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You would think I would have learned long ago that it’s not nice to be smug, but no, it seems I still need gentle reminders.  Once upon a time I was killing some time in the Village shopping at Balducci’s, once the greatest food store in New York, only to suffer a precipitous decline in quality and variety after the Balducci family sold the store to a Maryland-based specialty food conglomerate that made a hash of the business before closing it down abruptly with no warning to the employees.  One day, not long before closing, I was browsing at Balducci’s when I came across a tightly-wrapped, fat little bundle of snowy, matte white rice.  ”Kalijira,” read the label.  “Grown in Bangladesh.  $5.99/pound.” I’d like to think that I didn’t actually snort out loud, but there was a snort.  Foolish Manhattanites!  $6.99 a pound for Kalijira, the same Kalijira I bought in the new Indian grocery on 31st Street just off 30th Avenue in Astoria.  Mine came in a cream-colored cotton sack with a bright red painting of an elephant on the front, $11.00 for 8 pounds.  “Oh,” said the beautiful young woman at the register, “this is very nice rice. Have you ever cooked with it?” She told me to look for and pick out any stray little pebbles, to rinse the rice well and let it drain, to melt some butter and fry the rice a bit before adding boiling water to it.  The resulting rice, though short and stubby in appearance, behaves like a perfect, fluffy dry long-grain rice.  It is wonderful in pilaf.  I have heard it called “baby basmati,” but to call it such understates its charms.  It is not as fragrant as basmati, but it has a scent all its own, enhanced by toasting it in butter, and a taste that manages to be both subtle and deep.  It is worth paying $6.00 a pound for it, but I’m still glad I don’t have to.

Unfortunately, I have run smack-dab into Newton’s Law of Smartassedness, which states that an act of braggery must have its equal and opposite smackdown, which brings me to bamboo rice.  Last Saturday found me at Kalustyan’s, the place where I buy my Christmas fruitcake fruit, my fresh curry leaves and any beans and/or rice that I can’t find in my own neighborhood.  Because I am a fool for blackeyed pea hummus and hoppin’ John, I find myself going through a lot of blackeyed peas, and I found a four-pound bag at Kalustyan’s, a steal at twice the price.  You have to love a store that sells six different varieties of red rice—at least I do—and within minutes I found myself clutching bags of Wehani rice, Christmas lima beans, dried flageolets, rice beans, brown basmati rice, beluga lentils and this deeply green-hued, spicy-scented rice.  Once I got home and was able to consult with our space-age friend the Internet, I learned that bamboo rice was actually a short-grain white rice infused with bamboo chlorophyll during the milling process.  The instructions on the packet were a bit vague, so I decided to try my old standby of twice the volume of water to rice and see if it worked.  I rinsed a cup of rice in a strainer, to rid it of excess starch, and left it in the strainer to drain.  I brought two cups of water to the boil, threw in a little salt, added the rice, brought the water back to the boil, covered it, lowered the heat, and went to do something else for 10 minutes.  When I checked the rice, the water had all been absorbed, and steam was beginning to form pockmarked tunnels in the mass of rice, the formation that always reminds me of pictures from the moon.  I turned off the heat, recovered the rice and let it sit for five minutes.

The resulting rice was so rich that I wondered if I had maybe thrown in some butter and then completely forgotten about it.  Each grain had a sheen to it.  The intense all-over green of the rice in its raw state was gone; in its place were tiny little green flecks.  The flavor had a hint of tea about it, but not overwhelmingly so; instead, it seemed to emphasize the flavor of the rice itself, buttery, savory, earthy; it made the rice ricier, much in the way that the right orange muscat wine will enhance the taste of chocolate.  If I did not have plans for this rice, to say nothing of a nice young man with whom I’d already promised I’d share it, it would have been perfectly easy for me to cradle the pot in my arms—after putting on my big giant oven gloves, of course—and eat it all in situ.  However, I did have a plan for it, namely to combine it with a warm lentil salad that I learned to make in a spa cuisine class once upon a time.  I can’t remember who originally created the lentil recipe—Amy Cotler?  Seppi Rengli?—but I have to find out so I can give him/her proper credit, because I have eaten hundreds, if not thousands, of bowls of these lentils.  (I am trying not to turn into Neil from The Young Ones, but...ah, hell..."Lentils are really great.  No matter how many times you eat them, they never get boring.") These lentils are indeed really great, they never get boring, and they’re a doddle to prepare.  You take a cup of small lentils of your choice, either green Puy lentils (from France), brown Castelluccio lentils (from Italy) or beluga lentils (see the link above) and cook them until they are tender.  If all of the cooking liquid has not been absorbed, drain the lentils.  While they are still hot, dress them with a dressing made of olive oil, water or chicken stock, Dijon mustard, vinegar of your choice (I like sherry), salt and pepper.  About half a cup of dressing will suffice for saucing the lentils, but I’ll admit, I don’t measure anything; I just eyeball more-or-less equal quantities of everything.  If I’m watching my fat intake, I’ll scale back on the olive oil and increase the amount of stock.  You can add lemon juice if you’d like, although I think that the vinegar and mustard make this tart enough.  You can mince a shallot and add it to the dressing; you can crack a garlic clove and embed it in the lentils, and then remove it before serving it, if you are feeding someone who can’t or won’t eat it.  You can top it with some diced tomato, or some crumbled soft cheese like ricotta salata or manouri, or not.

As I tucked into my bowl that night, thinking of how proud my mom would be that I absorbed all her lessons about beans and rice combining to make a complete protein, I thought, “I want to eat this all the time.” Then I remembered that that bamboo rice set me back $10.00 for a pound of it, and it would not be coming to the local Indian market any time soon.  This is what I get for poking fun of my fellow Balducci’s shoppers, who, after all, weren’t paying $10.00/pound for their rice.  Foolish Bakerina!  $10.00/pound for rice?  Ah, well.  I guess I’ll just have to fall back on that jewel of the neighborhood, the big bag of Kalijira, or maybe make the leap to whole-grain once and for all and cook up a pot of Wehani rice.  Or...or...or I could just recognize a good thing when I see it, reflect ruefully on how and why I developed all these expensive tastes (sauternes, smoked sable, bamboo rice), suddenly remember that next door to Kalustyan’s is Curry in a Hurry, where I can buy myself a freshly-made aloo paratha, the potato-stuffed flatbread that makes the best cheap lunch in town, and then buy a bag or two of bamboo rice with the money I’m saving.

Dear friends,

It is not fair of me, I know.  I dangle a promise of rice and lentils, a big warm soulful bowl of them, and then renege.

I am not reneging, I promise.  I have spent the better part of 3 1/2 hours trying to find the words to convey just how good this is, and how absurdly proud I was of myself for stumbling across it.  But dear friends, it’s not going to happen tonight.  Simply put, I have been pasted by the events of the past week, from the usual nonsense at LuthorCorp to the news that my dad had to have emergency surgery on Tuesday to repair a detached retina to the intensive bargaining sessions I’ve been having with the universe on orionoir’s behalf.  Were it not for the kindness of friends, the promise of seeing my family in Philadelphia this weekend, and Lloyd’s stubborn insistence on loving me no matter how much of a moody lunatic I am, I would probably be sitting, mute and thick, in my broken armchair, watching The Player (that would be the cheesy-ass reality show, not the Robert Altman film).

Lloyd and I should be home early Sunday evening, at which point I will be in a sharing mood, really, I will.

Oh, Johnny.

I could go on and on about the Ramones and about how in a just world they would have been much richer than they were.  I could rehash the story about Phil Spector pulling a gun on them during the recording of End of the Century. I could mention that my favorite Ramones song is the underrated “Every Time I Eat Vegetables, It Makes Me Think of You.” I could talk about how I almost cried when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, how I didn’t because I was laughing too hard at Dee Dee saying “I’d like to thank myself,” and how that just made me sadder when I heard that Dee Dee had OD’d on heroin.  I could even point out that any band mentioned in songs by Motorhead and the Human League is a band well admired and adored.

If I do that, though, we’ll end up with an encyclopedia here, so instead I will put on my jeans and sneakers and go back to Vince Lombardi High, or at least the rubble of it, anyway.

Well I don’t care about history
Rock, rock, rock’n’roll high school
‘cause that’s not where I wanna be
Rock, rock, rock’n’roll high school

Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock’n’roll high school
Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock’n’roll high school
Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock’n’roll high school
Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock’n’roll high school

In all seriousness, if you loved the Ramones like I did, go buy or rent Rock & Roll High School.  If you live in a city showing the new Ramones docco End of the Century, go see it.  I’m going on Monday.

It is time for me to get back to work on the book, which means that it’s time for me to think about eggs again, which thus means it’s time for me to share my ponderings with you.  Lucky souls. 

I have read a lot about comfort cooking, the act of stepping into the kitchen and wrestling your demons to the ground whilst simmering a pot of something fragrant, or whapping the bejesus out of a bundle of peppercorns for steak au poivre, or discovering the Zen of jellymaking, as Debby Bull discovered, and about which she wrote so beautifully, in Blue Jelly:  Love Lost and the Lessons of Canning.  I have read it, from time to time I have even done it, and I believe wholeheartedly in it, but lately it has eluded me, rather like a slow-moving, splendiforous butterfly that hovers around your hand, only to fly over your head just as you are about to reach out and touch it.  Except for the focaccia I baked at Snowball’s house, I haven’t made a loaf of bread in months.  To make bread is to be reminded of better times, when I was writing my business plan for the bakery, when every loaf became a puzzle, one about which I could dream for hours:  can we make 100 pounds of this dough and still have every loaf taste as good as this one does?  I think about this time two years ago when I was getting ready to go to the two-week class in Vermont my friends and I referred to as Bread Camp.  There is more Bread Camp in my future, but right now I can’t see it.  It’s not just bread, either.  My usual staples of kitchen ballet—hummus; black-eyed-pea hummus; corn cut off the cob and sauteed with butter, cayenne pepper and a splash of half-and-half; tomato and mozzarella salad; panzanelle; all manner of summer fruit tarts; plum cake; my beloved salad mix of sorrel, arugula and pea shoots—all of these things, which normally make me feel centered and graceful, now call up feelings of clumsiness and a sneaking suspicion that I’ve had a good run, but it’s time to pack up my gear and make way for someone *really* good.

Fortunately, I know self-pity when I smell it, and I know that a) this is nothing more than a mild rut, and b) nothing jolts one out of a mild rut than either trying something completely new or revisiting something you haven’t made in a long time.  This week, I was lucky enough to do both.

Those of you who eat hard-boiled eggs for breakfast regularly may become a bit impatient at my fussing over them, but understand, please, that I thought I had eaten my lifetime quota of boiled eggs when I was 14.  That was the year I went on a ludricrous crash diet, created by a leading bariatrician of the 1970’s and 1980’s and published in a teen magazine.  For two weeks I had a hard-boiled egg for breakfast; plain water-packed tuna, sans mayo or any other form of dressing, on a bed of greens for lunch, another boiled egg and an orange for dinner.  I lost a tremendous amount of weight and turned into a moody, lethargic monster, as if I weren’t doing well enough on that score with adolescence alone.  I ate so many boiled eggs that the thought of ever eating one again made my stomach roll over.  To this day, I’m still very picky about egg salad, which is to say that I won’t eat it unless Lloyd makes it.  Lloyd makes dreamy egg salad.  But I’m getting away from myself.  I had thought my boiled egg days were behind me, until I read a New York Times article that casually mentioned salade Nicoise.  I didn’t know that salade Nicoise was just what we needed, but I knew that I wanted some right now.

We were in good shape.  We had tomatoes.  We had capers.  We had butter lettuces from the Greenmarket.  We had jar upon jar of Italian olive-oil-packed tuna that I bought to ensure that Lloyd would not go hungry while I was in Arkansas.  “See,” I’d said to him, “you can mix this with some oriechette and chickpeas and olive oil and lemon juice and it will be great.” “Sounds great,” Lloyd said, and then spent a month eating something else.  We even had anchovies, although I knew that Lloyd would probably enjoy the salad more if I gave the anchovies a miss this time around.  All I needed were the eggs.  I snagged two from the fridge, covered them with water, brought them slowly to the boil, turned off the heat, covered the pot and let them sit for 10 minutes.  I’ll let Lloyd have the eggs, I said to myself.

At 10 minutes, I took them out, ran them under cool water, tapped them gently on the counter, rolled them between my palms to crackle the shell a bit, and peeled them.  The shell came off cleanly, no pulls into the white, and I realized I’d forgotten what a satisfying task this was, shelling hardboiled eggs.  The egg itself had none of the throat-catching sulfurousness that comes from overcooking an egg; instead, it gave off a deeply savory, buttery, clean scent that just sang egg.  With my first bite of the egg, I was filled with the urge to make the egg sauces so prominently featured in my old English cookbooks, the cooked yolks used as a liaison for the other ingredients, the whites used to contribute flavor and texture.  If Lloyd and I weren’t headed to Philadelphia this weekend, you’d better believe I’d be in the kitchen, rolling eggs two at a time, one under each palm, hearing the crackle and sighing, deeply, on the inside.

So where does the “something completely new” come in?  That would come from the interesting new rice I bought on Saturday, the kind that taught me what a beautiful thing a plain bowl of rice can be, and what an even more beautiful thing that bowl of rice is when you combine it with tiny, perfectly-seasoned black lentils.  Yes, there is a recipe.  Or there will be, anyway.  Tomorrow, possibly. 

Edit: After posting this, I discovered that my pal C. JoDI at Journal of the Demographically Insignificant was Page Hit #30,000 here at PTMYB.  Those of you with more seniority than I have, what is the appropriate way to thank him for this?  Does one buy a bottle of wine?  Bake a cake?  Hire a stripper?  Thanking everyone in advance for their advice.

Even though I know she’ll kill me for this, in her own inimitable long-distance way, I am going to raise a hue and cry about it anyway…

As the best bloke in Skegness would say, please go here and wish Snowball a happy birthday.  Make a big fuss over her.  Pinch her cheek.  Ask her if there’s any cake left.

In all seriousness, I am here to celebrate Snowball, for if there were no Snowball, there would be no Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina.  It was she who encouraged me to start this little page you’re reading right now; it was she who opened up her home to me on the Great Trek West; and it is she who listens to my various tales of woe, gives me cheerful good advice, never calls me a clueless stubborn mope (which I am, really), and always, always comes back for more.  She is an angel of a writer, a demon of a worker—Three Stooges Capital had better know how lucky they are—and a brilliant and loving mom to two of the best kids to be found west of the Mississip.  She is whip-smart, very very funny and her grasp on great works of literature, philosophy, song lyrics and movie dialogue is not encyclopedic; it’s better than that.  I know I’m not the only one out there who feels this, way, either; everyone who has been lucky enough to meet her knows what a good thing it is to call Snowball your friend.

Okay, Snow, you can start with the pummelling now.  Just try not to go for the eyes, because I just got my new contact lenses.  Is there any cake left?

Edit: Michael has informed me kindly that I left off a bit of detail on just how Snowball encouraged me to blog.  Those interested in the tale—or those who love to see an interesting story told in soporific prose—may find it in the comments section.