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Oh, mercy.  Alicia did say that since the questions were up to the interviewer, said interviewer could make them as nice or as evil as s/he wanted them to be. And yet...I went ahead and sent a comment to orionoir, even though I know him well enough to know better than that.  Sure, pally, I said, go ahead and interview me.

Well, a deal’s a deal.  Here is the deal, in the form of rules of the game:

1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I’ll ask you five questions.
3 - You’ll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You’ll include this explanation.
5 - You’ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

1. in excruciatingly precise detail, please recount the plot, theme, pov, setting, grammar, style and special effects of your last sexual fantasy. include an endnote discussing your choice of font, its history, and a general overview of all antecedent and descendant fonts.

Define “last sexual fantasy.” I seem to be having a different one about once every seven minutes.  Let’s see...there was the one with Ewan McGregor on the uptown 4 train—no, wait, that was at dinner...there was the one with Johnny Marr hiding in wait for me under my desk, positioned strategically in front of my ergonomically correct chair...no, no, that was a lover I had who bore a striking resemblance to Johnny Marr...dammit...at any rate, the grammar was correct for blank verse, the style was both rococo and baroque (and if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it, rimshot), and special effects were designed by Len Hapgood’s Kost-U-Less Flash Animation Emporium.  Font is known as “that nifty default font from TypePad, but would have been Garamond if only I knew how to spell it.”

2. did at least one of your parents have higher hopes for you than seems to be the case? explain just why things have been such a big fucking disappointment; assign blame on others whenever remotely possible.
No, not at all.  My parents groomed me to be the first woman justice on the Supreme Court, and as soon as I save enough box tops to pay for Harvard Law School, then nothing can stop me from...what...really?...are you sure? (crestfallen) Um...*this* is a big fucking disappointment, and I blame Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for squashing the dream.

3. are other people concerned about your a) drinking, b) smoking, c) sexual practices, d) eating, e) hairstyle, f) fertility, g) lack thereof, h) complexion, i) drug use, j) driving, k) laziness, l) workaholism, m) gambling, n) housekeeping, o) parental disciplinary failure, p) lawn, r) internet use, s) lowlife friends, t) lack of friends, u) inability to cook a turkey, v) pigheaded political beliefs, w) cholesterol, x) body odor, y) pets, z) mental health? for q), simply answer question u) while pressing the pound key.
Yes.  Except for u).  I rock the house when I roast a turkey.  Nation-states crumble into dust, powerful men weep at my feet as they beg me to please, please tell them how I get the dark meat done to perfection without drying out the breast.  Ha.  As if I would give it away.

4. what were you doing during the minute which began at precisely 1:30pm eastern standard time (gmt -05:00) on thursday january 22nd 2004 and terminated at 1:31pm eastern standard time (gmt -05:00) on thursday january 22nd 2004? as much as you possibly can, reproduce the real-time second-by-second experience, footnoting all words, names, technical terms, and slang which may have been in your thoughts but which may not be readily comprehensible to a small child.
At 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, January 22, 2004, I was on the telephone with a buyer for an unnamed beverage and spirits company, explaining to him why we couldn’t sell him never-to-biodegrade plastic cartons for ten cents apiece when it costs us five bucks apiece to make them, stopping only to let him ask me if I had always been a loathsome piece of spider puke or if it was a skill I picked up on the job, and to remind me once again that Satan himself must have delivered unnamed beverage and spirits company into my evil clutches.  At 1:31 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 22, 2004, I hung up the phone, removed the fork I had jabbed into my forehead from my forehead and reflected once again on why I didn’t take that job gunrunning for those angry French farmers who like to blow up McDonald’ses.

5. what’s your deep dark secret? get it off your chest.
*I* am Keyser Soze.  Shhhhhh.

6. assuming heterosexuality, what reasonably well-known same-sex celebrity would you sleep with if the fate of the world absolutely depended on you so sleeping with said celebrity? if homosexual, pick opposite sex celebrity on whom with-sleeping the world’s fate does depend. if bisexual, pick wellable-nun cyllable celibritty celebaty famous person who sleeps with nobody with whom you’d be forced to sit in the honeymoon suite of the houston airport hilton watching a cable tv movie about the love between a figure skater and a hockey player defying all odds in order to culminate in an on-ice symbolic consummation which miraculously does nothing to endanger a pg rating.
Quite a lot of assumptions you’ve got there.  Okay, assuming heterosexuality, it would have to be the woman in the video nasty I picked up for Red Wine, Chocolate and Porn night while Lloyd was out of town for two weeks.  What do you mean it doesn’t count if I don’t give her name?  I don’t know what her name was—dude, it was a video nasty!

7. have you ever slept with some girl/guy, sheesh, s/he could have been all hairy with bad teeth and who knows what kind of bugs, you first met on the internet? okay then, just how many? a paragraph each, please.
Define “slept.” Define “hairy.” Define “bugs.” Define “internet.” Okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  In order, “yes,” “seven...no wait, twelve...no, wait...do Olympic swim teams count as individuals or as a single unit?”, and “define ‘paragraph.’”

8. i don’t know what 8 is for.
But nine, nine, nine for the lost god, ten, ten, ten, ten for everything everything everything everything.  (That bitch took my money and went to Chicago...whoops, I’m skipping ahead a bit.)

9. if a really nice blog writing guy were to come up from behind and give you a big hug while you’re doing the dishes, would you blush all shades of a newly blossomed rose, saying “awwww” in a really endearing voice, okay, and then the nice blogging bloke were to be untying your apron ever so slowly and swoosh there it puddles on the shiny clean floor, and then—oh, never mind.
I tend to blush all shades of a brilliant ripe tomato, which tends to scare off really nice blog writing guys because they think I’m suffering from hypertension.  It really cuts into my fooling-around-whilst-doing-the-dishes-baking-the-bread-stirring-down-the-damsons time, damn the luck.

10. what is your understanding of string theory? how do you reconcile its inconsistencies with standard quantum physics, and to what degree do you feel that einstein’s model of relativity is nullified by subsequent work at both american and europaean supercolliders? please cite all relevant sources.
Everything I know about string theory can be encapsulated here. For ease of supercolliders, Mr. Simpson:Eric Idle::Adrian Wapcaplet:John Cleese.

11. so the blog writing guy, he’s dragged you by the hair to the bedroom, and there are sixteen tastefully arrayed scented candles (whatever was on sale… lots of patchouli, that would be your guess) but, whoa, look out, the laundry’s caught fire --
Anyone who would fill a room with patchouli candles deserves to lose all his laundry.  Whoops, I mean, (tenderly) it’s the thought that counts, baby…

12. what is it that most annoys you about other drivers? do you get this constant urge to mount a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on the roof of your car, wear an orange baseball cap with the name of a chainsaw company on it, and go cruising around looking for someone who’s just asking for it, well, do you?
What most annoys me about other drivers is their penchant for running over pedestrians like myself (although not actually myself, thankfully).  I get a constant urge to walk around with my keys in my fist so that I can scratch bloody murder out of paint job on the Focus of the the wet weed who turns into a crosswalk and misses me by a scant six inches.  This would be an admirable solution, were it not for the fact that my keys only weigh six ounces, while a Focus is just the slightest bit heavier.  Plus, said wet weed may not try to run you over with said Focus, but he may just decide to leap out of said Focus at the crosswalk and punch you in the mouth.  Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.  Heavens, no.

13. sheesh, this laundry’s a total loss, what a smouldering mess. why don’t we go out for a cup of coffee somewhere?
Sure.  I know a place in Hanover that makes coffee so good it’d make you slap your own auntie.

What a lovely idea this is.  Alicia at TwilightCafe, dreamer and thinker, invited readers to leave a comment if they were interested in participating in a five-question interview.  Here are her questions, and my answers:

1. What is your favorite childhood memory?
My favorite single memory from childhood is probably my very first memory.  I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was small enough to still be sleeping in a crib.  I’m thinking I was a year old, maybe younger.  My mom and dad and I were living in my grandparents’ house in northeast Philadelphia, a house long since torn down.  (The state of Pennsylvania decided to build an access road through our neighborhood, so a dozen houses, including ours, were torn down.  The service road project ran out of money and the road was never built.  I have no idea what is there now.  I can’t bear to think of it.) My uncles, who were teenagers when I was little, shared a room.  My parents had the room next door and my crib was in their room.  I remember lying in the crib one night.  Mom and Dad were both still awake, watching tv in the living room, so I was alone.  The hall light was on and I remember looking at it.  From my uncles’ room blared Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention singing “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.” My grandmother tore into their room and yelled, loud, “TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN.  YOU’LL WAKE UP THE BABY.” I remember thinking it was funny that Grandmom was being so noisy.

Although it’s not a single memory, I have lots of pleasant memories of falling asleep in the back of my parents’ car on the way home from going out for dinner.  This was before my brother was born, so there were no car seats in the back seat, and I was allowed to unbuckle my seat belt and lie down in the back seat and sleep on the way home.  I can think of very few things that made me feel as happy and safe as lying in the back seat, knowing that my parents were doing the hard work in bringing me home, and all I had to do was sleep.

2. What new thing would you like to learn to do?
This is so embarrassing, but I’d really like to learn how to throw and catch a baseball.  I have terrible hand-eye coordination, except when it comes to cake decorating.  Anything that’s not food-related, I’m completely hopeless.  I have always envied people who could not only throw and catch beautifully, but could take such things for granted, who had so much confidence in the workings of their own bodies that they knew where the ball would go before it even left their hands.  I have been told that it’s an easy thing to learn, throwing and catching a ball.  I am trying to be hopeful, and not just assume that I’ll find a way to screw it up.

3. What would you do if you had the guts to try it?
I would travel alone to places where it might not be advisable for women to travel alone, such as Tunisia or Thailand or Goa.  I would travel to jungles and rainforests.  I would rent a trailer in the desert in Arizona and see how long I could be by myself without driving myself mad.

4. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I have never read Paradise Lost.  This doesn’t come up in conversation too often, but people who know that I was an English major, particularly other English majors, automatically assume I know Milton inside out.  Sometimes I fess up, but usually I try to play along vaguely, hoping that nobody notices I have no damn idea of what I’m talking about.

5. If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Other than the places mentioned above, I would probably return to Amsterdam for a long-term stay.  My husband and I spent two days in Amsterdam during our honeymoon, and we loved it so much that ever since, we have wondered to each other if we could make a go of living there.  It is such a beautiful city, old and grand and happy.  The other night I was watching VH1 Classic, which showed the video for the 70’s George McCrae song “Rock Your Baby.” I perked right up, because I loved this song when I was a kid (still do, really), but I almost cried when I realized that the streets and canals along which George McCrae walked as he sang looked very, very familiar indeed.  “Is he in Amsterdam?” Lloyd asked.  At that moment McCrae walked past the hotel where we stayed, our little love nest, and I cried for real.

If you would like to join the fun, here are the rules:

1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I’ll ask you five questions.
3 - You’ll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You’ll include this explanation.
5 - You’ll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Oh, my dear friends,

Tonight’s regularly scheduled whimsy must be postponed until such time as my hands stop shaking.

Back on New Year’s Eve, when I made the resolution to write that culinary history of the use of eggs in baking, I was not just making up the most eccentric premise I could think of.  In November I applied for a culinary writing fellowship, funded by the American Egg Board, for a four-week stay at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow Farm in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  The fellowship pays all expenses at the Colony to allow writers to work uninterrupted.  I applied for the Egg Board fellowship as a lark, never thinking that anything would come of it.  After all, I am not a published writer, save for a few long-archived food articles I wrote for the website foodies.com.  I am not a historian.  I have nothing to recommend me for such a prize other than a long attention span and the inclination to write a quirky historical.

The application deadline was November 15.  At the bottom of the last page of the application was an announcement that all winners would be notified by December 15.  December 15 came and went.  Ah well, I said, never mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, there it was in today’s new e-mails, buried in the midst of dozens of letters from one of my e-groups.  “WCDH American Egg Board Fellowship Results—at last,” said the subject hed.  Let’s just get this over with, I thought, preparing to read a press release about someone else’s good news.

It was not a press release.  It was not someone else’s good news.

Dear friends, I am the 2004 American Egg Board Fellow.  Sometime in the next 12 months, hopefully in May or September, I am headed to the Ozarks for four weeks.

When this really sinks in, I am going to be thrilled and terrified.  Now, though, I am just plain stunned.

One of my least favorite things about winter is the constant chatter of vox pops on the local news, in which people express the novel notion that it’s very, very cold out, and they don’t like it. I don’t like cold weather either, at least not this kind of cold, but I find it necessary. I am a big believer in seasons, and to me a fierce winter is the price you pay for a gentle spring, much as a baking-hot summer is the price you pay for a brilliant, crisp autumn. I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, and I learned early to mistrust that warm snap in February, when the temperature would near 50 degrees, the ice would turn into little tributaries, and the dirt would feel soft underneath my boots. I knew that this was a debt we were incurring, and within weeks we would have to pay up. Sure enough, we would wake up one morning to 7 degrees, with a 15-below wind chill. When Stephen King wrote in his novella “The Sun Dog” that it was the debt that hurt you but the interest that broke your back, I thought immediately of those winters.

I am even more leery of winters that never get very cold, 50 degrees and wet all winter long. Not only is it dreary—too warm for snow activities, too cold for much else—but once spring arrives, there is a sameness to it all; that soft mud, that gentle air, it becomes status quo, rather than the marvel it should be. It should be a marvel, to walk around the city, or sit in my parents’ backyard, or troop through woods and meadows, feeling warm air on my face and arms like a gift, feeling loved on this earth, all of us rewarded for our patience during those long dark fierce winter months. Because I am descended, on both sides of my family, from peoples of cold dark northerly green countries, I can’t have one without the other. So the Arctic cold front currently grinding the East Coast under its bootheel should fit right into my plans. Only...Jesus, it’s cold. I had forgotten how strenuous and draining it is, living in this kind of cold, how every gust of wind feels like an assault. I had forgotten the dread of waking up and seeing frost on the windows, knowing that that was the harbinger of a particular brand of cold, the kind that made you feel that you were being eaten alive. I had also forgotten how LuthorCorp loves to overcompensate in extreme weather, leaving us bluelipped in the dog days of August, and dry-roasted on a day when the wind chill hit 30 below zero. It is enough to make a girl run shrieking, or at least dream of escape. My dear friends who live in balmier and more temperate zones have graciously invited me and/or Lloyd to head southward or westward until all of this arctic nonsense blows over.  Fresser that I am, though, there is only one place I want to go right now: anyplace in Australia, or New Zealand, where I can get my hands on some finger limes.

When the weather turns cold, I deal with it in two ways. One is to make a lot of rib-sticker foods, one-pot dishes: the famous braised chicken and chestnuts from Land of Plenty; beef with carrots and prunes, covered with stout and baked for hours in a slow oven; the wonderful Gran’maw Peacock’s Chicken and Rice from The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. This is one of the best chicken & rice dishes you will ever eat, and it is also one of the easiest things you could ever make. (Since this is a copyrighted recipe, I will not post it, but if you are keen to try it, e me.) The other way is to turn 180 degrees from the baked and stodgy and embrace the warm and zippy. This year I have backed down from my normally strict insistence on eating with the seasons, simply because there are only so many baked parsnips one can eat without screaming. This year I have fallen back on chile peppers, haricots verts, broccoli, mustard greens and black kale. I have come back to cabbage, loathed in childhood, adored now that I know the proper way to eat it (raw, pickled or very lightly cooked). And I find myself giving thanks every day that I was born in a time where limes are cheap and plentiful.

I am a mad fool for tart, sour flavors. Much as a normal person’s mouth waters at the thought of a perfectly roasted prime rib, a bowl of buttery peas or a coconut cake with seven-minute icing, so does mine at the thought of a green tomato pickle, or the little rose-colored Greek pickled onions known as volvi, or the biting tamarind candies that I sometimes find in Asian markets. At this time of year I envy my British friends with access to forced rhubarb, as over here we don’t see the best and affordable stuff until May, and so I must wait, tastebuds humming in anticipation. To my mind, though, the best taste in the world is to be found inside a passion fruit, so unpromising at first glance (that wrinkled shell! those spooky seeds!) but so brilliant and sunny and tart and loaded with promise. Every time I share a passion fruit with someone, the reaction is the same: a look of trepidation, a startled “oh!” at first taste, a smile. This lovely fruit has two big drawbacks, though: it lends itself better to sweet dishes than to savories, and, at least where I live, they are expensive. The market where I find them charges $1.75 a piece for them; this for a single fruit that yields about a tablespoon of pulp. There are few things more dispiriting than to open up a cookbook and see “passion fruit, about two dozen” in the ingredient list. I keep hearing rumors of passion fruit being cultivated in Florida and California, cheaper by far than the pricy imported Pacific Rim fruit. I am still waiting.

No, what I really need to get me through the winter is a fruit that is cheap and plentiful, can be used in sweets and savories alike, and makes me feel like a little ray of sunshine, inside and out. Lemons do the trick beautifully. Limes do it even better.

As part of my overall January post-holiday, pre-spring dietary housecleaning, I have been cooking my way through Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook. Ordinarily I have no truck with low-fat, or even lower-fat, cookbooks; I have no patience for regimes and I have never embraced, in Nigella Lawson’s words, the way, the truth and the lite, but into every stubbornly-held crotchet falls an exception, and A New Way to Cook is mine. Some of the recipes are more high-maintenance cookery than others; for every brown butter/balsamic vinegar sauce, there are about ten recipes with long ingredient lists and very specific cooking techniques. Tonight I will be making hummus, the fodder for a dozen brown-bag lunches, and thus I will be toasting spices, grinding them, chopping garlic, blending them all together with tahini and lemon juice and then zizzing them in the food processor, along with the chickpeas I soaked on Monday and cooked last night. It is all worth it, I tell myself, because when I am done I can have a fruit salad dressed with Greek yogurt, brown sugar, cardamom and lime juice.

I have been eating insane quantities of limes, in seafood salad, in Thai hot and sour soup, in “brick chicken” (chicken marinated in lime juice, garlic and rosemary, pressed under a foil-wrapped brick and cooked in a cast-iron skillet). Normally there is no better way to roast a chicken than with a lemon up its bottom, but every once in a while I use a lime instead, and the result is a familiar yet exotic flavor. I’d always known in the back of my mind that lime juice + fish sauce + chile + ginger + rice vinegar + a little pinch of sugar was a workable combination, but I never realized just how gloriously all these flavors mesh together, particularly when you heat them for a few minutes. And I won’t even begin to discuss desserts—well, okay, I will begin to discuss desserts. The best cake I know how to make, the closest thing to a signature cake that I have, is a basic buttermilk cake, the kind you can find in cookbooks from Maida Heatter to Gale Gand, flavored with a lot of cardamom (do you sense a theme here?) and lime zest, soaked with quantities of lime syrup when you pull it hot from the oven. I made baked apricots last night, dried California apricots (so much bigger, brighter and more tart than their Turkish counterparts) soaked to plumpness, dressed with some of the soaking liquid, sugar flavored with cardamom and the inside of a vanilla bean, and several squeezes of lime juice. I ate those sticky, warm apricots with a little blob of full-fat Greek yogurt, and trust me, there was not a part of my body that wasn’t happy when I ate it.

You would think that I have a bit of an obsession with limes, those unprepossessing little handballs in the supermarket, nice enough for a gin and tonic but little else. Until last week I would have disagreed with you; I would have said that limes are greatly underappreciated, their propensity to flood the coldest, most arctic days with warmth and sunshine vastly underrated. I would have said, hopefully not too meanly, it’s not my problem, it’s yours, you philistine, you. Then the New York Times food section ran an article (since archived on their web page, damn them) about exotic limes, such as the Thai cuisine fixture makrut lime (never kaffir lime, not on this page, at least). On the front page was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, the cross section of an Australian finger lime. The little elongated juice sacs that make up a section of citrus fruit, those that are so lovely when your fruit is fresh and sweet, and so nasty when it is old and dried out, are called vesicles. The vesicles in a finger lime are perfectly round and large, about the size of fish roe, or large-pearl tapioca. Apparently Ferran Adria, the chef at El Bulli in Spain, was moved to tears when he tried one, and Daniel Boulud, a very snappy piece of cheese in the New York restaurant world, is aching to get his hands on finger limes for his restaurant. We cannot get them here, at least not yet. And thus my obsession is fostered. I imagine cutting a finger lime open, tipping the vesicles into my mouth, crunching them between tongue and palate, feeling my mouth fill with intense sunshine, and I know, I have to go wherever I can go to find those, right now.

Dear friends,

I am gobsmacked.  I’ve been back online for about 24 hours, but since my nice little return post turned into another honkin’ behemoth, I decided to wait until I was close to posting it before checking to see if anyone had come to visit while I was away.  Come to visit you did.  My golly.

I still have trouble believing that these little nonsenses I issue in this space are interesting to anyone else, but I will not protest too much.  I have no idea what good deed I did in history to deserve such kind, excellent and funny friends.  Thank you, each and every one of you.  Glory be.  (The funk’s in me.  We want the funk.  This is nineteen seventy-fiiiiiiive...okay, I’ll stop.)

So is that it?  That’s the best you can do after more than a week, slacker girl? No, no, of course not.  Give me some time to do my edits and links, and prepare to be bludgeoned.