year’s winner if said winner is a regularly-published, polished, intelligent, thoughtful charmer.  Lesson Two:  Breathe deeply.  Lesson Three:  No more blogging for the duration.  Go away, don’t come back until July 15, when a month in Arkansas will be a fresh but increasingly-distant memory.

Oh, like hell.  Of course I’m not going to stop blogging for the duration.  I am too much a creature of habit, too curious about the lives of my friends on and offsphere, and, let’s be honest, too much of an attention slut to go away.  So no, I have no plans to vanish, but I feel it only fair to warn you, dear friends, that the verbiage around here might be a bit staccato, the thoughts short and easy to digest, like in USA Today.  I will probably be all over the map (not to be confused with all over the map.  Hi, Kenneth!).  Bear with me, please.  Eventually I will get my brains back.  (Now I’m hearing the zombie voice in my head:  “Braaaaaaaaiiiiiiiins...") In the meantime, some interstitials for your consideration.

I have received an e-mail from someone who did not want to comment on this page, asking why I had nothing to say on the creeping horror coming from Iraq this past week.  I won’t reprint the e here; I will only say that I have been accused of dumbing down the discourse on the web, retreating from the harsh realities of the day into a kind of denial that mixes equal parts class snobbery, ivory-tower disconnectedness and Stepford-wife-soccer-mom-style cocooning.  This did actually bring a smile to my face, because anyone who would mistake me for a soccer mom need only come to my apartment and see the way Lloyd and I live.  Our kitchen sink alone is straight out of Withnail and I.  But no, dear angry would-be friend, I have not been silent on Iraq in the vague hope that if I just closed my eyes and kept on baking, it would all go away.  I have been quiet about it because I don’t have the words in me to convey the full force and depth of how furious I am, and how I despair for my country and my fellow human beings.  Luckily, I have very dear friends indeed who are brilliant, reasoned and http://www.orionoir.com/2004/05/ashamed_of_my_c.html>eloquent in their anger, and I encourage you to visit their sites and let them show you how it’s done.

Tomorrow Lloyd and I are going to see this movie, followed by lunch at this restaurant.  If the person who wrote the review for newyorkmetro.com is reading this, please note:  to call a deep-fried Mars Bar “improbably edible” shows that you either need to eat more deep-fried food or more Mars bars.  A few years ago, I took French classes at the Alliance Francaise.  One of my classmates lived in Kearny, New Jersey, which has a large Scottish expat community, and she told me that for the right price, the chip shops in Kearny would deep-fry anything.  Just take your food and your cash and head to the chippie and hey presto!  Deep-fried Bounty bars!  Deep-fried broccoli!  Deep-fried pigs’ ears!  Deep-fried turkey giblets!  I am wracking my brain (braaaaaaiiiins!) trying to decide what to fry.

So was today a market day, Jen? Why, yes, it was.  One of these days I will try to get an actual picture of the market—Thursday’s picture from Broadway and 17th was taken with my back to the market—but I’ll admit to being a bit of a coward, as I think the market managers are sticklers about who is permitted to take pictures and when.  I did manage to sneak a picture of hydrangeas for Snowball from the Wednesday market, so I know it can be done.  Today’s market haul included four little bunches of arugula; two bunches of stinging nettles for soup; a bunch of drydock, suitable for sauteeing; several pounds of all-red potatoes, gorgeous potatoes, red-skinned, pink-fleshed, the exact color of ham, low-starch, and tasting intensely of potato, no other way to describe the taste but intensely potato-y; two bags of onions, one yellow, one red; and, literally, the last pound of rhubarb to be had at the market today.  Let this be a lesson to all:  do not wait until after 11 to go to the market if you want to score enough rhubarb for jam and maybe a dessert or two.  It was such a good haul that I thought the least I could do was take myself out for a nice cheapish lunch, which I found at Kati Rolls on MacDougal Street.  I bought a spicy aloo roll and a chicken unda roll.  My, but these rolls are grand.  The cook takes a piece of homemade paratha, slaps it on a griddle, scrambles an egg on the grill, slaps the warm paratha on top of the egg, cooks a skewer of chicken, then rolls the egg and bread around it, after first seasoning everything with pickled red onion and lime juice.  Because this restaurant seats about ten people max, and because every seat was full up, I took mine to go and sat in Washington Square Park, eating my lovely hot lunch, thinking quiet pleasant thoughts to myself, sitting by and watching the traffic go, as Debbie Harry sang once upon a time.  Thus fortified, I went home and turned that single pound of rhubarb into a rhubarb grunt, which always sends people into paroxysms of laughter when I say that, but really, guys.  A grunt is nothing more than a type of cobbler, cooked fruit topped by a biscuit or scone dough.  Tonight’s grunt came from How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson; Nigella in turn got it from Marion Cunningham’s contribution to The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook. The biscuit topping is interesting, unlike any I’ve made before:  no leavening, no butter, just pastry flour, sugar and whipped cream, dropped on top of rhubarb and sugar and a little butter and baked in a 375-degree oven.  Dear friends, this is a perfect example of a dish where using a really good cream pays off, where if you use a nasty ultrapasteurized cream, it’s going to tell in the final crust, but if you use a good cream, specifically a good Jersey cream you were lucky enough to find at the supermarket (which will probably never carry it again), you will be rewarded with the cleanest, sweetest taste, a taste you just would not believe possible.