please send help

Warning: The recipe I’m about to share with you does not qualify as gruel: It is not healthy. It does not include any vegetables to speak of, and no whole grains. It is not a soup, nor is it a stew. And there’s bacon involved.

The bacon is, in fact, deeply involved. I had imagined creating a vegetarian version of this recipe, but the pork products weren’t having it: The bacon is holding a gun to my head while the bacon fat writes up a list of demands, which include a fueled jet, $1,000,000 in unmarked bills, and not to be left off this ingredient list.

I wish I could blame the bacon for my behavior the first time I ate this dish, which was served by my mother-in-law as an appetizer, a little puff-pastry pizza topped with, well, bacon, tiny chunks of apple, and blue cheese, drizzled with honey, and sprinkled with shallots that had been cooked in, well, bacon fat. But it wasn’t just for the bacon that I ate my share of the pizza, and then more than my share, and then, feeling sheepish but unable to stop myself, all that was left without offering anyone the last piece. It was the combination of flavors that was so addictive: salty and smoky and sweet, slightly sharp from the blue cheese. A combination from which the bacon should not be omitted, or the bacon will kill its hostage.

Smoky-Sweet Puff-Pastry Pizza

Adapted from A Farmer in the Dell

1 sheet Pepperidge Farm puff-pastry dough

4 slices bacon

1 shallot, minced

1 tablespoon honey, plus more for drizzling

a handful of mozzarella cheese

a handful of Gorgonzola cheese

½ of 1 apple, diced

1. Thaw puff pastry according to package instructions and preheat the oven to 400 degrees. When the puff pastry is soft, roll it out on a lightly floured surface into a rectangle and transfer to a large baking sheet. Fold the edges over about ½ inch, press the border with the back of a fork, and brush the border with water. Poke holes in the rest of the dough with the tines of a fork.

2. Fry the bacon in a skillet, remove from the pan, and drain on paper towels, then chop or tear into bite-sized pieces. Add the shallot to the bacon fat in the pan and sauté until almost translucent, add honey and stir until the honey is thin, then pour the mixture over the puff pastry. Sprinkle the pastry with mozzarella cheese, apple, and Gorgonzola crumbles, then drizzle with a little more honey. Cook at 400 degrees for 15–20 minutes, until the edges are just golden.

This could be served as a very unhealthy and ungruel-like dinner with a side salad, or do as my mother-in-law did and cut it into squares and serve as an appetizer, preferably to people who will not bogart the whole thing. Whatever you do, please, please don't leave out the bacon.

look!

It's jshu!


Dangling...


...from a banner hung over the side of a bridge in Pittsburgh!


He's crazy! He's also the guy on the far right (I think).

When's the last time you were arrested for civil disobedience committed on behalf of our planet? Huh? I thought so. Me, too.

remains of the dinner

At work tonight.


Lest you think that I'm a virtuous, carrot-eating ascetic, I must confess that for breakfast, midmorning snack, and lunch I had cake and cake and cake. I also had cake for dessert.

Lest you think I'm a rapacious glutton, I've asked the yachtsman to bring the rest of the cake with him to work tomorrow.

Lest he think I'm some kind of pussy he can steal from, I will tackle the yachtsman to the ground and rip the Tupperware from his hands if he tries to take that cake out of the house.

menage a fava

Or, fava beans three ways:

1. Fresh, grilled.



2. Dried, pureed, with sauteed arugula and Doe's Leap feta.



3. Fresh, peeled, blanched, peeled, with balsamic onions, basil oil, lemon juice and zest, and more Doe's Leap feta.


4. With liver and a nice Chianti.



My Greek stepmother, either directly or otherwise, is in some way responsible for three of these four fava bean dishes. Hint: Hannibal Lecter is not my stepmother.

i'm in the wrong line of work

I went online yesterday to make a credit card payment and decided that I'd like someone else to pay my credit card bill for once. Namely, the person who charged $1500 at a Home Depot in Ozone Park, New York, to my card but is not me.

I'm mad at the Ozone-Park-Not-Me not only for stealing my credit card number and buying a super fancy grill (or whatever the Ozone-Park-Not-Me purchased), but also for making me so late I didn't have time to make food or go to the grocery store before work (unlike Ozone-Park-Not-Me, I have a [albeit very part-time] job, and because I work from 2 p.m. until 9 or 10 at night, I have to bring dinner with me or I'll die of starvation cry). Flustered and late after my long conversation with the credit card company, I grabbed random food items from my refrigerator and left the house with the following:


So while the Ozone-Park-Not-Me spent the evening grilling steaks on the Cadillac of gas grills, I sat in a windowless, fluorescently lit room proofreading classified ads and eating hard-boiled eggs and pudding.

Did you hear that, Ozone-Park-Not-Me? PUDDING. Jealous?

old dog, new tricks

My dog has a couple of bad habits. For example, he will eat any food left unattended on the coffee table in our living room -- he has stolen cheese off the cheese plate at parties, licked the scrambled eggs off my toast, taken the crust of a slice of pizza in his mouth, slid it off the plate, and taken it back to his cave. He's sneaky, has bad manners, and can't be trusted.

Something similar happened yesterday with my mother-in-law. We were sitting at the park across the street from the Shopping Bag, a tiny, hole-in-the-wall market that has the best burger in Vermont, according to the Food Network. My mother-in-law foolishly left her half-eaten hamburger in her lap, and like an animal, I grabbed it when she wasn't looking and inhaled the whole thing in a matter of seconds.


My mother-in-law did not scold me or tell me go lie down, but I think the yachtsman is thinking of sending me to obedience school.

[I should mention here that other than a few tastes, which disgusted me, I haven't eaten beef in eighteen years. I should also mention that this burger was the best thing I've ever put in my mouth, and if my mother-in-law had tried to take it away from me, I would have bitten her.]

I obviously can never go in or near the Shopping Bag again, because I would probably climb over the counter and rape the nice man flipping the burgers. But if you are in the area, I highly recommend you do (order the burger, not rape its maker). Ask for the Scibek Sizzler. Bring mace.

eat, pray, stalk

I may or may not be stalking M. LaBee, the baker formerly known as The Mister Who Would Not Watch Gossip Girl (if you are one of the seven bl*g readers able to follow that sentence, I love and am available to stalk you, too, if you're looking for some attention). It may or may not be coincidence that we've "run into each other" three times in the past two days. Regardless, like most of M. LaBee's stalkers friends, I will do anything he tells me to except leave him alone respect his opinion. For example, last night I took his suggestion and ate dinner at Bite Me; I even got the pizza he recommended (Homage to Goats: Rosemary-roasted fingerling potatoes, chevre, baby arugula, roasted garlic, asiago & mozzarella cheeses, finished with a balsamic oil glaze). Chris and I now officially love that place: we love the food, we love the art, we love the candles, we love the nice guy behind the counter, we love the nice guy who cooks the pizza, we love the nice guy who recommended it...we cannot, however, bring ourselves to love the Grateful Dead playing over the speakers.

Praying

Waiting

Eating

And this afternoon I'm meeting M. LaBee so he can help me select some wine for my wine cellar drinking pleasure. Instead of buying one bottle every few days, I'm going to buy six at once and save 10%. See, Chris? I'm not splurging on booze, I'm a bargain stalker shopper!

Which goes to show, it really pays to be a stalker friends with M. LaBee; I have a feeling it would pay even more to have a slave baker. All in good time...

passion

There was a big fire in a dumpster outside our building last night.


I'm pretty sure Chris set it as a testament of his love for me, but he's blaming our arch nemeses at Souza's, the Brazilian all-you-can-eat-meat restaurant in the lobby.

it's called stockholm syndrome

There was a hostage situation at my house last night, and it was only seconds, not weeks or months, before I went all Patty Hearst and started identifying with my captor: fresh-out-of-the-oven sourdough bread.

Chris went to a bread-making class at King Arthur yesterday and returned home with beautiful loaves of bread he'd baked...



...plus dough he'd started there and brought home.



Last night he baked another round loaf and a delicious bread that I wrongly called a focaccia. This thing was heavily armed: drizzled with a little olive oil, dusted with parm and salt, speckled with garlic. It was WARM, people. Slightly crunchy exterior, soft inside. I'd like to have seen you try and resist (although if you'd been at my house, you wouldn't have had to; I wouldn't have let you near it). If the non-focaccia had handed me a machine gun and asked me to rob a bank, I would have...well, I would have gotten in bed and pulled the covers over my head, because if your food is talking to you, you're in trouble. And if your food is trying to get you to commit crimes, you're in BIG trouble.



All my dinner-making plans went out the window. There was no trip to the market, no making of a salad, even. The non-focaccia would not let me.

I would tell you to send ransom money, but at this point I have actually eaten my captor. I was both hostage and SWAT team; how that's for multitasking?

now i'm really, really worried about the economy

I actually gasped when I read this news. Not that I've ever watched the show. Not that my first crush was on Phillip Spaulding.

[I think my new favorite website is soapcentral.com. I love that in their "who's who" of characters section they have categories such as "aliases" and "crimes committed," and I love that in the "past marriages" category most characters have a list of at least five names. I was going to write, "Why did I ever stop watching soaps?" but I don't think I did; I just switched to soaps that air during primetime, set on the Upper East Side, in outer space, and on deserted islands.]