Bottle of Babble or a Bottle of 'Bon...?

In T.J.s as usual, staring up at the wine.

“Jules. Have you tried the Babble yet?”

“Say what?”

Employee yanks a curious-looking bottle from the middle shelf. “Babble. We all love it. It’s like Cocobon but a little different. Some of us like it better than Cocobon.”

Well that’s just blasphemy, I said. So I bought a bottle of Babble to bring home and imbibe.

Say THAT five times fast…

A merry band of grapes make up this red table wine from a Mendocino County wine maker. At $7, it’s the same price as Cocobon, so deciding which one to buy comes down to a matter of taste.

And how does it compare to Cocobon, my love?

Red and juicy. Decently rounded for the price point. Whoever wrote the back label was trying to be clever, playing on the whole “babble” theme, and mentions the flavor of bacon fat in there somewhere…I couldn’t access that myself.

In all, I found it comparable to Cocobon, but somehow less substantial. As if substance were at all an issue in $7 table wines.

Try it yourself and see. Cocobon is still my number one.

Although my mom really didn’t cook, she did have a little recipe box, about six inches long and three inches wide; blue with flowers, I think, and a cover that hinged back and over when it opened. Inside were a number of index cards, some stained with use but many not. It occupied an unloved corner of counter back by the refrigerator, until the day it disappeared into a drawer, never to be seen again.

All the moms had them, so I figured it was just standard kitchen gear, even though I’d never seen ours being consulted. I hadn’t thought of a recipe box at all in years until this afternoon, when Eva pulled hers out.

Eva and I go way back. We met at our first job out of college and bonded over our mutual disorganization. This afternoon she had promised to make an apple cake for her son’s school and was digging through her recipe box, stuffed with every manner of paper, each one with a recipe scribbled on it. Index cards and receipts, scrap paper, paper torn from magazines. No attempt at order or classification. I wasn’t holding my breath.

“You’re worse than me,” I said. “And that’s saying something.”

This is why we're such good friends...

I got to thinking about the recipes we keep. They say that with the ever-growing popularity of the i-Pad, which is easy to set up in the kitchen while you call up recipes from the internets, cookbooks and the scrawled recipe on paper will be going the way of the rotary phone. I don’t agree.

For one thing, even when they’re much cheaper and as ubiquitous as cell phones, not everyone will opt for an i-Pad. Secondly, there is a lot to be said for the recipe written out on paper. People have a deep love of ephemera that may take another generation or two to breed out of us. And nobody wants to ruin said i-Pad with buttery fingerprints and spilled tomato sauce.

This is what an old, much loved recipe looks like

I just print recipes I get from the internet out anyway, and tape them on the cupboard in front of  me. They still get stained. But I wonder in what cold, technical world people making food for other people would come to prefer pixels on a screen to words your mom or a friend once wrote on the back of a notecard.  One way is information.  The other is community and tradition.

That’s how I think of it, anyway, when I open an old cookbook and a recipe for tamale pie written by my late stepmother 35 years ago falls out. I can hardly read her scrawl, but that’s the point; it makes me smile and think of her, and all the love she gave us through her meals.

Eva pulls out a particular recipe. I can hardly read it, either, but it was only a few lines: Saute an onion, brown ground beef, throw in a package of Lipton onion soup mix, add lots of cut tomatoes, simmer. Eat over rice.

So simple and so good. "We ate this all the time. The tomatoes make it great."

Here’s another one

"This one's like pudding! Damn it's so good!"

Every recipe we keep is a memory as much as any photo. Why did we ask for this recipe? Who gave it to us? Why did we clip it out of this magazine? Remember when this newspaper even had a food section? I have faxes sent to me by a friend in Italy, back when the Drama Teen was a baby, detailing some of her favorite recipes. They are faded and curled and of course stained all over…but I pull them out of my stack still and recall the circumstances.  It helps tie the passing years together.

A recipe or a memory?

Eva eventually found the apple cake recipe. It’s really easy, she promises, and she’ll write the recipe down for me before I go. I wrote down her mom’s recipe too, since that also sounds pretty tasty … although neither one of us like the idea of the Lipton onion soup mix.

I’m starting to wonder if Mom still has that little recipe box of hers. Maybe I’ll ask. Yes, I definitely will ask.

Photo credit: Of course Etsy has what I think is the actual recipe box we had at my house in the ’60s and ’70s. Thanks Etsy!

Yeah, I know Cinco de Mayo is more about selling tequila than celebrating the Mexican victory in the Battle of Pueblo in 1862. Still, it’s as good an excuse as any to make enchiladas.

I had an idea to make some black bean and cottage cheese enchiladas, because a girlfriend once made veggie ench’s using cottage cheese, and because I love black beans. I thought I’d throw some zucchinis in there too. And while I was at it, some jalepeno, some red onion, some red pepper…

Well. You’ll be pleased and probably surprised that it did come out edible, although it was sort of touch and go there for a while…

Enchiladas are pretty basic and simple if you’re not me and have made them before. I Googled a few recipes like this one and this one. But in a fit of over-confidence I went out on my own.

I used a tub of cottage cheese
two cans of black beans
two small zucchinis, shredded
half a red onion (chopped)
half a jalapeno pepper, minced
cumin (about a tsp, to flavor the black beans)
white vinegar (a dollop for the beans)
a little diced red pepper for color
Mexican Jack cheese
enchilada sauce
about a dozen corn tortillas.

I sauteed the onion and added one can of beans with liquid, cumin, vinegar, red pepper, jalepeno and then half of the shredded zucchini. I probably shouldn’t have done this, but I did.

While I was stirring this mixture, I blended the cottage cheese and the other half of the shredded zucchini in a blender.

blended cottage cheese and zucchini

I let the bean mixture cool for a bit, then I mixed the two together.

I wasn’t feeling too sure about any of this.

The resulting glop was way too wet. So I opened up another can of beans (this is the second can),  drained them, and added them to the mix.

Was this the way to make enchiladas? Who knew. What I did know was that I shouldn’t have added that much jalapeno…

About this time I noticed my corn tortillas wouldn’t roll without cracking – cheap, D-list tortillas so I was forced to do it this way:

what you have to do when you buy cheap corn tortillas

Which effectively meant that instead of enchiladas I was now making a Mexican lasagna. But whatever. I layered my ingredients in the lasagna fashion and topped it all off with enchilada sauce and a generous spread of cheese. I covered the whole mess with tinfoil and baked for 30 minutes at 350.

Ask a Mexican: Lasagna or enchiladas?

So it didn’t look bad. I let it cool for a good hour and half before I ventured into a slice. I was worried it would never hold and I’d have to eat it with a spoon.

I needn't have worried

I was very pleasantly surprised. Of course, how bad can black beans, zucchinis and tortillas covered in cheese and enchilada sauce be? No matter who makes it.

Exactly. But I ate a whole piece. And the lovely ex ate a whole piece, praising the little “kick” at the end thanks to the jalapenos.

The real test came when Marisa, an actual, bona-fide Mexican, showed up.  “Give me a tiny piece,” she said. I handed her a regular piece.

I watched her eat it.  She didn’t say it was bad. She didn’t say it was good. She said she hated that brand of enchilada sauce and that the tortillas I had used were crap (I knew that much.) But she kept eating.

Even as she told me I should have used the tomatillo sauce I learned how to make from her mom, and roast some peppers and use queso fresca, all of which sounded fantastico to me, she kept eating.

So I took that to be a good sign.

Not bad for a first try. Stay tuned for better things…

I grabbed a handful of fava beans from the bin of my local farm stand specifically because I had a memory of somebody else doing something neat with them.

I myself had no idea what to do with them.

But if Emily loved fava beans, then surely I would love fava beans.

We lived next door to Emily and her family for a while more than 10 years ago, but she left a large impression on me. A scholar on Moroccan Jewry who spoke several Levantine languages, Emily was also a stylish blonde who collected art and books and had a bad eBay couture habit. She had this graceful insouciance in the kitchen that drove me mad with envy. She could whip up a beautiful impromptu dinner party without breaking a sweat, serving it out on colorful Moroccan crockery. She was the one who gave me the rosemary red soup recipe, and once produced an onion tart from scratch with so little effort it became my (still unrealized) culinary aspiration.

Skinny bitch. I pretty much worshipped her.

I recall her sitting at her tiny table before a mountain of fava beans, shucking them patiently. Why would she go through such an effort, I wondered.

“I just love fava beans,” she told me. “I ate them every day in Morocco. They’re so delicious…”

It was with just this in mind that I grabbed my handful of favas. But when I emailed Emily to ask for her recipe, she wrote back, “Oh, you know, just a little garlic and olive oil and some thyme…”

In other words, no recipe. In other words, if you are sophisticated and well-traveled, you’ll know what to do with fava beans. In other words, Julie, YOU will have to GOOGLE it. And didn’t your thyme plant just die recently in your weedy backyard herb planter?

In other words, here I was with a handful of fava beans and no real idea of what to do with them. So I Googled how to prepare them.

Because before you do anything with them, you have to prepare them. It’s a lot of work, fava beans. You have to shuck them, THEN steam them…

Don't ask me how long...

Some reports say only a minute or two. I did five. The little beans went shrively and the bigger ones still required a knife to peel.

Oh yeah, you have to peel them after you steam them. TWO steps. Before you even get to the cooking part.

Seems like a whole lotta work...

...for a little dish of fava beans

In the end, because I had so few fava beans, I went ahead and sauteed them in some garlic and olive oil. No thyme, but some sea salt and freshly ground pepper.

A small dish of favas

And they were pretty tasty. Buttery. Nice. But I’m sure if Emily had made them for me it would have been some kind of crazy awesome mouth experience. Maybe when I see her next week…

Stay tuned. In the meantime, tell me what you like to do with your favas…

Every now and then I start to think, “Maybe I’m getting the hang of this…”

Recipes will turn out edible.  I’ll try something new and discover it’s not as hard as it sounds. I’ll innovate on my own to household accolades.

And I start to think that I’m becoming not such a bad home cook after all.

But then things like mashed sweet potatoes and kale with bacon happen. And I am reminded of who I am all over again.

In the last post, we learned that I don’t care for kale. Really dislike it, in fact. But this recipe from the delicious Sarah Gim stopped me in my tracks: Mashed Sweet Potatoes with kale and bacon. With this photo, taken by Sarah herself.

Go on — look at it….soak it in…tell me this doesn’t look like heaven…

Food porn

Can’t you just taste the fluffy, warm sweetness of the potatoes and butter? Feel the crunch of that bacon in your mouth?  Even kale must taste divine with all that butter and bacon. Admit it: you want to bury your face in this.  And it sounds so simple to make!

So I thought I’d try this myself. The recipe sounded simple:

Ingredients:
About 3 pounds of sweet potatoes (I bought one 3-pound bag of nice looking specimens from, where else, Trader Joe’s.) Scrub and cut into big old chunks.
1/2 cup olive oil. Ish
Salt and pepper
1 bag of kale. Yes, damnit from Trader Joe’s.

Scrub and chop your potatoes into big chunks. Bring to a boil in a pot with water to cover by two inches, then reduce to a simmer. Cook until done, about 15 minutes. At this point the skins should come off easily.

Meanwhile, boil the kale, about 10 minutes. Drain and reserve.

Mash the potatoes with the oil, season expertly.  Stir in kale, add a pad of butter and bacon if using.

Sounds straightforward, right?

Here’s what mine looked like:

glop

So much for simple recipes.

The Drama Teen even laughed at me. “You suck,” she said. And it’s true.

But at least I’m getting better enough to suspect what I did wrong.

I over-cooked the sweet potatoes. They started out too soggy, and things went from bad to worse when I added the oil, and not even the whole 1/2 cup either.  And why the hell am I adding olive oil and not butter and milk? Is this some sort of weight loss thing? I don’t need to lose any weight. Not one single pound. But if I keep making soupy, gloppy, tasteless crap like this, I’ll be losing plenty of weight indeed.

At that point it just became a science experiment. I stirred in the kale, which tasted like kale. I crumbled my fake veggie bacon on top.

Pearls on swine...

Nothing mattered. I could have deep fried the whole thing and covered it in chocolate, although that sounds even grosser than the photo above looks.

The bottom line: I am still a very bad home cook and I need to start paying more attention. To everything. I’m sure this is a delicious recipe, but one of you guys will have to try it and let me know how it came out.

With grave apologies to Sarah!

Picture this chap in a Hawaiian shirt...

INT: Cheap diner. Mid-morning. All the customers are Trader Joe’s Employees.

Bad Home Cook: Morning!

Waitress: Morning!

BHC: Right. What have you got, then?

Waitress: Well, we’ve got eggs, kale and bacon; eggs, bacon, sausage and kale; eggs, bacon, kale, kale, sausage and kale; eggs, kale, potatoes, sausage and kale; kale, eggs and kale; kale, kale, bacon and kale; and mashed sweet potatoes with kale and bacon.

BHC: Have you got anything without kale in it?

Waitress: Well, there’s eggs, bacon and kale. That’s not got much kale in it.

BHC: I don’t want ANY kale.

Lovely Ex: Why can’t she have the sausage, kale, eggs and kale?

BHC: That’s got kale in it!

Lovely Ex: Not as much as the bacon, kale, kale, sausage and kale.

BHC: Look, could I just have the eggs, kale and bacon but without the kale?

Waitress rolls her eyes.

BHC: WHAT? I don’t like kale!

TJ’s employees (singing, and swinging mugs of beer even thought it’s 10 a.m).: Kale, Kale, Kale, Kale, Kale, KALE!  wonderful KALE!

BHC: Shut up! Shut UP! Why do you have to keep getting new kale products when you know how much I HATE KALE! Why is there a kale recipe on every food blog I read right now? Like here? and here? and HERE? I can NOT be the only person who hates kale!

Lovely ex: I think you’re over-reacting. Just order something and I’ll eat the kale. I love kale.

TJ’s: KALE, KALE, KALE, KALE KALE! HOW WE LOVE KALE!

Waitress: SHUT UP! Oh, look what you’ve made them do. They’ll never go back to work now. Just order something, would you?

BHC: Fine. How about the sweet potatoes with kale and bacon. That might be good…

Young Female Trader’s Employee: Make sure to massage your kale before you eat it…

BHC: WHAT?

YTJ: Massage your kale. If you’re going to eat it raw. EXTRA yummy!

BHC: (horrified) WHY would I eat that stuff raw? It’s like horse flesh…

TJs: Yum, yum, yum, yum, YUM KALE! YUMMY KALE!!!

BHC: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SHUT UP!

Runs screaming from diner, but secretly plans to attempt mashed sweet potatoes with kale and bacon. Will it turn out? Stay tuned…

Not bad. Just not right, exactly...

Eggs are still on my mind.

I have made some underwhelming scrambled eggs in my day, wholly unaware of how much better they could be. Indeed, before I knew better, I took a certain pride in even being able to make scrambled eggs at all. Look! I can cook a breakfast! And I’d whisk a few cold supermarket eggs in with some milk and throw them into a hot pan with some butter and cook them up in a minute flat.

The resulting eggs were often dry AND somewhat burnt; either over-seasoned or too bland, depending on factors ranging from my mood to my level of caffeination to the depth of my hangover.

But eggs and how to best make them keep popping up lately. So lately I’ve been trying to make better scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs as they should be.

You shake your head perhaps. But it’s not as easy as it sounds! Not if you’re me.

Eggs and how to prepare them have been popping up everywhere lately. On Facebook, where various friends are debating whether eggs count as “dairy” or not (I say no). To cooking magazines, where I read something about how you can tell a lot about a cook’s skills by the way he or she makes a simple omelet.

I’ve always liked that idea – that there are several very basic, very simple meals every home cook should be able to do well. Scrambled eggs are one of them.

I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s The Table Comes First (which pretty much nails the case for my being an official foodie) and he writes about making his son scrambled eggs in the French manner, cooked very slowly with lots of butter.

I decided to try this. I scrambled some eggs in lots of butter, cooking them more slowly than usual, and throwing down a nob of butter right before they’re done. They looked good to me. I served them to the boy, who asked me not to cook his morning eggs in so much butter next time.

“But this is the French way,” I told him.

“I’m English.”

The Drama Teen didn’t like them either. The next morning both kids asked for scrambled eggs followed quickly with the request that I not make “French eggs.”

So that backfired.

I kept trying.

I found this totally great post on how to make the best scrambled eggs by one Mr. Breakfast. He acknowledges the varied scholarship out there. But in the end, it just left me more confused.

Here is the excellent Kitchn post I followed to try and make the kind of custardy deliciousness I was going for. I tried — twice — and both times my eggs cooked far more quickly than the 15 minutes she says it should take.

During the first attempt, my lovely ex showed up that afternoon with coffee, ringing the doorbell just as I threw the eggs into the pan. He followed me back into the kitchen to watch. I explained the idea behind slow cooking.

“Oh, that’s how I make my eggs.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, ask the boy how I make my eggs. He loves them.”

I thought about the boy’s reaction to my French eggs and scowled.

“How come I didn’t know this? You never made me eggs like that.”

“Yes I did. You just don’t remember.”

“So but what you’re saying is you know how to make excellent scrambled eggs.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Not like yours.”

Just throw that gauntlet down, right there on the kitchen floor, mothaf%$#@!

I stirred the eggs. Luke watched over my shoulder. “Are you going to let that middle bit get thick? Stir it!”

After five minutes and some deep, cleansing breaths, the eggs were looking pretty fluffy and done, so I took them off the heat.

Little fluffy clouds

These were decidedly better eggs than I usually make, but they weren’t the custardy lovelies I was going for. Also, I forgot to season them. How typical. Luke gave them one thumbs up. Feh.

The next day I tried again. This time with a different pan that was not an iron skillet. Perhaps an iron skillet gets too hot too quickly?

How low can you go?

Once again, however, they cooked up in just about five minutes, and were once again the fluffy-not-custardy texture.

Still not right

At least I remembered to season them this time.

Tasty, if not what I was going for

Now I’m annoyed. If everyone else can make these why can’t I? I’m not done eating eggs. Not by a long shot.

And my final question: Are chives and the green part of a spring onion the same thing?

STAY TUNED!

A long time ago I read about a Greek Easter tradition involving red eggs. Eggs are beautifully shaped in any case, but the photo that stuck in my mind for the next 20-plus years were of eggs dyed a rich red. According to the article, you could do this with onion skins or beet juice. One day, I thought, I’m gonna try this myself.

That day finally came yesterday, when I looked around, noticed I had beets, red cabbage, spinach, and eggs, and with spring in the air, I thought the time was finally right. I have no springtime traditions of my own, so any action I take toward Easter or Pessach or Ostara springs, so to speak, from whim.

This year my whim was naturally-colored eggs. I mean, think of the blog fodder.

I looked up how to dye eggs naturally. It didn’t seem like rocket science. A quart of water, a tablespoon of vinegar and some salt, plus whatever ingredient you were boiling to make the dye.

So first I hard-boiled some eggs. (Cover eggs with water, bring to a boil, cover, remove from heat, and when you can reach in and grab an egg out of the lukewarm water, they’re done.)

in hot water

Next, prepare your dyes thusly:

Cabbage water will turn an egg blue.

Tumeric is supposed to turn it yellow

Beet juice is supposed to turn an egg red. I wondered if spinach would turn an egg green. Couldn’t hurt to try, right?

turns water green, right?

While you’re cooking all this on the stove, sip wine and dance around happily. It’s spring!

The daffs look on, bemused...

The experiment continued. Once the eggs have cooled and you’ve strained your dye from whatever veggie you were cooking it from, pour some into cups or small bowls or whatever you have on hand and, I guess, let cool for a bit. Slip an egg (or two) into each one.

I didn’t say this wouldn’t be messy. Spectacularly messy, in fact.

But it’s all worth it, right? Now you simply wait. I suggest at least an hour. Others say overnight. I did overnight.

How were my results? Interesting. And varied.

The one I didn’t expect to turn out turned out the coolest by far:

My blue egg

The beet-juice eggs? Not so accomplished.

Speckled beet-juice eggs

I’m not sure what happened to this blue one. Except that it was a brown egg. Now it looks like an egg-shaped turquoise bead….which isn’t uncool…just…not what I was going for…

I have earrings that look sorta like this...

The spinach didn’t work at all. At least not in a green way:

Huh.

I’m not sure what happened.  I was supposed to use one quart of water in each, but I didn’t measure, so I’m sure I used more. Also, one tablespoon of vinegar and one of salt in each pot…I blurped some of each in. I didn’t think it would matter, but maybe it does. The dyes didn’t seem to take to most of the eggs except for the one red cabbage blue one. What did I do differently in that case? God knows.

Interesting and natural-looking eggs

Note, please, that the tumeric ones didn’t hold that well either. I was hoping for a lovely, rich gold color. The one you see in the picture above? That was a brown egg already.

So this didn’t go as planned, but what could I expect, being me?

A positive ending, however. When the kids came home, they expressed delight with these strangely mottled eggs. The Drama Teen even exclaimed, and, in perhaps the ultimate compliment, took a photo with her smartphone and posted it to her Tumblr account. Then she ate two of them.

OK then. I am strangely gratified.

But any ideas from any of you, my betters, about where I went wrong, would be vastly appreciated. Because I still really want to try this onion skin idea for really red eggs.

As always, stay tuned…

OK let’s be honest. This “number one” tip is the only Passover tip from me you’re gonna get.

But it’s a good one. I pass along here a much loved family recipe from a worthy friend of mine “It goes way back,” she tells me. “Two, maybe even three years.”

Matzo Pizza.

Here’s how you do it:

Yours should probably be the Kosher for Passover kind

Then, get your pizza maker to help:

Spread your pizza sauce. Any kind will do

Then, and this last bit is tricky….

mozzarella makes it more pizza like

Put this into a toaster oven, microwave or regular oven until the the cheese is melted, maybe even a little brown.

Nom nom nom

All the kids will like this. So you will you.

Good luck with your Pessach seders. I’m not having one this year. I’m still scarred from the last one I attempted.

Chag pesach ve sema-ach!

Not your mother's iceberg. This is fabulous fresh lettuce from my local urban farm.

A reader just wrote in saying she loved this blog because she could so relate. She is also a middle-aged mom whose own mother wasn’t interested in cooking and so she never learned how to do anything in the kitchen.

The only difference, she says, is that I WANT to cook, and she doesn’t. She’d rather deal with teenagers than cook.

That’s some serious aversion.

So it made me think, why DO I even bother? Why DO I like to cook and want to learn, considering my constant stupid mistakes and ruined simple dishes? Why don’t I just give up and, I don’t know…live on take-out and stuff in cans?

Because at some point I decided that I should at least be able to feed my family in some basic manner. And it started to annoy me that even though I could read and follow a recipe to the letter, I still managed to burn scrambled eggs and make bland slop out of three simple ingredients.

This very blog sprang from one such epic fail with miso soup. So bad it was comical. And because once I’d started the blog (back in 2006, believe it or not) I then needed fodder. Which meant I had to actually try and cook regularly.

But everything else sprang from there. The family seemed to appreciate sitting down at the table every night to break bread together.  I found I enjoyed feeding people … especially when they seemed to enjoy what I made.

Make no mistake. I still can’t cook very well.  Other bloggers will tell you all about their latest Provencal braised lamb chops and I’m doing the happy dance because I didn’t burn the cheese quesadillas.

But I’ve also found that what Mark Bittman and all those other foodie folks say is true: home cooking is the hub from which a dozen positive spokes spring: It’s healthier, it’s cheaper, it fosters family and community and friendship, it launches traditions (your kids are watching), it’s relaxing, it’s enjoyable. It tastes good (most of the time, in my case, anyway).

I didn’t used to be like this. Before I had a family of my own cooking was at the end of a long and diverse list of interests, after entomology but before a root canal. I admired the folks I knew who would spend the day deciding how best to prepare a fish dinner for eight, but I didn’t understand their motivation.

I get it now. And to you, dear reader, I’d say this: Buy Mark Bittman’s new book How to Cook Everything: The Basics, and try something, anything. And see how cool it is to make something that turns out.

His original How to Cook Everything, the original, made all the difference for me when I was just starting to try my hand behind the stove. The recipes were so simple even I didn’t muck them up (most of the time.) And since he went through every category of food (meat, vegetables, desserts, bread, etc.) methodically describing what it was, how to shop for it, how to make it, I came away with a lot of knowledge I didn’t previously have.

Like, who knew you could actually make crackers at home? I had no idea!

Yes, food snobs will snort in derision. This isn’t a book for experienced cooks or professionals. It’s a book for people like you, dear reader, and me, who did not learn how to cook when we were growing up and just want some basic competence so we can feed our people.

With each little success you’ll like cooking a little more. I promise. And you’ll try something a little more complicated eventually. And maybe that will turn out. And maybe you’ll start figuring out what it is you have a little knack for (mine’s rice) and riff on that. Maybe you’re a better baker? Stuff starts to turn out, you start to understand why or why not, and then it starts to be a little fun. ….

I’m serious. If I can do it anybody can do it.

Go! Cook! And keep me posted…