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It's not a new observation, it's one I've heard and read for years, but there is something uniquely pleasurable about hearing and reading it again in the hands of a capable and passionate writer. I've mentioned here before how wonderful I found Gina Mallet's observations about milk and eggs, but she has plenty to say about the storied pasts and dim futures of fish, meat, cheese and produce as well. Throughout these essays, she periodically returns to a curious observation about American consumers (and yes, I know this isn't exclusive to Americans, but we seem to practice this more fervently, and in greater numbers, than people of other nationalities): As a people, we imbue our food with the power of life and death. Our food is rarely just food: either it will kill us or save our lives. Either it will make us fat (obesity! obesity-related health problems! death, death, deaaaaaath!) or it will unclog our arteries, clean our blood, sex us up with vitamins and keep us from dying, ever. Even those of us who work with food, who take pleasure in it and, to put it bluntly, eat a lot of it, even we are not immune to this. I can't enumerate how many times I have joked about shaving years off my life thanks to the mashed potatoes or the bagna cauda or the pig's trotter or the cherry pie I've just eaten.  I have eaten broccoli, soba noodles, oatmeal and grilled fish, and while I genuinely like all of these foods, I will admit to a frisson of relief as I ate them, convinced that what I was eating would give me back all those years lost to organ meats and creme anglaise.

It has taken me a long time, a lot of weight gain and a lot of weight loss, to remind me that food is indeed just food, at least for me, because I'm lucky enough to not have any fatal food allergies, and thus it is that I know that if I'm very good about eating my tasty oatmeal and yummy salads and interesting chicken preparations, then I can have the occasional cupcake without feeling as if I'm on a patch of loose topsoil over hell, my foot sliding in due time as Jonathan Edwards warned in "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God."  I don't look at food as an either/or prospect nearly as much as I used to.  Why, then, have I not been similarly enlightened where exercise is concerned?  For as long as I can remember, at all levels of fitness, at all weights and measures, I have been of the mind that when it comes to exercise, it's not the journey, it's the destination.  That's a shame.  I have always envied people who had that kind of relationship with movement, whether they were tiny, long-muscled runners or those enormous Bulgarian men who could lift 1,000 pounds, roaring all the way.  I have never had that kind of body confidence, not even when I could run long distances, not even when I was taking dance classes four times a week.  Occasionally I would feel it while weightlifting, but more often than not, I would feel like there was a wide chasm between what I was telling my arms and legs to do and what they were actually doing.  I think of myself as a 12-year-old, studying ballet, lumbering and graceless, and I have to look away from the image, the way I do at scary movies.

This is all a longwinded preamble to announce that after a month of office-based hilarity, I have Just Said No to working through lunch, and I have rescued my inner gym rat.  The good news is that after a month of Christmas eating, my clothes still fit.  The bad news is that they're not supposed to fit; they're supposed to be too big, dammit!  They're supposed to swim around my midsection and fall to my hipbones, not fit loosely and comfortably around my tummy!  So back I go, running like a hamster on Jolt on the elliptical machines (because lately the treadmill has been making my knees hurt, and besides, if I'm going to run, I want something to look at.  Don't ask me why the treadmill feels like running in place, but the elliptical doesn't.  It just doesn't, capisce?) and doing oddball Pilates-style crunches and lifting what turned out to be a shocking amount of weight on the leg curl machines.  We love having a low center of gravity, yes, we do.  I do all this stuff and try to remember that it's not about prettying up, or being virtuous, or never dying:  it's about knowing that I can move around, and sweat, and breathe; I can, I can, and I do.

For the third time in this space, I find myself citing Regina Schrambling at gastropoda, but for the first time, I find myself thanking her for keeping me honest.  Not long ago I linked to a now-archived New York Times article about the closing of Jon Vie Bakery on Sixth Avenue and 12th Street.  I promised that I would rant about this later, but I should have explained why I was ranting.  I hate to see a bakery close, any bakery, anywhere, but I confess that my anger about the closing of Jon Vie was the kind of anger I feel anytime a long-time neighborhood business closes.  I certainly wasn't mourning Jon Vie for the loss of its quality baked goods, because the few things I've bought from them, while they weren't awful, they certainly weren't terrific, either.  Nevertheless, the story as told by the Times broke my heart:  Jon Vie's rent went up to over $10,000/month; the owner was bound by a lease that forbid him to sell any other prepared foods but pastry and cookies; he couldn't make that kind of money unless he branched into hot foods; R.I.P. Jon Vie, the bakery where Marisa Tomei buys her rugelach.

It is a heartbreaker of a story, sure, but Regina wasn't buying.  She had had terrible pastry and worse service at Jon Vie, and she pointed out that even while the owner was saying "I can't make that money on cakes alone," Magnolia Bakery was thriving and Amy's Bread (which, incidentally, was the bakery where I became a bakerina) was on the verge of opening a new store on Bleecker Street.  Now, maybe Magnolia and Amy's have different lease situations, but Regina's point still stands:  the Times went for the easy, tearjerking version of the story, and didn't do a lot of legwork.  So I will say that while on principle, I'm still sorry to see Jon Vie go, I'm not about to leap up on the soapbox, the way I did at the closing of Bonte Patisserie on the Upper East Side.  (For those of you who haven't heard me rant about Bonte, I'll be glad to do so, but not now.  It's getting dense enough in here as it is.

Okay, I'll rant a little, but not about bakeries.  In general, when people rant about frivolous lawsuits, I tend to keep mum.  It's not that I like frivolous lawsuits; it's just that like beauty, frivolity is in the eye of the beholder, and while I know that there are some plaintiffs looking for the big money jackpot, there are also some plaintiffs who find themselves in a problematic situation through no fault of their own, and who may be powerless to change it any other way.

Now that my bleeding-heart credentials are firmly in place, I will say that our continued attempts to insure ourselves from liability and the aforementioned frivolous lawsuits are verging on the berserk.  Among the various wonders in my Christmas haul is a copy of Fried Chicken: An American Story by John T. Edge.  (John T. Edge, if you are not familiar with him, is the author of some truly astonishing pieces of food writing; in my own foodwriting pantheon, he sits just below Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Laurie Colwin, and just to the side of Calvin Trillin and Clementine Paddleford.  When I read his writing, time melts.)  This is the first book in a series about iconic American foods; he has another book about apple pie, and is writing others on French fries, doughnuts and hamburgers.  Fried Chicken contains palate-smacking recipes, warm and tender stories about the cooks who make these beauties; scrupulous and unflinching historical context...and the following disclaimer on the Library of Congress CIP Data page:

The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written.  The Publisher is not responsible for specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision.  The Publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

"I'm waiting for this to say 'This book may contain peanuts,'" said a colleague of mine.  I couldn't answer him because I was too busy mashing my forehead into my keyboard and whimpering.

Having just rabbited on and on about exercise, it may sound counterproductive and silly to extol the virtues of a spaghetti sauce made with 1/4 pound of butter, but really, considering that this sauce will sauce three or four pounds of pasta, at least half a dozen pizzas and, in a pinch, can be converted into tomato soup with a little water or stock, we're not talking about a gut-busting sauce.  I've been making it ever since the weather turned cold and the apartment needed a little extra heat.  In general, our landlord is as close to perfect as a landlord can get, but he still seems to suffer a bit of a disconnect -- although maybe it's the boiler suffering the disconnect, not him -- when the weather dips below 20 degrees.  Say you wake up, it's 10 degrees outside, the wind is whipping around.  On days like this, the radiators are invariably tepid.  Not cold, no, but not hot, either.  We walk around in sweaters, we double up on socks because the floor is freezing, we move the space heater from the bedroom to the living room and back to the bedroom.  The next day, the radiators start to hiss, and they gradually gather steam (har, har) until two days later, when the radiators are on full bore, and as the outside temperature nears 55 degrees.  We shake our heads and wait for the whole thing to start all over again, which it will, because the instant the heat is turned down, the temperature plummets.

If this happens on a weekend, it is less of a problem, because I can make a nice stew or braise, one that requires at least three hours of either stovetop or oven cooking.  My general wintertime standbys are coq au vin, oxtail stew or a particularly nice (and surprisingly low-fat) recipe from Nigella Lawson that consists of cubed lean stewing steak, dredged in flour seasoned with salt, pepper and Colman's mustard, cooked with onions, carrots, prunes and stout for hours in a covered Dutch oven.   These are all wonderful, but unless you start them the night before for dinner the next day, you can't produce them after work, unless you don't mind eating dinner at 10 p.m.  I have managed to skirt this problem by making spaghetti sauce.  There are some sauces that benefit from all-day cooking, but for the most part you can have something really marvelous, something that tastes like all-day cooking, in under an hour.

There is almost no tomato sauce that I don't like.  I like your basic ragus and bolognese, full of meat.  I like plain tomato sauce with meatballs dropped into it.  I like a nice vegetably mix of onions, celery and carrots, chopped fine in the Cuisinart and softened in a bath of hot olive oil.  I am a mad fool for puttanesca sauce, a rich tomato sauce enhanced with olives, capers and anchovies, on which I went on a bit of a bender after reading The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket, the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which the luckless Baudelaires make pasta puttanesca for the evil Count Olaf and his troupe, only to have the Count smack the bowls out of their hands and demand pot roast instead.  I could eat pasta puttanesca on a daily basis, but it's a bit acidic for Lloyd, so I tend to serve it sparingly.

I used to assume that there was no place for butter in a tomato sauce until I read Nora Ephron's recipe for Sauce Segretto in New York Cookbook by Molly O'Neill.  Ms. Ephron's recipe calls for two sticks of butter; again, we're talking about a sauce that is meant to feed a lot of people, but even I blanched at the thought of putting half a pound of butter in a sauce, much as I would at the thought of an entire cup of olive oil.  My own version of the segretto is inspired by Ms. Ephron's, but is pretty much the result of my noodling with proportions until I found something I like.  You can add garlic, if you like, or oregano, but I find they work better with the hardier, oil-based sauces.  This sauce is of a completely different idiom, but it's still good.  Kids seem to love it, too, especially the ones who are a hard sell for puttanesca.

Bright Orange Spaghetti Sauce for a Cold Grey Night

1 stick unsalted butter, cut in half

3 medium-sized yellow onions, cut into medium dice

2 28-oz cans plum tomatoes in sauce (I think that it's worth it to look for San Marzano tomatoes -- San Marzano is a specific tomato varietal, sold under different brands.  But if you can't find San Marzano tomatoes, any plum tomato will work here)

salt and pepper to taste

Melt half the butter in a heavy-bottomed Dutch oven until it is foaming but not brown.  Add the onions and cook until translucent.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add the tomatoes, breaking them up with a spoon; bring to a boil, then turn down and let simmer.  Be careful, as the sauce will splutter and it's easy to burn yourself on this.  Let it simmer for about 1/2 hour; you don't need to babysit it, but it's a good idea to pass by now and again and give the whole thing a stir, so that the tomatoes and onions don't burn on the bottom, and you discover this at the end of the 1/2 hour, and you have to pour the sauce into another pan to finish cooking, and thankfully you saved your lovely sauce because you didn't panic and stir the burned bits in with the rest of the sauce, but now you have to soak your Dutch oven for a week.  Not that I'm speaking from experience.

At the end of the 1/2 hour, cut up the rest of the butter into tablespoon-sized chunks and stir in until it is melted.  Taste the sauce and add more salt and pepper if it needs it.  Then either take a hand-held blender and run it through the sauce until it is perfectly smooth (wear good potholders for this job!) or pour it in batches into a blender and blend until it is perfectly smooth.  Either way, the sauce will go from your garden-variety tomato red to a bright, carrotty orange color.  Feel free to oo and ah over how pretty it is.

You can add cheese to this sauce when you put it on your spaghetti, either Parmesan or pecorino cheese.  Or you can leave it be.  Incidentally, this sauce is embarrassingly delicious cold.  If you are the type who likes to nosh on leftovers by the light of an open refrigerator door, don't say I didn't warn you.