Yes, We Have No...

So, we had a couple of bananas that were about to "go off." I had an hour and some ingredients. So there it was.

There's a basic recipe I like, from the first edition Betty Crocker cookbook (1950 - it isn't exactly mint condition; the spine is held together with duct tape, and some of the pages are in bad condition). Banana bread isn't exactly rocket science, to be honest, but it's practically bulletproof. The basic recipe reads:

Mix together:

2/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup soft shortening
2 eggs

Stir in:

3 tbsp sour milk or buttermilk
1 cup mashed banana (mashed with fork or pastry blender)

Sift together and stir in:

2 cups sifted flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Blend in 1/2 cup chopped nuts.

Pour into well-greased loaf pan. Let stand 20 minutes before baking. Bake at 350°F for 50 to 60 minutes. Let it stand for about 10 minutes on a cooling rack before you take it out of the loaf pan.

That's it. Pretty straightforward, and pretty damned quick.

Thing is, you don't have to follow things exactly. Let's start with the fact that I had 3 bananas: probably two cups (I'm not sure - who the hell measures bananas?). Oh, well. Throw it all in there.

I wanted to use brown sugar. That has to be by volume, not weight: you gotta pack it into the measuring cup.

And we don't use a lot of shortening around my house. Normally, I replace butter with shortening (you have to use about 25% more butter), but I had cream cheese that needed to be used - closer to half a cup, maybe a little more.

Had a kind of an issue with the eggs: I started to crack it on the mixing bowl, and apparently found a weak part in the shell - most of the eggwhite ended up on the floor. So I added another egg. This loaf got an extra yolk.

Sour milk? With my son? We can't keep milk in our house long enough to go sour. I swear he just pulls a gallon out of the fridge and sticks a straw in it. And we don't drink a lot of buttermilk in these parts, thanks; I'm not gonna buy it special just to use up a couple of bananas.

Sift? Motherfucker, that's why they MAKE blenders. Just pour it in slowly so you don't get stuff all over the kitchen: first the baking powder, the soda and the salt, then the flour. Lob the nuts in on top, and stop as soon as the flour is mostly mixed in (don't go too long - you don't need the extra gluten that you get from too much mixing).

As for letting it stand before baking for 20 minutes? It sits there long enough for the oven to preheat. And that whole "Let it stand for 10 minutes" thing? Nah - that's how you get it stuck to the loaf pan. I flip it out on the cooking rack right away. (Do I have to mention that it's hot? You're an adult, right?)

And you know how it came out? Goddamned perfect, that's how it came out.

Lemon Pudding Cake

OK, so do you have about an hour and a half, just a couple of ingredients and some kitchen hardware, and want dessert? Good for you. You might or might not want to keep reading.

So here's what you do. You take two lemons, and you zest them.

Now, if you don't cook much, "zest" is the yellow part of the lemon skin, without any of the acidic white part under it. There are any number of ways to do it. Here's mine.

Yes, that's a microplane grater. Bought it at the hardware store. We only use it for food. (Trust me on that part. Sawdust should never be considered a food product.)

(On that subject, of course, look up the term "cellulose," and groove on how often it turns up in prepared food. Just a thought.)

The recipe calls for one and a half teaspoons of zest. I got this.

That's probably a tablespoon and a half. Maybe two. You got a problem with that? Yeah, then screw you, too.

Now, once you've taken a lot of the yellow off the outside of the lemon, you should probably juice it. (Sure, you can wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. Where it will turn interesting colors and eventually get rushed to the outside garbage can. Or you can just juice the damned thing now, OK?)

Fortunately, we need some of that juice now, too. First, you do this.

Yeah, seems obvious, right? This dessert is so goddamned simple, you'll be able to make it, like a champ, even if you needed that last step. OK?

Now, here's what I use. If you paid more than two bucks for it, you're an idiot.

It's a juicer. It isn't hard to use. Trust me.

OK, so you're done with that? Good. Leave it. You'll get back to it later.

Step one, you preheat the oven to about 350 degrees. You're also going to need a pot of boiling water.

Now, you take a 1/4 cup flour. The recipe says "sifted." I say "fuck it." We'll see who's right.

Add a cup of sugar, and the recipe says "1/4 teaspoon salt." Here's what I do.

You're measuring? Salt is cheap. Measure some, pour it into your palm, and remember what that looks like. And then never measure it again, OK?

Dumped that in? Now, that's all the really dry stuff. Remember that "sift" thing? Stir it with a fork. Trust me. The sugar and the salt breaks that shit up pretty well. Just do it.

Now you're going to get into some fancier cooking shit, OK? You get to separate two eggs. There's plenty of Youtube videos to teach you how to do this. Basically, you crack the egg carefully, and pour it back and forth between the shell halves, over a mixing bowl to catch the egg white. Then you drop the yolk into a different bowl.

So, what you end up with is this. You got a bowl with the yolks, and a mixing bowl with the whites.

Technically, you might notice that there are 3 yolks there. What happened was, in separating the second egg, the yolk broke, and I got some in with the whites. So I had to start over. The other yolk was fine, though, so why toss it?

So the recipe calls for 2 whites and 2 yolks. Will this be an issue? Hopefully not.

The whites get whipped in the mixer; while they're doing that, whip the yolks with a fork, just enough to mix them. The egg whites need to get to stiff peaks, so turn the mixer up to high, until they look like this.

Now, the recipe called for 1.5 teaspoons of zest. I've probably got 3 to 4 times that. It all goes in,

along with 1/4 cup of that lemon juice I squoze earlier,

the egg yolks and a cup of milk.

Just stir it enough to mix, and then fold in the egg whites.

(Basically, I dumped the whites on top, then used the spatula to slice through at an angle, and pull some of the liquid to the top. Do that a couple of times, and it's mixed reasonably well.

You can pour the mix into a 7.5" casserole dish, or, like I did, ramekins (some people call them custard cups); you put whichever you use into a baking pan.

Now, if you want to take a chance at hurting yourself or making a mess, you can do this some other way. What I do is I opened the oven door, pulled the rack halfway out of the oven, put the pan on the rack, and pour the boiling water (remember that from earlier?) about halfway up the cups, until it's even with the top of the batter in the cups.

Carefully slide the rack back in and close the oven. The recipe said to let it cook for 45-50 minutes. I checked them at 35 minutes, they were browned on top, and I pulled them.

Carefully remove from the oven. Now's another tricky part: the water is still boiling, and you need to get the cups out of it. (If you used a casserole, it's easier - just lift that shit out.) I took a big spoon in one hand, and an oven mitt on the other,

and transferred them to a cooling rack. (There will be a little dripping here. Keep being careful.)

And there you have it - six cups of lemony awesomeness. You have to let them cool before eating, but it's got a cakey crust on top, creamy, lemony bit on the bottom - it's amazing.

After I made it, the Trophy Wife told me that I was supposed to start with cold water in the pan - it'll boil in the oven. (Did that change the cooking time? Probably not 10-15 minutes worth - I also live in Albuquerque, a mile above sea level.)

This recipe is pretty much impossible to mess up. Everything I screwed up as I was making it, and it was still incredible.

In case it's important to you, here's the original recipe, from the 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook.

Lemon Cake Pudding

Sift together in mixing bowl:
    1/4 cup sifted flour
    1 cup sugar
    1/4 tsp salt
Stir in:
    1 1/2 tsp grated lemon rind (1 lemon)
    1/4 cup lemon juice
    2 egg yolks, well beaten
    1 cup milk
Fold in:
    2 egg whites, stiffly beaten

Pour into 1 1/2 quart casserole (7 1/2") or 6 custard cups. set in a pan of water (1" deep). Bake. Serve warm or cold, with or without whipped cream.

Temperature: 350 degrees (mod. oven)
Time: Bake 45 to 50 minutes
Amount: 6 servings

Running the water

So last night, with the help of a friend, we installed a new water heater in our house. Total cost, less than $350.

If I’d used a licensed contractor, it would have cost an additional $300 to $500, plus "we might have to bring in a guy to redo your ducts if they aren’t up to code."

(On an unrelated note, my ducts aren’t up to code.)

This morning, my bath was too hot. Life is good.

Wassail

Winter is coming. With that in mind, Wassail is a big favorite. And we shouldn't be the only people who can make it right (seriously, we keep getting told ours is better, which is just stupid). It's one of the simplest hot drinks ever (unless you like microwaving your water). I don't even measure, really (all metric measurements are approximate).

So, dust off that crock pot you haven't used since you got it for your wedding.

Wassail
Cloved orange
2 sticks cinnamon
1 palmful allspice berries
2 quart apple cider (about 2 L)
2 cup cranberry juice (about 1/2 L)

Add everything together in the crock pot. Turn it on high for an hour, then leave it at low. You can drink it straight, or add rum, bourbon, whatever.

The only tricks are:

• A cloved orange is just an orange with whole cloves driven straight through the skin. Over the whole surface, about 1/2 to 1" apart (1-3 cm)
• Both juices should be unsweetened. Just trust me. That's the most obvious mistake. (And don't even think about cranapple. The proportions are all wrong.)
• If you're storing leftovers, the orange should get thrown away. It'll make the rest of the batch bitter and sour.

That's all there is to it. (Now, maybe you'll find other uses for that crock pot, since you've started.)

Adventures in Cooking

OK, so the Trophy Wife was busy sewing this year, and I got to make the whole Thanksgiving spread this year (it's not the first time, but we usually share the cooking these days - she's better at it than I am, so she's usually driving the bus, but I'm right there plugging away).

But this year, since I was in charge, I decided to go the traditional route. We tend to be pretty hard on tradition: ham is relatively normal, but we've had Thanksgiving pizza, and one year we decided that everybody does "pilgrim food," so we needed to have Indian food. So we had chicken Korma, cucumber raita, homemade naan, a whole spread - it was awesome.

But this year, I just decided that I was cooking, and damn it, I like turkey. So I went with the standard menu - turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, sweet potato pie.

The green beans are an old Southern recipe, with versions on both sides of our family: boiled for hours, with a ham hock, salt, sugar and a little apple cider vinegar. By the time they're done, there's nothing remotely healthy about 'em. I had Aunt Drew in Texarkana, who used to put on a huge spread whenever anybody in the family came to visit; and the wife had any number of relatives who did the same. And they all used basically the same green bean recipe.

The stuffing was an interesting challenge, because I wanted to duplicate the Trophy Wife's cornbread stuffing, which is awesome. But when I asked what recipe she used, it turns out that she basically fakes it every year. So that was interesting.

But for the main course, I decided to see whether Alton Brown's turkey recipe was a winner - he starts it at a high heat, and then backs it down, to end up with both a crispy skin and a juicy bird. But that didn't work for me as well as I'd hoped.

We didn't use a standard brine, because, truth be told, I'm not entirely sold on the joys of brining. (Your mileage may vary.)

We started at 500 degrees for half an hour, and then lowered the heat to 350 for two and a half hours. But at the end of that time, we had a browned chicken which would have been way underdone in the middle (which isn't good in poultry). But keeping it going at too low a heat would have resulted in turkey jerky, so we cranked it to 425 for another hour, and it turned out amazing: moist, flavorful, and exactly what we wanted. But I'm not going to proclaim the joys of the three-stage cooking method - the usual low-and-slow method makes it just as good, without the random moments of panic that this one had.

(Please note: all temperatures are in Fahrenheit, because we're American and stupid.)

So, in the end, everything worked out, with only a tiny amount of tension. And a good time was had by all.

<i>We must code</i>

Blogger recently did a redesign on its pages, and a lot of people don't appreciate it.

The spacing has gone weird, it likes to reset your font at random, and sometimes the background color will just do whatever the hell it wants. The problem is, I'm willing to bet, that you're working in "Compose" (that little button in the upper left, assuming you have the standard layout).

See, I have a little (very little) training in coding. And damn, but I wish I'd kept it up - in 1999, I could have made a ton of money just correcting a programming error in COBOL.

If you're having weird formatting issues, open that post, and click the button in the upper left labelled "HTML." What's probably going to happen is that a lot of crap that you've never seen before will suddenly appear in the middle of your post.

I know you don't care, but HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language." It's just the commands that tell your computer how to do things on the internet. It's not usually scary, until you let a machine try to do it.

Because they use a program to put the HTML in the middle of your text. And one of the things that the program does is set your format for every paragraph (the font style, the font size, everything). And if you go back to something you've already written to change a few words, the program wants to reset the format again.

And sometimes, when you throw in a space it doesn't think is necessary, it'll throw some invisible symbol in there (usually starting with an ampersand and ending with a semicolon). You normally can't see those, but they exist.

And sometimes, there's so much unnecessary crap there that you can only barely find your text, hiding between various commands that have no real excuse for existing.

It's automated. Like any machine, it does exactly what it's been told to do, and doesn't vary in the slightest. So you just have to cut proto-Siri out of the equation. Here's what you do. And don't worry if you have no experience with computer code: we're going to start slow and work you up to it.

First, just accept the standard font and background. You can mess with those later when you're more comfortable with it. So, the first thing you need to do is to click the HTML button again. You're about to take a few (very few) tentative steps into the wonderful world of computer code.

Now, every HTML command gets bracketed by "greater than" and "less than" signs. That tells the computer to sit up and pay attention, because you're talking to it, by god!

So, for example, to tell it to put things into italics, you type <i>. That "i" tells it italics. (Exchange it for a "b" and you've just told it to bold the next bunch of letters.)

An important thing to remember at this point is that, just like in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, if you tell your computer to do something, it will keep doing it until it dies. So every command you open, you have to close. And in this case, that means that once you've told it to italicize something, you have to tell it to stop, usually with the same command, only preceded by a slash (so </i>). Think of the slash as you, telling your computer "stop, you bastard!"

In fact, once you've done it for a while, you'll discover that a lot of programming involves counting commands and seeing which one you didn't shut down. (Or counting parentheses and seeing which one you didn't close.)

The next thing you'll notice is that HTML doesn't like paragraphs. Everything you type ends up in one big block of text. To fix that, we have another command. We'll call it "break" (programmers like easy-to-remember commands, by the way.) It looks like this: <br/>

You'll notice that the slash is at the end. This one isn't paired up with a second command. It just inserts a break (what us old guys would call a "carriage return" - those of you too young to have used a typewriter... fuck you. You'll be old soon, too).

Me, I like double-spacing between paragraphs. So I end up typing <br/><br/> at the end of every paragraph.

Pro-tip: just to make it easy on you, after you enter the breaks (<br/>), hit "enter" and make a new paragraph (which the HTML will just ignore): it'll make it easier to edit your work later.

Now, there's just two more things to show you tonight.

The first is the hyperlink. It's a jump to a new web page. It goes like this: <a href="">

Now, inside those quotes, you'd put the address for whatever webpage you were interested in. If, for example, you were writing for a particularly slow audience and wanted to steer them to the Google homepage, you'd type <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>

(Notice that the closing command was just "/a" - the first part of the command is the important part. Everything else is just details, giving it the specifics of what you want it to do).

And because we like to quote our sources sometimes, it's cool to be able to set them off from the stuff we wrote, perhaps slightly indented. To do this, you'd use the command <blockquote> at the beginning of the quote, and </blockquote> at the end. (Personally, I like to italicize those as well, which looks like this: <blockquote><i>quote goes here</i></blockquote>

To be honest, you don't have to get them in the exact order, either. I do, because it's easier to look at it and say "OK, I opened italics here, and closed them here. The hyperlink starts here and ends here." Like I said, if you get into any detailed coding, it's a good idea to have a simple system to follow.

So, to recap, if you type the following commands, you'll get the following results.

<i>Italics</i> gets you Italics

<b>Boldface</b> gets you Boldface

<a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> gets you a link to the Google homepage

If you need to set off a quote from the rest of your text, you use <blockquote>The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.</blockquote>, which gets you this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

And just so you know, you don't have to put breaks either before or after a blockquote. It already double-spaces on both sides of it.

Once you're comfortable with that, you can move on to more advanced commands. Which you can learn about by going to Google and asking for "HTML for background colors" (or whatever it is you want to change). But start slow: wait until you're comfortable with what you're doing right now.

Thoughts on food

Two things.

1. This is something I never thought of, but if you happen to have a big chunk of dark chocolate, and think that a little grated chocolate on top of ice cream might be a good thing, you just go to town with a grater, right?

Well, as it turns out, grated chocolate seems to have a slight static electricity problem. It clings to the grater, to the plastic container you're grating into, and it jumps around and doesn't want to go where you think it should go.

I had never known this up until now. But there it is.

2. Last night, the Trophy Wife made her usual killer homemade chicken pot pie. Now, you have to understand, this is not the Swanson Pot Pie of my childhood (a product that many of us loved, if you happen to be of a certain age), this is an actual homemade pie. Only the filling, instead of being composed of apples or whatever, is chicken and vegetables. (And about 2 cups of homemade chicken stock, spices, and some flour to thicken it, if you're curious.)

This is the Giant Wookie Son's favorite dish in the world. And last night, he made the crust (mixed the ingredients, cut it into two portions, and stuck it in the fridge to think about what it had done), I did the filling, the Trophy Wife rolled out the crust and put the filling in the pie, and I stuck it in the oven. So, a little bit of teamwork and everybody wins.

One final note: Alton Brown, usually a genius, suffered a huge brain cramp when he came up with his idea of what a chicken pot pie should be. It's not a goddamned stew with biscuits floating on top: that's just stupid. The bottom crust is there to soak in all the meaty-flavored juiciness from the filling, and might well be the best part of the pie.

Depression-era cooking... or not

Some of you may have noticed that the economy could be better. It's just a rumor at this point, but I've heard people suggest that. And if you're looking to save pennies wherever possible, here's an idea that the Trophy Wife and I have started doing, which basically goes back to the concept of "Use everything."

Now, a quick disclaimer: the Trophy Wife and I cook from scratch a lot. Which, by itself, can save you money. First, unprocessed ingredients tend to cost less. And further down the road, eating healthier can save you money in medical bills. (Plus it tastes better, unless you really suck as a cook. But that can be fixed...)

When you start to cook from scratch, you'll notice that you end up using stock a lot: beef stock, chicken stock, and even (less often, unless you're vegetarian) vegetable stock. Stock making isn't hard, and plenty of people are happy to tell you how. Here's a quick overview.

I'll tell you one thing about this stock recipe: bitch is crazy. Completely batshit. She took a simple concept, and made it cost about five to ten times what it should.

Let's start with the chicken. What the hell is she doing putting an entire chicken into her stockpot? She is literally wasting all of the meat, because it's going to add very little to the stock, and when it's done, it is literally only good for dog food (now, admittedly, the dogs will be overjoyed, but they also stick their noses in each other's butts).

What you want is the bones, cooked or not. The remaining carcass from a whole cooked chicken is perfect; with the larger stock pots, you want two. (Also, you know that turkey skeleton left at the table after the relatives descend on it like piranha's? Same thing - I think turkey and chicken stock are interchangeable, but some people will argue that. For example, the wife...) Plus, since you were only going to throw those bones away, this is pretty much free.

Now, as to the vegetables, she's once again wasting perfectly good food. And here's where, with just a little planning, we keep this stock basically free (we're paying for water, a couple of spices, and the cost of running the stove; oh, and some ice, but that comes later).

When you peel an onion, what do you do with the top and bottom ends and the outer skin? If you compost it, well, good for you; most of us just throw it out.

Likewise carrots. Most of us scrape off the outer layer, chop both ends (and the greens, if you buy them that way), and toss it. Garlic skins and the dry brown tip where it came off the bulb? The ends of celery? You just throw it away, right?

Instead, keep a bowl above your cutting board (or in the sink, or by your feet as you sit on the floor in your lonely cell; wherever you cut the stuff up), and stick the peelings in that. When you're done, put them in a ziplock bag and shove it in the freezer. Every time you cut up vegetables, pull out the bag and shove in the new stuff. When it gets full, use a marker to put the month and year on it, and shove it to the back of the freezer.

The only real tips about what vegetables to include are pretty simple.

• You don't want to put things like potato peelings into the bag. For one thing, what the hell are you doing not eating the peel? For another, starch doesn't add anything to stock, except to thicken it more than you want.

• Bell peppers are in the same family as their hotter cousins ( jalapeños, habaneros and the like), and all the heat in those peppers comes from the membranes and seeds inside. It's just bitter in the bell pepper, but who needs that?

• When you overcook cabbage (like, say, boiling it for hours), it breaks down and throws out sulfur compounds. Which doesn't improve your stock at all.

• Beet stalks turn the stock a bright red, or reddish-brown. We like that. You might not.

By the time you need stock again, you pull out a bag or two (depending on the size of your stockpot), throw in the bones, one or two bay leaves and a handful of peppercorns, and run that sucker up to a boil. Back off the heat until it's at a bare simmer, and let it go for several hours.

The description we used when we asked our kids to check the boil every so often was "the Bog of Eternal Stench" from Labyrinth: one bubble breaking the surface every few seconds, rather than a rolling boil. And basically, the stock is done when the bones break easily to fingertip pressure when you fish one out; in fact, if you've extracted all the connective tissue, they pretty much crumble to the touch.

We usually take two days to boil this stuff: if you trust your stove, you can let it boil overnight, but depending on your household situation, you might be risking a fire (or boiled cat, which is a completely different flavor). We just ice the stock down overnight (see below) and restart it in the morning.

The next secret they don't tell you? Don't try to skim the fat off while it's hot. Our method is that we bought a set of three stock pots. We lay out newspapers, and carefully pour the big pot through a colander into the medium pot ("carefully" being the important word - it's boiling hot). Then we lid the pot, stick it in a cooler on a folded towel (it's a plastic cooler - think about it) with two ten-pound bags of ice emptied around it.

(Alton Brown suggests some frozen water bottles in the stock, too: your choice. One other trick, though. Leave the colander draining above the stock pot until it stops dripping juicy goodness, and then you can throw the solids out. For that matter, you can compost them, if that's how you roll. Personally, I use a fork - it's still hot, remember - to pick out the biggest chunks of meat, and carefully separate the meat from the remains of the bones. And then I put it the meat in a plastic container in the fridge, and supplement the dog's food. They seem to approve.)

That was my next biggest problem with the video, by the way; right after using whole chickens instead of just bones. If you stick a big pot of boiling hot liquid into your freezer, you're going to defrost your freezer and ruin anything else in there. Plus, frozen fat doesn't come off nearly as easily.

The next day, you peel off the yellowish-brown disk of fat off the top, and do what you want with it. We put a little schmaltz on the dog's food once any boiled chicken runs out. They seem to appreciate it.

The fat's going to come off in chunks, not as a disk. Don't let that bother you, all the little pieces float. You need a good-sized slotted spoon, a little patience, and a container for the fat.

Then we pour it into small ziplock bags, one cup per bag. (If you use more, go for two cups per bag - again, your choice.) We freeze it flat on cookie sheets and store it until we need it.

I've seen people say you can freeze it into ice cube trays, so you have convenient one-tablespoon cubes. Which is great if you use one tablespoon of stock at a time. Also, if it's a plastic ice-cube tray, don't ever plan to use it for ice again. Oils and any remaining fat will be happy to bond with the plastic, and unless you're drinking iced chicken soup, that might be an issue.

By the way, this same method can be used for beef stock; in our case, we've used both beef bones and ox tails (until the price started going up). But lately, we've found the cheapest thing on the market: hooves, often labeled as "beef feet" around here. Since they're nothing but collagen, they make the most amazing stock.

And finally (you could probably have worked this out), you can make vegetable stock, which only takes a couple of hours and there's no fat to mess with.

And if you're really into composting, you can recycle the remaining vegetable matter one final time. (I don't, but I support the idea.)

One word of warning: this is not a method for the anal-retentive cook who obsessively measures every last grain of salt. Our vegetable mix is different every time, which can subtly change the stock. But if you're not a professional cook, making 500 identical dishes every day, this probably isn't going to matter to you. It's that little bit of chaos that keeps things interesting.

When the moon hits your eye...

Pizza seems to be the all-American food, despite its suspicious Italianate origins.

Something very similar to pizza was served as street food in Naples, where it was modified from the Greek idea of herbs, olive oil and a little bit of cheese on a flat bread; the Neapolitans added tomato into the mix and chowed on this for years. It wasn't until 1889, when the Royal Palace commissioned a special pizza in honor of visiting Queen Margherita, which was made in the colors of the Italian flag - red (tomato), green (basil), and white (mozzarella), and voilà (to add yet another country to this story), we have the basic cheese pizza, referred to in Italian as the pizza margherita.

(Bonus trivia time: technically, Margherita Maria Teresa Giovanna of Savoy was only the Queen Consort to King Umberto of Italy, but nobody really cares about that. Also, the tomato was brought to Europe from America in the seventeenth century, but wasn't very popular after it arrived. Because it was a member of the nightshade family, they figured it was poisonous. But it grew easily in Italy, and became popular among the poor people in, for example, Naples. So there you go.)

Nobody can agree on when the pizza came to America first, but sometime, probably in the early twentieth century, Italian immigrants brought it to America, possibly to New York, or Chicago, or even possibly New Haven, Connecticut. But it's hard to tell, since 3.2 million Italians immigrated to the United States just in the first two decades, and several of them are claimed to be the first Pizza Guy.

But it actually took a while for pizza to catch on.

Food writers in the 1940s who were worldly enough to take note of the traditional Italian treat struggled to explain the dish to their readers, who persisted in imagining oversized apple-pie crusts stuffed with tomatoes and coated with cheese. “The pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew about it,” The New York Times lamented in 1947, illustrating its plaint with a photograph of a pie subdivided into dozens of canapé-sized slices.

But when it finally took off, it did so in a big way. The standard estimate (widely spread across the internet, so it must be right) is that Americans eat 23 pounds of pizza per person per year. As a group, we eat 3 billion pizzas every year - around 350 slices of pizza every second, or 90-100 acres of pizza per day. A $30 billion industry, with almost 62,000 pizzerias across the country.

And yes, there is a pizza.com, to help you find pizza parlors in your area. (It has a couple of other pizza-related functions, incidentally. As you'd expect from "pizza.com," I guess.)

While rankings vary depending on who compiles the list, pizza is usually pretty high on any list of "Favorite American Foods." Unless the word "homemade" is added to the title. And that's kind of a shame, because pizza isn't as difficult as some people think.

First, of course, you need the crust. We used to use Alton Brown's recipe, but this one is actually easier - it's modified from a recipe by Andrea Meyers. We have a KitchenAid stand mixer - you'll have to adjust if you're using anything else.

(By the way, you need some standard all-purpose flour for the gluten to give you a crust, but I haven't figured how much yet. The flour needs to add up to 2 cups, basically - you can go with 100% standard white flour if you want.)

Pizza dough

Take:

1 1/3 cups whole wheat flour
2/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast (or 1 package of quick-rising yeast)
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of sugar

Stick them all in your mixer bowl with the paddle attachment, set at low, and add 1 tablespoon olive oil and 3/4 cup hot water.

(The yeast blooms better with a little warmth - not boiling, though. Tap water is fine. And you can use extra virgin olive oil or not. Nobody will notice.)

Once the dough comes together, switch out for the bread hook, and beat it on medium for just a minute to knead.

Lightly flour your work surface (cutting board, counter, whatever you want), take the dough (which should be a ball right now), and slap it down on the floured area. Oil one side of a piece of plastic wrap, and cover the dough. Let it rest for fifteen minutes (a half hour wouldn't hurt) while the yeast does its thing.

Once it's rested, preheat your oven to 500°, cut the dough in half, and deal with it. Two choices:

The easy way: Roll it out with a rolling pin. Make it round-ish. (The gluten won't really make a solid mesh, so it might fall apart on you a little. But you'll save time.)

The pizza way: Lightly flour your hands. Flatten the dough with your palms, then pick it up and hold it by the edge, rotating the dough in a circle. This stretches the dough and strengthens the gluten. Lay the stretched dough on a floured surface. Take that rolling pin again, and roll out the dough, rotating a quarter turn every couple of passes. Keep going until you have a 12" (or so) circle.

Somewhere between those two methods lies happiness. You'll have to judge exactly how much work you want to do.

(And to be honest, the true pizza auteur would eschew even that much rolling pin work, in favor of hand stretching - using your knuckles, press the pizza dough out in a rolling motion from the center and moving out, until it's about the thickness you want. It tends to be more amorphic than round, with the characteristic edge that marks a homemade pizza. If you're really into this whole thing, the traditional spinning is supposed to round the dough out with centrifugal force [although you'll lose a lot of dough until you practice]. Again, it all depends on how much work you want to do.)

You can do this on a cookie sheet, a pizza pan or peel (I agree with Alton Brown regarding unitaskers, though), or whatever you want to use. However, you need to dust it with cornmeal, or it's going to stick like duct tape.

Bake 10 to 15 minutes, until the edge is lightly browned; the bottom is usually done by that point.

Now, a couple of thoughts on the rest of the pizza:

• Spaghetti sauce is pizza sauce. Don't be fooled. If you like it on pasta, you'll like it on pizza.

• Too much sauce is a mistake. If you can't see most of the crust through a thin layer of sauce, everything's going to slide off on you. That's bad.

• The type of cheese doesn't matter. If you like it, run with it. Mozzarella is the standard, but I like adding a little bit of whatever cheese is around, for variety. Dust a little Parmesan on before adding the rest; feta isn't going to melt, so keep that in mind when you sprinkle it around; cheddar can overpower the pizza, so use half as much as you do mozzarella (unless you like cheddar). Just not too close to the edge, or it will melt off. And don't make it too thick (unless you like that) - remember, it'll be happy to slide off and mess up the oven.

• Some people like caramelizing the onions. I think it makes them too sweet - you lose too much onion flavor. I think you can just put them straight on; the Trophy Wife, on the other hand, prefers to sauté them (cook them at medium heat with just a little butter or oil) until they just turn translucent. Your choice.

• White pizza is not heresy. Sauté as much garlic as you want (start with four cloves - adjust later), add 3 tablespoons of flour, enough butter or oil to make a roux, add milk, simmer for a while, add more milk to loosen to roughly spaghetti sauce consistency.

• Precook the mushrooms. Trust me on this. If you put raw mushrooms on a pizza, they'll release a bunch of liquid, and your crust will be mushy. That's bad. Sauté them on medium (I like butter) until they release their liquid, and then darken just a little.

• There are no bad toppings, but round things roll off (and if you flatten beans, that's just ugly). I've had corn (don't go crazy - remember, rolling is bad), seafood (the tiny little squids adorning my trilingual pizza frucht de Mer in Trier nearly made my mother-in-law heave), spinach (chop reasonably fine and consider a white sauce instead of tomato), whatever you have lying around (for example, I like artichoke hearts). Just chop them to pizza-sized bits. The only rule is, the pizza is only as good as the toppings - bad sausage won't get better.

Pizza is easy. Life is hard.

Adventures in cooking

So, the Trophy Wife was out the other night, doing Engelbert Humperdinck's opera "Hansel & Gretel" for the schoolkids of Gallup, New Mexico. (That's the Engelbert Humperdinck who was writing fairy tale opera's for children in the 1890's, not the one who was singing crap pop music for the soulless masses in the 1960's.) She's been doing this with Opera Unlimited for just shy of five years now.

So there I was, my son and I, left to my own devices for dinner. Not the first time - I am a passable cook; although not nearly as good as the Trophy Wife, I can follow a recipe with the best of them. ("Recipe" being a moderately important word here, though. I don't have a lot of instincts for cooking, so if I don't have a list of ingredients and instructions, it might be best to have the pizza place on speed dial.)

But we really had no idea what we were going to eat, and Christopher went rummaging in the pantry. The first thing he turned up was a can of Spam that dated back to when Luke headed off to the Marines. (For some inexplicable reason, both my sons like Spam.)

The second thing he turned up was a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. And he put these two cans on the counter and grunted in his pidgin Neanderthal "Make food." Then he wandered off to finish digging the pit-trap for the mastadon.

I looked at the two cans for a minute, as they sat there on the counter, mocking me. And I decided to go with a really simple application. I cut the Spam into five slices, put them in a skillet to sear slightly on each side, and dumped the chili's in on top of them.

The first thing that hit me was the smell - it was like barbecue sauce, only good. (Sorry, I'm not a big BBQ sauce fan - that doesn't mean I'm a bad person, does it?) After I flipped the Spam slices, I poured some red wine in on top, and let it cook it down a little. Then I just served it over rice.

Then Christopher and I sat there, watching the fourth Die Hard movie (easily the best since the first one), and reveled in our pain.

See, my wife isn't exactly a fan of spicy food (and when I say "not a big fan of," what I mean is "kind of a wimp about"), so I've cut way back on my capsaicin consumption over the last two decades or so.

In case you aren't aware, chipotles are just the smoked version of jalapeno peppers. So not the hottest thing out there, but once you've worked your way through four or five of them, the built-up heat gets pretty intense. Take a drink, the heat just goes downstream, without lessening at the top at all.

The thing about capsaicin is that it clings to everything. I once picked up a bottle of some seriously kick-ass hot sauce when I was helping a guy move, and I didn't know that he'd spilled some on the outside. An hour later, after washing my hands once, I rubbed my eye where some dust had gotten in. I was reasonably certain that I was going to go blind (possibly by plucking my eyeball out to stop the burning).

The smokiness of the chipotles was mostly overpowered by the adobo sauce, but the heat? Not even close. It was awesome; we both ended up with a chili high that had us laughing at each other for no good reason.

(It's amazing, as puritanical as some people are, that chili's haven't been banned yet.)

Capsaicin has a number of uses other than tormenting the cowardly gourmands. It's one of the main chemicals in one of the varieties of mace (specifically, the one referred to as "pepper-spray," by some weird coincidence), and a number of pain ointments use it as a key ingredient (for example, a product called Capzasin).

Oh, and one final note. I'd forgotten that, when you severely overindulge on chili peppers, you need to understand that everything goes somewhere. And capsaicin doesn't always break down as readily as you'd expect in the digestive system.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the next day, you'll be sitting on the toilet, and it will feel like somebody coated their finger in Capzasin and shoved it up your butt. Just a thought.

But then, last night, I took my first crack at making soba noodles. And that is a truly weird experience.

There's all kinds of good reasons to eat soba noodles - they're made from buckwheat instead of processed white flour, and, you know, the less processing of your food the better, right? Plus, they're high in fiber, which is something everybody needs on a regular basis (so to speak). And in one study, it was shown that buckwheat lowered the serum glucose levels in rats by 12 to 19 per cent. And with growing numbers of diabetic Americans, that might just be something to pay attention to.

Now, the package instructions were pretty much written by a crazy man. Basically, you bring the water to a rolling boil, toss in the noodles, and keep the heat cranked. When the water tries to boil over, pour in a cup of cold water, and when it tries to boil over again, kill the heat. Rinse.

And boil over it did. (Or actually, it tried to - I was just too fast for it.) I suspect it's the variety of starch that buckwheat throws off, but it's pretty damned similar to boiling a pot of detergent. It foams up like a mad dog chewing a can of shaving cream.

It's the insane way to deal with soba. People who cook their soba that way will probably also serve it by reaching into the boiling water and pulling out handfuls of noodly goodness.

Fortunately, a little research found me a food blog by an ex-pat Japanese woman living in Switzerland (hey, welcome to the 21st Century), who shows us a more reasonable way to cook soba. (Possibly, in fact, too controlled, approaching anal-retentive; I mean, come on! "hold the noodles over the water and sprinkle them in strand by strand?" Really?)

Basically, boil the water (or broth - whatever), toss in the noodles, stir... hell, it's her story, let's let her tell it.

Bring the water back up to a gentle boil, then lower the heat so that the water is just simmering. (This differs from the ‘rolling boil’ that’s recommended for pasta.) If the water threatens to boil over, add about 1/2 cup of cold water (but if you lower the heat to the gentle simmer, and have a big enough pot, this shouldn’t be necessary). Cook for about 7 to 8 minutes, or following the package directions (for thinner noodles 5 to 6 minutes may be enough. Test by eating a strand - it should be cooked through, not al dente, but not mushy either).

At this point, you may want to reserve some of the cooking water. This is called sobayu (そば湯), literally ‘hot soba water’, and many people like to add it to the remaining soba dipping sauce at the end of the meal to drink like soup!

Drain the noodles into a colander. Immediately return them to the pot and fill the pot with cold water. When you’re draining the hot water you may notice that it smells quite ‘floury’. This is what you want to get totally rid of.

If the noodles threaten to flood out over the pot, put the colander on the pot to hold the noodles down. Leave the water running for a while over the noodles.

Once the water and the noodle are cool, start to ‘wash’ the noodles. Take handfuls and gently swish and rub them in the water. Your goal is to wash off any trace of starchiness or gumminess on the noodles. When you’re done the water should run clear.

She goes on to talk about presentation and stuff, but basically, it's noodles. You know the drill, right? Then just rinse them when you're done. They'll be fine.

Here we come a'wassailing

Well, Thanksgiving is over. And as the Christmas season starts to spark into full, capitalist-driven life, let's consider some of the older traditions that accompany it.

Wassail, for example.

Now, the average American, for a number of good reasons, has no idea what "wassail" might be. The closest they might come to it is the old carol from which this post takes its name, Here We Come A'Wassailing.

Now, traditionally, "wassailing" was based in the Anglo-Saxon habit where a group of peasants went to the lord's manor and sang badly until they were given something, usually food or drink, just to make them shut up. We can see this reflected in the lyrics to We Wish You a Merry Christmas, where they end up begging for "figgy pudding." (Somehow, I doubt that a box of Fig Newtons would cover it for them, but what do I know?)

Etymologically, "wassail" apparently traces back to the Anglo-Saxon phrase wæs þu hæl ("be thou hale," or "be in good health"). This was shortened at some point to Wæs hal! ("Be healthy!"), and thus to "wassail." And wassail was the liquid equivalent of the figgy pudding, a drink that the master could keep on hand for the servants to ladle out to whoever came around singing.

If you look around, you'll find an abundance of recipes claiming to be wassail. Some of them are fruit punches, some are based on tea, but none of them are likely to be accurate - many are based on various formulations of mulled cider.

Now, Alton Brown (our cooking lord and savior, blessed be his name) did a little research, and came up with a recipe for wassail that may be entirely accurate.

Alton Brown's Wassail Recipe

6 small Fuji apples, cored
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
72 ounces ale
750 ml Madeira
10 whole cloves
10 whole allspice berries
1 cinnamon stick, 2-inches long
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
6 large eggs, separated

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Put the apples into an 8 by 8-inch glass baking dish. Spoon the brown sugar into the center of each apple, dividing the sugar evenly among them. Pour the water into the bottom of the dish and bake until tender, about 45 minutes.

Pour the ale and Madeira into a large slow cooker. Put the cloves, allspice, and cinnamon into a small muslin bag or cheesecloth, tied with kitchen twine, and add to the slow cooker along with the ginger and nutmeg. Set the slow cooker to medium heat and bring the mixture to at least 120 degrees F. Do not boil.

Add the egg whites to a medium bowl and using a hand mixer, beat until stiff peaks form. Put the egg yolks into a separate bowl and beat until lightened in color and frothy, approximately 2 minutes. Add the egg whites to the yolks and using the hand mixer, beat, just until combined. Slowly add 4 to 6 ounces of the alcohol mixture from the slow cooker to the egg mixture, beating with the hand mixer on low speed. Return this mixture to the slow cooker and whisk to combine.

Add the apples and the liquid from the baking dish to the wassail and stir to combine. Ladle into cups and serve.

The only really unusual ingredient there is Madeira, which is basically a fortified wine - historically, the vintner would just stop the fermentation of a batch of wine by adding enough distilled alcohol (usually brandy) to kill off the yeast before it ate up all the sugar. Madeira, Marsala, port, sherry, vermouth - they're all considered "fortified wines." They tend to be more alcoholic than most wines, but less than most liquors.

We made a batch of Alton Brown's wassail tonight, just in support of that whole Christmas tradition, and while I have to admit that it isn't the most disgusting thing I've ever put in my mouth... oh, lord, it isn't good.

You know how some things are greater than the sum of the parts? Yeah, this isn't one of them. If anything, this takes some of the less appealing parts of the ingredients and amplifies them: the slight bitterness of the ale doesn't really match well with the sugar in the baked apple and the sweet bite of the Madeira wine. (And, incidentally, if you don't temper the eggs well before adding them in, you end up with some slightly boiled scrambled eggs on top, which isn't what a normal person might consider good eats...)

If you don't believe me and want to make it for yourself, let me help you out a little: here's the cut-down version of the recipe. Try it and see for yourself.

1 small Fuji apple, cored
2 2/3 teaspoons brown sugar
Enough water to give you about 1 cm on the top of your smallest baking dish
A 12 ounce bottle of ale
1/2 cup Madeira
2 whole cloves
2 whole allspice berries
Half of a cinnamon stick
Dash ground ginger
Dash ground nutmeg
1 large egg, separated

Treat them as above. But don't say I didn't warn you.

We've used a crockpot recipe for years, involving apple cider, cranberry juice, brown sugar, a cloved orange, some spices and time to heat. (Personally, I think it works best with a shot of rum added - that's just me.)

I think we'll stick with that one.

Is That You, Honey?

Several years ago, my wife decided that I needed a hobby, and I ended up with a wine making kit. I did manage to pull off some decent fruit wines (never really got into the whole grape thing - no press, y'know), but percentage-wise, my efforts at the oenophilic arts have not been a complete success.

To put it another way, I've probably ruined a truckload or two of fruit trying to drink it. And there's very little that's good about 5 gallons of battery acid. (Although, come to think of it, the one attempt that really qualified being called "battery acid" would have been that attempt at orange wine, but I only made a one gallon batch of that.)

We have discovered, though, that I can make a mean mead. And as a fairly direct result of that discovery, I've got about 5 gallons of honey bubbling away in a corner of my kitchen right now.

OK, technically, only about 16 pounds of it is honey. And another one ounce is made up of yeast. In a couple of weeks, it gets racked into a secondary fermenter, and a couple of weeks after that, it gets bottled and put away for at least a year. Maybe longer. (This is a long-term hobby; there's not a lot of instant gratification going on here.)

Honey is a fascinating product. Evidence shows that humans have been cultivating it for around 10,000 years - roughly 4000 years longer than some people believe that the world has been around. So it's literally a Stone Age skill, if you still use that pop-culture, ethnocentrically-biased term, anyway. (I do, but I'm shallow.)

As Alton Brown will tell you, honey is the only food produced for us, by animals. What about milk, you ask? Well, you actually have to work to get the milk out of the cow - now, if the cows milked themselves, and stored the milk in little bladders, and then stored the bladders in giant cow-hives, it would be an equivalent situation. (Of course, then you'd have to shoo off the angry hordes of cows before you could harvest the milk, and that would probably take bulldozers and massive, pitchfork-shaped cattle prods. So overall, it's probably best that bees are small.)

Honey has been used in medicine for centuries, and for good reason. It's hygroscopic, antimicrobial, and even antioxidant. If you get a cut, you could easily smear honey on it (like they did for centuries), and the antibacterial qualities could keep it from getting infected, the hygroscopic qualities would keep the wound moist and cut down on scarring, and all you'd be left with is figuring out how to deal with all the ant bites.

If you really insist on it, you can get all mystical about the stuff. On a bookshelf in the kitchen (next to The Joy of Home Wine Making), I've got a copy of Mad About Mead. I suppose that the subtitle should have warned me - "Nectar of the Gods." It's about 150 pages long, and the first 40 are taken up with mysticism, ancient religious beliefs and questionable history. I suppose it must be useful to somebody (even if you build your own religion from scratch, you've got to get building materials from somewhere). But I was definitely not the target audience.

The second two thirds of the book contain some decent tips, although I take many of them with a grain of salt, as well. For example, I don't support the idea of the "open fermenter" method: when the mead is in its initial, most active phase (where the yeast is bubbling away like mad), the author believes that an open drum covered with a sheet is the perfect container. I don't agree - although I can laugh at the idea of pulling an angry cat wrapped in a honey-soaked sheet out of a large trash can, I'm pretty sure that the reality would be much less entertaining.

On a related note, even though he barely touches on mead-making, I strongly recommend The Joy of Home Wine Making, which was written by Terry A. Garey; he also has a website, joyofwine.net, which is an equally important resource. Mr Garey's book is the bible of wine-making (only more readable, and more useful, than the actual Bible). Everything you need to know about making alcohol from various forms of sugar is in that book.

Mead is relatively bulletproof (which is probably why I can do it without screwing up too badly). At its core, mead is really just honey, water and yeast; in fact, if you make it this way, the result used to be called a "show mead," and it was the only type eligible to be entered into competition in the UK.

There are other varieties of mead, too. For example, if you use herbs and spices to flavor it, you have "metheglin," and if you use fruit, you end up with "melomel." (Don't blame me - that's what they're called.)

Almost every culture has their own version of honey-wine. This is probably because honey often has strains of "wild" yeast in it, and will sometimes, if mixed with water, ferment itself. This isn't recommended - the yeast won't be very good at making alcohol, and might screw up the flavor to the point where you can't drink it.

The first step to making mead is to boil the water and honey, to kill off the "wild yeast" and break up the proteins. Most people also add acid (to make the yeast more comfortable), yeast nutrient (sometimes called "yeast energizer," to round out the yeast's diet a little), and tannin (to help the flavor). While it's boiling, a lot of proteins will break and rise to the surface as foam, which you skim off.

Then you pour it into a primary fermenter (in my case, an airtight jug fitted with a pressure-release valve called a "bubbler"), along with enough water and ice to make 5 gallons. (You need to reduce the temperature to around 70-75 degrees, or you kill the yeast; if it's too cold, you put it to sleep. So you have to be careful with the ice.)

And then you sit back and let the yeast do its thing.

"Its thing," if you're taking notes, is to eat sugar, belch carbon dioxide, and crap alcohol. (Yes, I could have said "excrete alcohol," but let's be real here, OK?) The yeast dies when the alcohol content is too high; this used to be around 10-13 percent, but some of the more modern wine yeast can produce around 18 percent alcohol.

You get some sludge settling at the bottom of the container as it ferments, so, as the first stage of fermentation starts to settle down, you siphon it into a secondary fermenter (most people use a big jug called a carboy), leaving the sediment (or lees) behind. You can "rack" it (which just means siphon it out, basically) a couple of times to clear more sludge; some people recommend it, some people say anything more than once is too much. I figure it's all waste, and cleaning the toilet is a good thing.

Once the bubbling is pretty much done, you bottle it and store it in a cool dark place for a while; in the case of mead, like I said, the absolute minimum is a year. I've never had it last long enough to tell you what the top end is, but I'm told that seven to ten year old meads are incredible.

(Quick disclaimer - that was less than you needed to know to make the stuff. There's all kinds of chemistry you can do - which I mostly fake - and other steps you need to know about. This was the 5-minute overview for the layman.)

On this batch, I'm experimenting on a couple of steps. First, I didn't boil it. I've been reading that boiling destroys a lot of the "nose" (smell) of the mead, and you only need to heat it to 152 degrees to kill off the wild yeasts. I admittedly went closer to 160 degrees, but I never let it boil.

Secondly, I went semi-natural. Instead of a powdered acid, I used the juice and zest (peel, with as little pith - the white stuff inside the peel - as possible) of two lemons and three oranges. And instead of powdered tannin, I brewed strong black tea and added that.

However, I did add yeast nutrient (hence, semi-natural). I could have added raisins, but that isn't the flavor I wanted. And the other top choices I found were bee pollen (didn't have any), and crushed bee larvae (umm... ick). And besides, I had yeast nutrient, so I'm pretty happy with my choices here.

This might be the first batch I've made that turns out badly. I won't know for a year. But as I write this, on day 2, it's over there popping like a tenor drum about once every three seconds. So it seems like I've done something right.

Only time will tell.

Saving Money in an Economic Downturn

I'm sure you've noticed by now, our economy has been healthier. We aren't totally screwed yet, but things have been better; I am noticing a lack of lubricant on the store shelves.

What can we do in this time of crisis? Well, we can all stick together, for one thing: the closer you are to your neighbor, the easier it will be to slash their throats when the time comes to eat them.

Well, learning to cook and to sew are both ways to save money. Sadly, they're also skills that have fallen by the wayside. (Learning to sew also takes in initial start-up cost, and takes up both time from your schedule and room in your living space. So if either of those is at a premium, sewing may not be for you.

(Incidentally, if you do buy new clothes, check the label. If it has special washing instructions, that should, by itself, be a reason to reconsider buying it: it's going to cost more in the long run.)

Cooking isn't actually that difficult, but it scares some people. (Best recommendation: watch Good Eats on the Food Network for a while. It's interesting, relatively funny, and you'll learn something at the same time.)

Eating healthy will also help you in the long run: those pesky medical bills can really eat into your wallet.

Some things just don't save you any money at all. I take the bus to work. For the last part of last week, I passed a sign advertising a yard sale (strange by itself, since it pointed into a group of apartments, but never mind). The sign was attached to the outside of a cardboard box (fairly common). But to weigh down the box, you know what they'd used? Not rocks or bricks - that would have been too ordinary.

There were three quart-sized jars of applesauce.

Sometimes, you need to give the kids very specific instructions before you turn them loose to do something for you.

(By the way, if you're shopping at Walmart, remember that, while you may be saving money in the short run, but most of your cash is leaving the country. So in the long run, you're hurting the economy. Things aren't going to get better over here anytime soon. But the people of China thank you. (OK, the people in charge in China thank you. Nobody else is really making more than slave wages. But, hey, it's your money. Do what you want.)

But really, anybody can cook. And if you do it for a while, you eventually get to the point where other people will eat it, too.

Now, let's look at how you can eat decent food, and still save money. First, let's go steal a recipe. We're going to a site called "bakespace.com," where we find:

Beef Stroganoff With Brandy

2 tablespoons olive oil
3 pounds beef tenderloin, trimmed, cut in 3 inch x 1 inch x 1/4 inch strips
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 medium onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
16 ounces fresh mushrooms, sliced 1/4 inch thick
1 cup low sodium beef broth
1 1/2 cup low fat sour cream
1/2 cup brandy
6 tablespoons fresh parsley, minced

In a large nonstick skillet, heat the oil over high heat.
Brown the beef for 2 minutes, transfer to a warm platter, and season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper.
Melt the butter in the skillet over moderate heat.
Add the onions and garlic and saute for 2 minutes or until onions are tender, then stir in the mushrooms, cover and cook for 3 minutes.
Uncover and stir in the remaining salt and pepper, and add the beef broth.
Bring to a boil, stirring to scrape up any browned bits, and boil, uncovered for 2 minutes.
Remove the skillet from the heat and whisk in the sour cream until smooth.
Stir in the beef and any juices that have collected on the platter.
Add brandy and place over low heat and stir constantly just until heated through (don't let the sauce boil).
Turn heat off and place Stroganoff in a serving dish and sprinkle with parsley.
Serve over whole grain pasta cooked al dente.

Now, let's break that down.

olive oil - OK, let's be real. You're frying meat in oil. And then it's going into a cream sauce. You aren't going to notice if the olive oil is changed with canola oil.

beef tenderloin - Oh, shut the hell up. Go look at the price per pound, and tell me how quickly you're going to change to a lesser cut. Now, the more fat you see on a cut of meat, the less of it you really want to buy for anything except stew. In fact, any part of the meat that isn't openly red and meaty, you only want it for stew. Or braising. Basically, any long, slow cooking method, where the non-meat stuff has a chance to melt and be absorbed into the food.

brandy - now, again, it's going into a cream sauce. The brandy is there because the meat (and some of the herbs) have some flavor compounds that dissolve best in alcohol, and not water. (Actually, tomatoes have more of those compounds, but this recipe doesn't have any of those, so go figure.) You don't have to use your best brandy. Trust me on that.

And as for mushrooms, you don't have to buy the best ones, either. White button mushrooms do just as well as portobello mushrooms (unless you're my wife, but she has taste buds and stuff).

Serve over whole grain pasta cooked al dente - OK, the standard is actually egg noodles, but serve on whatever pasta you like.

Now, have we cut the price enough?

OK then, here's a cheaper version. Replace the beef with ground beef, and everything else with a can of cream of mushroom soup (made with half the liquid). Dump it over some cooked noodles, drained. (If you really want to save money, serve it over ramen noodles, cooked without the flavor packet. (You might be able to use the flavor packet if it's beef ramen. And then you wouldn't need to add salt, either.)

While it isn't nearly as good (and it definitely doesn't have a whole lot of health benefits), it costs about a 27 cents a serving.

Health food for everyone

I'm going to see if I can't make the world a better place in one simple blog post. Since it's July, this is a particularly far-reaching and important piece of news, and will increase happiness in much of this hemisphere.

First, let me point out that a study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture tells us that researchers in Thailand and America discovered that the antioxidant properties of strawberries are increased by the application of a little alcohol. (This is true of blackberries and other colored fruit, if you're curious.)

Now, some naysayers would like to point out that too much alcohol damages the liver. Screw them. They always want to rain on our parade. So we'll ignore them, in that responsible manner of the Bush administration, which bravely ignores any scientific evidence it doesn't agree with.

Straight strawberries have other beneficial effects - vitamins, minerals, fiber. You know, stuff that nobody wants to know about, but, like traffic laws, we need to have to stay happy and out of trouble.

Then we have the benefits of honey. It's good stuff. Plus, if you get honey harvested locally, it can have beneficial effects on your allergies, as well.

So, here's how I'm going to improve your life.

Strawberry Daiquiri Smoothie

1 pint (16 oz) frozen strawberries
1/4 cup local honey
1/2 cup water
Juice of 1 lemon (around 1/4 cup)
¾ cup rum (spiced is good, by the way)

Put sugar in blender first, to grind for a second or two. Pour in water rum, and lemon juice. Blend until to mixed (a few seconds). Start adding frozen strawberries, a few at a time. At the end, you'll probably need to stop the blender and stir with a spoon, pushing down any floaters. Serve.

Makes 2 good-sized daiquiris (3 if you skimp a little).

If you want don't really care about the health bonus from honey, you can go ahead and use 1/4 cup of "superfine sugar." Just put regular sugar in a dry blender first, and run it for a few seconds. If you actually pay extra money for "superfine" sugar, I'll have to come to your house and break your kneecaps. I'm sorry, but that's just the way life is.

(Some people would tell you to increase the sugar by 1/4 when substituting for honey. Well, to tell the truth, that kind of measurement is too much for me. I'm lazy. And I recommend that you avoid trying that much math when you're cooking, too. Or drinking. Same problem. It'll cause brain rot.)

Now, I'm willing to go for something that'll make your life easier and cheaper almost every time. But I'm not willing to substitute the "juice of one lemon" part for an equal amount of any brand of "reconstituted lemon juice." Because if you look on the label, every one of them that I've found uses either potassium benzoate or sodium benzoate to preserve the stuff. So avoid it.

There. See? One simple blog post, and you're healthier, more regular, and more relaxed. So what could be better than that, right?