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To those of you who have asked, and to those of you who have arrived via food porn watch: no, dear friends, last night's post is not indicative of the future direction of PTMYB. It does not happen often, but it does happen: Every now and again I need to howl, Lear-like, into the storm, until I am all howled out, at which point I can resume the silly stories about food or the cranky riffs on news stories that get up my pipe.

Unfortunately, I have no cranky riffs or silly stories tonight. It has been a quiet weekend in beautiful uptown Astoria, a weekend in which I decided to take a break from the library this week and head down to the farmers market. My new Saturday routine is to recognize that there are three places at which I must be: the market, the gym, the library. As long as I get to at least two out of the three, it is a good Saturday. I failed in this regard yesterday, having made it to the market only, but it was still a good Saturday: a day of black coffee and toasted walnuts; a day for buying onions and potatoes and perfect shallots, multibulbed shallots with taut golden skins stretched over purple-striated flesh; a day of dreaming of rough-textured rabbit ragu for pappardelle and a big fat capon for Sunday dinner; a day of warm lentils and goat cheese for lunch; a day for the gentle cooking of butter and chocolate together, of melting sugar into them and whisking like mad while adding fat quivering egg yolks, one by one, of turning egg whites into glossy snow, folding it all together, setting it carefully into the oven and waiting for that dreamy moment when the house smells like chocolate, the fragrance settling over us like a warm blanket; a day of craving olives and oranges, not knowing why, but knowing that that craving will only be satisfied by buying a bag of tangelos, rubbing that fat capon with salt and olive oil and the juice of those tangelos, running through your fingers as you catch the seeds, the cavity stuffed with more oranges and the whole thing roasted to crackly orangey olivey perfection; a day for dicing mountains of vegetables and sweating them in a cast-iron skillet until they are soft, tossing them into a Dutch oven with that rabbit you bought, along with white wine and water and tomatoes and bay leaves and just a pinch of cinnamon and clove, cooked almost into oblivion, until the meat falls from the bone into shreds, and the vegetables collapse into the sauce; a day for buying the cleanest-tasting pasta sheets in the world, the ones where you can smell wheat and water and egg as soon as you open the bag, the ones that will sit under your ragu like a pillow, and will slide down your throat like they were made just for you; a day for putting up a sponge of flour and milk and sugar and salt and yeast, a sponge that will sit overnight and will be enriched with butter and an egg the next morning, so that your husband can say with surprise, "you made waffles!"; a day for planning a holiday, a long-dreamed-of holiday in a soft green country; a day for reading books, taking notes, paying homage to those who have come before you, the work they did and the knowledge they share with you now; a day for writing or calling or just thinking of the people who you are lucky enough to know and love: Happy anniversary. I baked you a cake. Thank you. I miss you. I love you, always did, always will.