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Last week, in mooning over the Existentialism Virus, I compared it to a summer cold.  This week I learned that the summer cold does not like to have its name dropped, and if it catches you dropping its name, it will exact a swift and terrible revenge.  “I think I picked up a little cold,” Lloyd said yesterday afternoon.  Now he is just about over it, after a day of little worse than a sore throat, while I am in the throes of it, mouth-breathing, slack-jawed, ten years older than I was when I woke up on Saturday morning.  The worst thing about summer colds to me is that they turn me into a gigantic, tetchy, can’t-cope baby, rather like Baby Huey, only without the sweet disposition.  I drove myself into near paroxysms of rage last night when my wireless connection went down.  I know that in the normal course of wireless activity, connectivity will go down for a few seconds at a time, but over the weekend, particularly in the evening, I would lose connectivity for about 10 minutes at a time.  Lloyd worked his brand of computery magic to add another channel on which I can connect, but whatever is knocking me out knocks me out on all channels.  Last night I lost the connection at 9:30, and it was still down when I went to bed at 11:30.  I have the creeping suspicion that one of our neighbors just got a new cordless phone.  None of this should be earth-shattering; after all, I’ve only been wireless for a month or so, and I can always just plug in the ethernet cable, yes?  No.  Something is seriously munged with my port, and it won’t hold the cable in place long enough to make the connection.  Again, this is the sort of problem you have to have the luxury to have; if this is the biggest problem I have in my life, it’s a good life.  Unfortunately, I was not nearly as philosophical about this last night. I found myself turning into Stewie Griffin from Family Guy, crying “Damn you all!  Burn in hell!” and flailing my arms impotently.

Luckily, I was able to check my stats last night before everything went down, and thus did I find all the lovely nutty things people will type into a search engine:

liquid woolite guest supply. Rest assured, if you are a guest in our house, we have a bountiful supply of liquid Woolite at hand, and you are welcome to use it.

beets turning stools black. Eww, eww, eeeeeeuuuuuuuwwwww!  Go away, go away, go away!  Not to be rude or anything, but go away, go away, go away!

spice that a bartender would just your Brandy Flip with. Now that’s more like it.  Unfortunately, I’ve never made a brandy flip, just or unjust, so I don’t know what spice this would be.  Any bartenders here this morning?  (Oh, that came out seedier than I meant it to.)

nymphette memories. Nothing to see here!  Move away!  Move away!  Move away!

bench understatement fashion show models. Either this is one of those gibberish paragraphs that show up at the end of spam e-mails or “bench understatement” actually means something more interesting than I’d imagined.

meet daddy kept man. Well, the internet has something for everyone, I guess, including guys trolling for sugar daddies.  Too bad that whoever googled this ended up at my post about my late grandfather. Damn you all!  (flail, flail)

is tapioca pudding and tapioca balls the same thing Maybe you should ask the tapioca.  (rimshot) All right, all right, I’m sorry.  That was foul, gross, inappropriate and corny.  Totally wrong of me, I know.  Dear new friend of PTMYB, if you haven’t fled in horror at my general lunacy, I have an answer for you.  Tapioca balls are the pure form of tapioca.  Tapioca pudding is made from milk, sugar, eggs (which are optional), any flavorings you might like, and tapioca balls, which are available in small, large or extra-large (i.e. the ones used in Taiwanese bubble tea) sizes.  Minute Tapioca is parcooked small tapioca balls, made for quick cookery.

home of the girl next door. Could you hold for just a moment, please?  Thank you.  Michael, it’s for you!

shameless cakes. Now you’re talking. 

Pity our poor Lloyd, for he is married to a clearly insane woman.

Today was a market day, and unlike most market days, I had an actual plan.  Plenty of greens, because Lloyd and I have not been good about eating our vegetables this week.  Eggs, because we are running low.  Garlic, lots of it, for the making of the garlic stew ‘mouse shared with us.  Berries, whatever looks good, for the making of bumbleberry pie.  Corn, for eating as is, for succotash and for my summer staple, spiced corn, an Ismail Merchant recipe I got by way of Laurie Colwin.  Riding to the market on the N train, I decided that the time had come for me to make a batch of chicken stock.  I hadn’t made it in a long time; I try to keep stock-making to cooler weather and just spend the hotter months making food that doesn’t require it, but lately I’ve been craving the things I like to make with it:  pasta with beet sauce, risi e bisi, braised kale with mushrooms and oyster sauce.  I’ll get some chicken feet from the egg farm, I thought.  There is not a chicken broth that is not made better by throwing at least a single chicken foot into the pot.  I can’t remember where I learned this, but I know that as I got braver, I would throw two feet, then four feet into the pot, until eventually I would throw an entire one-pound package in.  Lloyd knows that I know what I’m doing with these chicken feet, but they appall him nonetheless.  Once I put a pot of stock ingredients on the stove and forgot to warn Lloyd.  He went into the kitchen to make coffee and was confronted by the sight of half a dozen chicken toes poking out of the pot.  He does not shriek like a little girl, but if he did, that would have been the moment for him to do it.

At Union Square I walked directly to the egg farm stand and queued up.  Today!, the handwritten sign said. 5 pounds backs, $3. Even better!, I thought.  I won’t have to make another stop for a chicken at home; I’ll just make it with backs and feet!  I knew I would be slightly more encumbered than I’d planned to be at this point, but I didn’t mind.  “One dozen large brown, one dozen extra large brown, a package of backs and a package of feet,” I said when I reached the head of the line.

It took a bit of digging around in coolers for the counter guy to find everything.  I saw him pull two large-ish bags from a cooler and put them on the table.  One of them was the largest bag of feet I had ever seen.  $5, said the label.  This was a five-pound bag of feet.

“Wow.  Lotta feet,” I said.

“Yep,” said the counter guy.  “This is the only package of feet we have left.”

My heart sank.  I didn’t need five pounds of feet.  I didn’t want to start my shopping trip with 12 pounds of groceries.  On the other hand, the guy did take the time to find them for me, and the line behind me was getting longer.

This was the point at which I could hear the voice of my mental-health professional in my mind, and I knew that if he had been at the market with me, rather than on a well-deserved vacation, he would have been going berserk.  “What are you doing?  Why are you not taking care of your own needs?  You don’t need a 5-pound bag!  Why are you worried about *his* convenience?  *He’s* certainly not thinking, ‘oh, maybe she doesn’t need 5 pounds’!  He’s thinking that he wants to make a sale!  You don’t need to worry about his feelings, you need to worry about yours!  No one else will take care of you!  You have to take care of you!  Aaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Reader, I heard it all, and I still bought the whole damn bag.  Thus did I sentence myself to lugging 12 pounds of poultry products to my regular veggie guy, to the tomato stand, to the fruit stand, to the dairy stand.  Corn on the cob was right out; after all, corn is heavy to carry around in quantity.  I was forced to restrain myself on this trip.  Unfortunately, my idea of restraint is a head of Simpson lettuce, two little bundles of arugula, two big bundles of black kale, a spray of tarragon, a bundle of celery (so superior to supermarket celery, so much greener and leafier and more pungent, that it is worth it to me to pick it up on this trip), four pounds of heirloom tomatoes, half a dozen serrano chiles, a dozen bulbs of garlic, and 3/4 pint of cream.  No berries to be found anywhere.  That’s all right, I thought; I can’t possibly carry one more thing.  Then I discovered that my favorite fruit stand had a small complement of greengages.  If you’re not familiar with them, greengages are a type of plum, or at least a close relative of plum, with a fairly thick skin that is deep green when unripe and a warm green gold when ripe.  They are terrific in jam and in plum tarts, but left to my own devices I can eat ridiculous quantities out of hand.  I bought four pounds. 

This is insanity, I thought on the ride home on the N.  I either need to get a car or I have to learn how to shop like a human being.  What are we going to do with five pounds of feet?  In general, I don’t like to freeze meat at all, raw or cooked, because frozen meat sustains cellular damage that affects the texture and taste of the meat after it is cooked.  If I ever find myself with a frozen roast on my hands, I usually marinate it to offset some of the freezer damage.  This time, though, I have little choice.  There are wonderful dishes to be made with chicken feet, like the chicken feet in black bean sauce I had at dim sum one weekend, but Lloyd flat-out refuses to even try them, and I don’t know how to do anything with chicken feet but boil the (figurative) stuffing out of them, forcing out all their jelly-making goodness into the soup pot.  In the end, I weighed them out into pounds, wrapped them tightly in food film and again in aluminum foil until they resembled giant foil tamales, or small bales of heroin.  Four of them are sitting snugly in the freezer, in a space made clear by pushing the quarts of cherries I’d frozen the previous four weekends out of the way.  The fifth, never bundled and wrapped, is sitting in a bubbling pot atop five pounds of necks and backs, studded with shallots and a carrot, blanketed by celery leaves, just lying in wait to give Lloyd a rude surprise.

Last week was a sad one for cooks, readers and happy eaters, as we lost not only the inimitable Julia Child, but also the peerless chef Leslie Revsin, the first woman to work in the kitchens of the Waldorf-Astoria, and a pioneering chef-owner of her own restaurant in the West Village.  The world is a dimmer, less cheerful place for the loss of them, and in need of serious good news.  And there it was, just at the moment we needed it, in the form of this beautiful, evocative essay from receptionista, in which she announces that her sister has been accepted to culinary school.  Thus is the torch passed to another generation, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.  Congratulations, Molly Virginia.  You keep us all posted, now, y’hear?

Receptionista’s words make me wish I could extend the Great Trek West into a never-ending road trip so that I could join her and Molly Virginia and their mom at table—don’t you love how I just invite myself to meals?—and, if they would let me, work elbow-to-elbow with them in the kitchen.  In general I’m a solitary cook; sometimes Lloyd will help me with prep, but since our kitchen is so badly laid out, it isn’t conducive to group cooking.  My parents’ house, though, is another story.  When I go to visit my parents, my mom and I cook together, and at our best moments it feels like dancing.  We take turns working as each other’s sous-chef, keeping an eye on the pots, turning on the oven light to see how the roast is progressing, or the gingerbread or the roast tomatoes, and in doing so we continue an adventure we began when I was three, the point at which I could be trusted to stand on a chair next to Mom and not flail out, needing to touch everything.  I learned early that if I didn’t reach into hot pots or bowls with moving beaters, eventually the pot would cool down, or the beaters would be unplugged, and I would be allowed to touch and taste everything we were making.

In the parent lottery, I got supremely lucky.  My dad and stepdad are both excellent cooks; my mom is also an excellent cook and a dream baker besides.  She let me try my hand at pressing spritz cookies and kneading bread dough; most of what I produced looked like a mangled nightmare, but she let me keep producing those mangled nightmares until I got the hang of it.  My stepdad taught me how to cut up a chicken when I was 12, and, like Mom, he patiently let me screw up a lot of chickens before I got the hang of it.  My parents, bless them, ate burned stews, flavorless Maryland chicken, chicken-rice soup with enough rosemary to choke a wild pig, birthday cakes made with jars of honey and with the texture and weight of doorstops, because they had both been there; once upon a time, they had to learn how to cook, too, and they knew that on the other end of that awful food lay food that was better, then good, then better than good.

You don’t, of course, need parents or grandparents or aunties to teach you to cook.  I know plenty of splendid cooks who grew up with non-cooking parents, not knowing how to make toast, but who had the desire to learn, and the willingness to use a cookbook just long enough to teach them the basics, and the confidence to put the cookbook away when they were comfortable with their stoves, their pots and their ingredients.  I also know that if you did not have cooking parents or grandparents, it can be daunting to crack open a cookbook, or read an interview with some smart young chef, and read about how they learned to make confit or bake madeleines or seed currants for bar-le-duc preserves before they were out of diapers.  You don’t need some childhood pedigree to learn how to cook.  You just have to have the desire.  I think of a line by my ultimate food hero, the late Laurie Colwin, that I’ve always loved:  she said that cooking was like falling in love.  You don’t have to be particularly beautiful or glamorous or rich; you just have to be interested in it.  She was the perfect embodiment of this ethos:  she would cook for her friends, who found the whole idea of regular home-cooked meals a bit silly or antipathetic or, at best, romantic but impractical for our harried modern lives; then they would take one bit of her baked chicken, her creamed spinach with jalapeno peppers or her ginger cake, and they would sigh, oh, this is wonderful, I can’t believe how good this tastes, and she would reply this is a meal put together by someone who can barely add two and two.  You don’t have to go to MIT to make a scratch cake, and they would look at her with astonishment.

One thing that will not help you, in my opinion—and I realize I’m sticking my neck out here—is home ec, or Domestic Science for my English pals.  Now, if you had a home ec teacher in middle school or high school that was just a wonder, who opened up the wonderful world of cooking for you, please do e me with your story, because I want to hear it.  I want to hear that home ec is a good avenue for people who didn’t learn to cook at home.  Unfortunately, my home ec experience was dismal, and the stories I have heard from friends don’t vary much from mine.  My fifth-grade home ec teacher was a sweet-natured, sweet-faced woman who seemed to want us to have a good time in the kitchen, but in sixth grade I changed schools, to a middle school where the home ec teachers seemed to take such a grim pleasure in sucking the life out of cooking and sewing that I almost wonder if they got a sexual charge out of it, out of taking something that could be so satisfying, such a challenge and a puzzle and a pleasure to figure out, and leaving a drab, airless space in its wake.  I spent four years in home ec, making pan after pan of Rice Krispie treats, Chex Mix, Egg Beaters and other food-company-drafted, sugary, prefab crap snackysmores.  By the time I got to eighth grade, we were allowed to take a crack at bread.  I asked if I could make challah, having just learned it the week before at home, and I’m still wondering what put my teacher in enough of a good mood to give me permission to do it.  The next week, we were back to making Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bomb Bars, or whatever the hell Big Cereal Company called them.
The worst part of home ec for me was that we were never given explanations for why things happened, or why we were supposed to do things a certain way.  Our teachers would measure flour by spooning it into the cup, then levelling it off with a knife.  My mom measured flour by dipping the cup into the flour and levelling it off with a knife.  When I asked my teacher why I shouldn’t measure by dipping and sweeping, like Mom, she answered, “Because this [the spooning method] is the right way to do it.” This is not an answer.  An answer would be something like “Flour weights by volume can vary a lot depending on how you get your flour into the cup.  If you sift it into the cup, a cup of flour weighs four ounces.  If you spoon it in, a cup of flour weighs 4 1/2 ounces.  If you dip and sweep, it weighs 5 ounces.  If you dip and pack, it can weigh up to 6 ounces, and that 2-ounce difference can make the difference between your cake being just right and being too dry, or not having enough flour to give it structure.  Our recipes are written assuming a 4 1/2-ounce cup of flour.” A less satisfying, but still better answer would be “Because this is the way we learned to do it at Home Ec College, and this is how we pass that knowledge on to you.” But “because this is the correct way, full stop”, that’s no answer for an inquisitive and curious cook.

Here’s another example, one that I put in practice almost every day.  When you separate eggs, be sure you have three bowls.  One is for yolks, one is for whites, and one is for individual whites. Break the egg, drop it into your cupped fingers, let the white slide through your fingers into the “individual” white bowl, drop the yolk into the yolk bowl, pour the white into the “collective” white bowl, repeat. I do this not because this is the “right” way, but because it’s the practical way:  If you accidentally break a yolk into the white you’re trying to separate out, then you won’t contaminate the entire bowl of whites with a speck of yolk, which will impede the whipping of air into your egg whites.  Likewise, I learned this week, while making brownies, the same brownie recipe I’ve been making since I was 8 (and the first thing I ever baked without parental supervision), that it really is a good idea to break your eggs into a bowl individually, and then pour each egg into the mixing bowl.  Doing this is a pain in the neck, a palaver, requiring another bowl to wash at the end of it all, but if you omit this step, you run the risk of cracking your fourth egg into the bowl and noticing that the yolk has exploded into milky formlessness; you gently sniff the eggshell from which that last egg came, and you discover that you have just contaminated your whole bowl of eggs with one bad one, and you’ll have to throw the lot away.  Fortunately, if you’re lucky you’ll have four more eggs, and they’ll all be fine, and you can resume brownie-baking, which you then feed to your grateful friends and lovers, who will ask you if it’s really that easy to make these scrummy brownies.  You can smile like the Mona Lisa, both at the warm glow you get from feeding the people you love well, and at the little kitchen science lesson you received earlier.  Here endeth the lesson.

Dear friends, I had planned to share with you some more nonsense about food, but I had the stuffing kicked out of me at LuthorCorp today.  With any luck, by this time tomorrow, insights will be shared, recipes will be traded and receptionista will get the ping she so richly deserves.

In the meantime, I thought, what better way to get ready for my upcoming trip by showing some pictures from my previous trip?  Behold…

I think I have found the vehicle that I need to take the much-talked-about road trip.  However, since the sign on the windshield says “trade,” I can’t help but think that there are slight problems with this truck, like, say, a family of bees living in the engine.

This is an old grocery store I found on one of my walking tours of Eureka Springs this summer.  I think it is yet another perfect location for a bakery.  Too bad someone has posted “private property” signs all over the doors and windows.  What nerve. 

I think I found the neighborhood where all the slackers and struggling musicians in Eureka live. Apparently legalization is not a priority; it is enough to just encourage us all to smoke it.

I can’t tell what I like more here:  the steps to nowhere, or the ferocious attack kitty lying against the second step, guarding the lot of them.  I woke him/her up when the flash went off. S/he was not amused.

The wife of the farmer who sells herbs at the farmers’ market says that she is often envious of people who live on the coasts because their produce is better.  Maybe we have better variety, but in terms of quality, it would be almost impossible to improve on the herbs, onions and lettuces I bought in Eureka.  The sunflowers are pretty grand, too.

Of course, eventually I had to come home, and even with the happy occurrence of seeing Lloyd again, I still found myself missing Eureka a lot.  Luckily, the fates intervened and decided I really needed some fine produce to come back to.  “Say,” said the fates, “I wonder if the gooseberries are ready yet?”

The existential virus.  Here are two symptoms: 1) You’re in your house, surrounded by beautiful things and great stuff you normally love to do, but you can’t bring yourself to feel one single ounce of interest. 2) (If you’re a woman) You check your calendar, certain you miscalculated and that it must be PMS. And it’s not.

—Pam the Beancounter

Dear friends, I knew it wasn’t all in my head, and it wasn’t just me.  Here, there and everywhere, the best of us suddenly find ourselves confounded, overwhelmed, and sad.  Ennui runs rampant.  The world is full of socks to knit, comics to draw, novels to write and pies to bake, and yet we find ourselves sitting in our living rooms, or in a caff somewhere, staring blankly at television sets while some loudmouth tells us that Michael Phelps should be casting his head down in shame for only taking a bronze in an event that was not his strong suit, and in which he participated only for the chance to compete against Ian Thorpe.  Coffee has no fragrance.  Thai food has no snap.

Something must be done.  Radical measures must be taken, particularly the kind of radical measures that reflect spontaneity (if you’re being kind) and/or poor impulse control (if you’re not), as well as the willingness to go any distance to find the cure.  Specifically, it involves the willingness to go to a site like Orbitz or Travelocity, search for airfares between your home and the homes of your friends, and goggle at the realization that you can travel thousands of miles for roughly the cost of a pair of boots.  We’re not talking stylish, impractical, make-me-write-bad-checks boots, either.  We’re talking about sturdy, functional, suitable-for-Buffalo-and-Minneapolis-winters boots.

Dear citizens of Snowballville, CO, secure your doors and lock up your husbands/fathers/sons/really nice guys that any girl would be lucky to get, because I’m headed your way Labor Day weekend.  My research assistant and hostess-with-the-mostest will be the lovely Snowball, who has generously offered to let me bunk with her, the famous B and G, the also-famous Mom of Snowball and their collective menagerie.  Together she and I will be driving hither and yon, cleaning cat hair off our shirts, fortifying ourselves at the fabulous local delicatessen/bakery and giving smoldering glances to local musicians.  To quote the theme from Roger Ramjet, for these adventures, just be sure to stay tuned to this station.