S.O.S. and Spam: Remembering My Aviator Father

I've often heard it said that once a person serves in the military, it changes them forever. I'm not sure if this is actually true--I've never served in the military myself--but I do know that, until the day he died, my father clung very fast to the years he spent in the Navy as a night fighter pilot flying off The Enterprise during the last days of World War II. He entered the military when he was eighteen, and learned how to fly a plane before he knew how to drive a car. When he died in 2002, I spent hours tearing through long-sealed boxes in search of his discharge papers so that the VA would provide us with a flag for his coffin. We are not military people in my family, and my father was not a military man in any way, shape, or form; but his service had to be recognized as we laid him to rest. That's what he would have wanted, above anything else.

Whether appropriate or not, my father saw fit to share with me countless tales of his experiences in the Navy, as a Brooklyn-born Jewish boy away from home for the first time in his life. It informed a lot of our conversation and even our vacation time; on a trip to Vero Beach, Florida when I was in high school, we had dinner one night at a seaside restaurant called The Ocean Grill. Waiting at the bar for our table to be set, my father peered out the window and smiled; about half a mile out were the skeletal remains of the Breconshire, a British vessel that had gone down in 1894. Its hull was just visible through the water's surface.

"We used that for target practice," he told me, while the bartender nodded. "And this place was my officer's club." That night, sipping on what was one of the last Shirley Temples of my youth, I could have sworn I saw ghosts wearing their dress whites. My father drank to them with a gin Gibson.

As proud of his service as he was, my father was unaccountably even more in love with Navy food--so much so that he used to make it for me on a regular basis. Most kids would wake up on Sunday mornings to French toast or bagels and lox. I woke up to creamed chipped beef on toast-- more affectionately known as S.O.S.--and a dish that may actually have its roots in the World War I-era Boeuf le Creme de Argonne [sic], in which roast beef was prepared with a cream gravy and rushed up to the front lines in France. I was fifteen before I found out what S.O.S. actually stood for; this doubtless accounted for the many looks of horrified dismay that were cast my parents' way when, at seven years old and on a trip to California, I stood on my chair and loudly ordered a plate of the stuff at Chasen's in Beverly Hills. They actually made it for me, and even there, with Fay Wray sitting at the next table, it still looked like shit.

A few years later, my father excitedly returned from one of his early Sunday morning dog-walking jaunts, plunked a brown paper bag on the kitchen counter, extracted an odd, rectangular can from its depths, popped the lid, and began frying up what could only be described culinarily as glorified pet food.

"I haven't had this since pre-flight school," my father exclaimed, while our Airedale drooled so badly that it looked like he was swallowing shoelaces. The little slabs of god-knows-what fried up crisp and brown, and by the time my mother emerged from the bedroom, I was sitting at the breakfast counter, eating Spam and eggs like they were blini and caviar.

My parents divorced shortly thereafter.

Although my father's wartime reminiscences were geared more to what he saw, ate, and drank than the innate horrors of the situation, my father died with the honor of Naval duty coursing through his veins. An hour after his funeral, when his family and friends had dispersed and the limousine had taken me back to his house, the driver--an older man with a cough and a flat top haircut-- helped me out of the car and handed me the detritus of the funeral home, all stuffed into a green plastic shopping bag: the signing book, assorted cards, and the rolled-up flag that had been draped over his coffin.

"Hold this end tight," he said, unrolling the flag, and handing me one of its edges. He folded it in half lengthwise, then corner over corner, until it was a perfect triangle. And then he handed it to me, and saluted.

I honestly didn't know what to do. But somehow, I felt as though I'd known him for years.

S.O.S.

There are no decent words to describe in detail the way this dish looks when made correctly, but it is, in fact, delicious. If you have the time, replace the dried beef with ground chuck and the toast with mashed potatoes. But then it wouldn't be S.O.S.

Would it.

Serves 4

1 4 ounce jar dried beef

1 tablespoon unsalted butter or margarine

1 tablespoon flour

1-1/2 cups milk, low-fat

4 slices toasted white bread (buttered, if you have a death wish)

1. Place the contents of the dried beef in a colander, and rinse well with cool water. Pat dry with paper towels, chop, and set aside.

2. In a medium-sized, stick-proof skillet, melt the butter or margarine, and add the beef to it. Saute until lightly brown. Sprinkle with the flour and stir well to combine.

3. Drizzle in the milk and whisk continuously until the sauce is smooth. Serve over toast.

Fraught Veganometry

We had a dinner party the other night. When I invited our friends over, they suggested that we go out instead.

"Why--"I asked. "I cook--"

"We're vegans," Monica said apologetically, almost quietly, like she was saying she was a hatchet murderer.

"It's totally fine," I said. "We love Indian food. So if that works for you, we'll see you at seven. No dairy. I promise." They loved Indian food, they said, so we were good to go.

I dug up Mark Bittman's tofu pudding recipe from a few months back, and watched the video. He said something about it being vegan, so off I went to the supermarket to buy silken tofu and chocolate. It was only after I came home with four bars of mostly decent quality Ghirardelli that I realized that milk fat in the ingredients list made the chocolate entirely not vegan. And it's true: not all chocolate is vegan--only the super fabulous high quality stuff, like the forgotten bar of Dagoba that had been sitting in the pantry for a few months, waiting for a time like this.

At four o'clock, Susan went to put something in the fridge and asked me if I'd turned it off by mistake.

"Why would I do that?" I asked.

"Maybe you just hit that little dial by accident, and turned it off."

"I did not," I said, opening the door to show her.

"DON'T open the door!" she shouted.

She never shouts.

The rest of the afternoon pretty much went downhill from there: Non-vegan chocolate for vegans. Mysteriously dead fridge. Lots of hysterical running up and down the basement stairs to the other fridge, while the one in the kitchen dripped and melted old fridge stuff all over the floor. And a last minute discovery that the stereo was making Emmylou Harris sound like Leonard Cohen crossed with Jerry Lewis.

All of this just three hours before our vegan guests arrived.

We were both seriously on edge, and I couldn't figure out why. We love to entertain. We love people. We love people who love animals, and who love food and wine, like these people.

So what was the problem? Was it the broken fridge? Or the chocolate? Or the stereo?

"What are you doing tonight honey? I'm going out--" my mother announced, calling in the middle of everything.

"We're having vegans for dinner," I responded, melting the chocolate.

"How do you make them?" she asked, chewing on something.

"They're people. Like vegetarians without the dairy," I said.

"Moonies?"

"For god's sake mom---"I answered, eyeing my new copy of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals on the sideboard.

"They must be Moonies," she said, sighing. "Oh well. It's your life."

And then she hung up.

In my home, cooking for people--any people--who have dietary restrictions of any kind is nothing new: my cousin Michelle is allergic to fish, beef, and a variety of other things. My cousin Zach is allergic to nuts. Zach's brother-in-law has celiac, so he can't have any gluten. One of my best friends can't eat eggs. Most of my family members don't eat pork but many will eat bacon and ham and the occasional cheeseburger. My mother claims to be allergic to wheat but thinks that Wonder Bread is the second coming. My grandparents were kosher but loved lobster, especially in Chinese food on Sunday afternoons. I could work around anything.

So there was no reason at all for me to be crazed at the prospect of vegans coming for dinner. Everything was planned: tofu would be used in the curry instead of shrimp. Coconut milk would go into the spiced peas instead of whole milk. There would be no ghee used anywhere, and no butter on the paratha. The chocolate pudding would be made with silken tofu, and the wedge of Maytag Blue that was sitting in the (now downstairs) fridge would remain there.

But the sound of my mother's voice hit the nail on the head for me. My mother hates vegetarians, even ones who eat that way for health reasons. And now that she knows that vegans aren't some sort of generic wheat thin, she hates them too. Why? My mother has spent most of her adult life traveling the employment continuum from cabaret singer and television performer to model. Fur model. So anything that might even remotely be aligned with animal rights she approaches with fists flying and claims of raging unAmericanism. She feels this way, even though she adores my dog and likes my cats and will lay down in the middle of the street to play with puppies while dressed in Armani.

Years ago, when I was at college in Boston, I came to the realization that it was probably safer to eat in a smaller cafeteria than a larger one, so I transferred my dining hall rights to the Vegetarian Eating Plan, where we ate things like East West Lasagna, and "Chicken" McTofu, and Bean Bonanza. When she found this out, my mother called my father and asked if he knew that his daughter had become a communist. Later that year, when I came home from school and bought a box of herbal tea to keep in my mother's cupboard while I was staying with her for the summer, she secretly called him again and asked if he knew that his daughter had become a member of the Celestial Seasonings Cult because there were tea boxes in the kitchen that had philosophical sayings written all over them. For years, I wanted to transfer to school in Boulder, where the tea manufacturer happened to be located. She put two and two together:

Celestial Seasonings + Vegetarian = Moonies

No wonder I was on edge. I was having a flashback.

The dinner went as planned. The curry was delicious, the peas were succulent and tender; no one missed the milk, or the cheese, or the butter. There was great wine: our friends brought a remarkable 2008 Seghesio Zin, and we opened a 2008 Navarro Pinot Noir. The tofu chocolate pudding disappeared. Success.

When my mother called to check in the next day, she asked how dinner went, and I told her.

"What kind of tea did you serve?"

Goan Tofu Curry

This recipe, which is an adaptation of Suvir Saran's remarkable Goan Shrimp Curry found in American Masala, is infinitely flexible; add another red chile to make it hotter, or cut way back on the heat. Bake the tofu ahead of time and cube it, or just add it in uncooked. A lovely dish.

Serves 8

¼ cup vegetable or canola oil
12 fresh curry leaves, torn into small pieces
4 dried red chiles
2 tablespoons fresh, minced ginger
1 medium red onion, peeled and minced
3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons ground coriander
½ teaspoon turmeric
1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes
1 teaspoon prepared curry powder
1 15-ounce can coconut milk
¼ cup water

1 pound tofu, cubed

chopped fresh cilantro, to taste

1. In a straight-sided, large skillet, heat the oil over a medium high flame until it begins to shimmer. Add the curry leaves (carefully; they will pop and crackle) and the chiles. Stir well.

2. Lower the flame to medium, add the ginger, onions, and garlic, and cook until soft, about 8 minutes. Add the coriander and turmeric, and stir to combine well. Add the tomatoes, currypowder, coconut milk, and water, and bring back up to a burbling simmer. Stir well, lower the heat, and cover for 8-10 minutes until the flavors begin to meld.

3. Add the tofu and the accumulated juices from the marinade, stirring well, for another 5 minutes.Stir in the cilantro.

Serve over rice or quinoa.

Brain Food: The Culinary Trials of Childhood

A lot of my friends, neighbors, and younger family members are currently in the process of raising their children, a job that can be culinarily fraught, at best. One of my friends has two sons--one thirteen, one eight; the thirteen year old has declared himself a strict vegetarian and wears nothing but canvas shoes, and the eleven year old refuses to eat anything but noodles and toast. Someone else I know is raising her not-yet-two-year-old little girl to eat parmigiana reggiano, gorditas, tofu, smoked mozzarella, and manteche from Alleva in New York City. I think this is wonderfully admirable and all; it reminds me of that line in Home Cooking, when Laurie Colwin's daughter, Rosa, announces from her pram that she would like some Coach Farm's goat cheese. (I may be mangling the quote, but you get the idea.) The flipside? Dexter. I have nothing but the deepest respect for Pete Wells, but I'm growing a bit tired of Dexter, cute little guy that I'm certain he is.

Anyway, I always find myself getting annoyed at parents who throw up their hands and say "Fenster just won't eat anything but mashed potatoes and cheerios" or "I have to cook three different meals three times a day--one for me and my husband, one for my daughter, and one for my son." Please. Allergies and intolerances notwithstanding, what ever happened to mom or grandmom plunking down dinner in front of junior, and junior either eating it, or not? Sure, I know what you're going to say: Elissa, you don't have kids. You have cats. So please. Stop talking about what you haven't experienced. Fair enough.

But the fact is, I was once a child. My mother hated to cook and I pretty much wasn't crazy about anything she fed me, because that hatred was infused, viscerally, into the food she served. It's a little understood fact, but if someone really loathes making beef stew, you're going to taste that disgust right there in the bowl. And I did. Things got marginally better when she discovered Swanson's frozen dinners; I loved fried chicken and she could give it to me every night--plus a warm apple thing (it wasn't a pie, a tart, a crumble, or a muffin. What was it?), mashed potatoes with a swirl of previously frozen butter, and industrially perfect peas and carrots. Better yet? It all tasted the same. Absolutely every single time she fed it to me. Is this a good thing? I'm not sure.

I was lucky, though; my Grandma Clara--my mother's mother--was a great cook, and made insanely delicious Hungarian goulash with spaetzle (her parents came from Budapest), and Friday night roast chicken. Her brisket was spectacular, and she could actually make stuffed breast of veal palatable. Likewise, my father figured out pretty quickly that our tastes were similar and that he could take advantage of that fact on days when he and I would be left to our devices while my mother was having her hair done: he liked pastrami, I liked pastrami. He liked Holsteiner schnitzel, I liked Holsteiner schnitzel. He liked apple strudel from Mrs. Herbst; I liked apple strudel from Mrs. Herbst. He liked Spam; I liked Spam. He wound up having high blood pressure and high cholesterol; I wound up having high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

There were only three occasions that I remember where I sat at the table, stared at my food, and refused to eat: Once, when Grandma Clara unaccountably plunked down a previously-frozen filet of sole wrapped around a mound of previously-frozen spinach. It was white and green and cold in spots and warm in others. I just sat there.

"Whatssa matter with you?" she said.

"I don't like this," I responded, staring at the plate.

"It's brain food. You'll eat it," she answered, and ultimately, I did. In bites that were small enough to feed to an amoeba.

This may be why I still don't like sole, unless it's doing the backstroke in brown butter. Grandma never fed it to me again.

A few weeks later, shortly after seeing Young Frankenstein at the Ziegfield, I was hauled off to visit my father's parents in Brooklyn. I was ushered in to the eat-in kitchen. My father's mother, whose food I rarely ate, placed a lovely little flowered luncheon plate right down in front of me. Sitting on it, without benefit of accoutrement, was a small, grayish, fist-sized brain.

I stared at it for what seemed like hours.

It sat there, like a brain on a plate.

My mind skittered back to the stuffed sole, and Abby Normal.

After several long child-minutes--when 60 seconds feels like 3 hours--my father came in and rescued me.

"Ma, she doesn't eat brain yet."

Yet? So this was the culinary goodness I had to look forward to once my palate went on its little jaunt through puberty? How nice for me, I thought.

Two weeks later, in the same kitchen, my great aunt from Russia served me a bowl of cold, creamy borscht with a peeled potato floating in it.

I stared at it. I was convinced that it was a conspiracy.

This great aunt, who was, at best, imposing, looked at my father.

"She doesn't eat borscht?"

"I don't eat pink food," I said.

And that was that.

Thirty-five years later, and I still don't eat borscht. Or brains. Or frozen sole wrapped around anything else that's been frozen. But I am abundantly grateful that I was raised largely by people who believed that when the family sat down to a meal, they sat down to a meal. Because the home kitchen is not a restaurant, and mom isn't in the back preparing several different menu selections for one's choosing. That isn't the way it's supposed to work at home.

I know, I know. I haven't experienced raising a child who is finicky at the table. Maybe this is where the brain comes in: the next time the kid complains that he won't eat this or that, plunk some gray matter down on a plate, give him a knife and fork, and watch what happens.

Unless you're Fergus Henderson, he'll want what you're having, peas and all.

Crossing the Bridge: A Day in Brooklyn

I suppose I'm biased: my people are from Brooklyn. In the early 1900s, my maternal great-grandmother owned a boarding house in Williamsburg, where Caruso stayed one night while passing through town. His manager, Gatti Casazza, invited her into her own parlor where a small concert had been organized without her knowledge. She listened, and then she went back to work.

Her in-law, my grandfather's mother, owned several buildings in Williamsburg from the late 1800s until her death, and passed them on to my grandfather and his brother, and their wives. When my grandfather died in 1967, my mother and grandmother--rather than risk the regular visitations that ownership of increasingly decrepit real estate necessitated--sold them. Five of them. For less than the price of a tiny studio apartment in a rotten part of the Upper East Side. Today in Williamsburg, the price of a decent loft is now double that of a five bedroom colonial in the Fairfield County town that I live in. Feh.

I did live in Brooklyn once, though. In the early 1990s, after going through a miserable breakup, I lived for eighteen months in my paternal grandparents' more-or-less empty apartment, on Ocean Parkway and Avenue T. The smell of chicken fat wafted through the rooms and down the halls and hung like ghostly apparitions in every corner. The day that I moved in--two full years after my grandmother had died at 93--an unopened jar of her gefilte fish still sat in the refrigerator. Her clothes, from Klein's of 14th Street, were still in the closet. A few nights later, when I ordered in a pizza, the next door neighbor opened her door just a crack--enough to see the word "sausage" written on the side of the box as it was being delivered. It was shabbes.

"I hear you're Henry Altman's granddaughter?" she asked, through the chain.

"I am," I said.

She mumbled and slammed the door while I paid for my dinner.

I couldn't wait to leave.

But a few years ago, the undeniable fact of Brooklyn as New York's culinary hub started bubbling to the surface, and it gnawed at me a little bit.

"It's just like Oltrarno," I told Susan, trying to convince her that we should spend some time there.

"The last time I lived in Brooklyn," she responded, "someone broke into my car and stole my pillow."

"Why were you carrying a pillow in your car?" I asked.

"You're missing the point," she said.

And she was right. She was intimating that even where she lived in Brooklyn, in Park Slope, on a gorgeous tree-lined street in a gorgeous brownstone, things still weren't safe.

Fast forward twenty-five years; Brooklyn is now an acknowledged culinary destination. For the first time in years, I wanted to go back and that's exactly what we did, last weekend. We had two destinations: DUMBO (Down Underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), which used to be an unwalkable, uninhabitable morass of burnt out building shells connected by dangerous streets overlooking various ideal locations for dumping Jimmy Hoffa. And we wanted to go back to Williamsburg, where my family came from.

The day was gorgeous, and our trip in took little more than an hour; Helga, our Scandinavian-but-British-educated GPS took us directly to the Sunday DUMBO location of the Brooklyn Flea, an outdoor flea/vintage market where you can find virtually everything from Eames-era lounge chairs that will set you back a mortgage payment, to the glorious pieces created by Brooklyn ceramicist Alyssa Ettinger, to vintage $45 Tony Lama boots that could make even you feel hip, assuming you are tall, which I am not and never will be. The rumors of Martha sightings abounded, and when she finally did show up with her camera crew, producer, and French bulldog, barely anyone looked up. It's Brooklyn, and the stand-keepers--including a young woman who was slicing fresh proscuitto and layering it gingerly onto pieces of warm bread that had been dolloped with local, creamy Salvatore ricotta (a great, elemental snack for $3)--were busy. Hipness has nothing to do with it; these people--all of them young and most of them stunning--were working. And when you're working, time is money.

Alyssa Ettinger's gorgeous ceramics, at Brooklyn Flea.

Slicing proscuitto, at the Salvatore Ricotta stand.

The last time I had been to 312 Grand Street, where my grandfather owned a furniture store, it was 1967 and I was four years old; my father carried me for fear that I'd slip through the store's broken floorboards and into the black, Hieronymus Bosch-like Brooklyn abyss of centuries-old Gowanus slime. But I remember well the red-painted doorway, the long, narrow store warmed by a pot bellied stove, and my grandfather lounging on a kilim-covered chaise tucked behind a partition. He came home to Forest Hills only on Friday nights, and the rest of his days and evenings were spent here, at the current site of a bar packed with soused football fans. We parked across the street and walked into Mulholland's, where dozens of young, testosterone-gushing men were screaming at flat screen televisions while drinking beer. I walked into the back of the bar where the partition had been, and where my grandfather spent his days. The pot-bellied stove was gone, but the tin ceiling was still there, and I closed my eyes and remembered him and the homing pigeons who lived in coops on the roof, and who thought he was their mother.

My grandfather's store, now a sport's bar.

There's a lot to be said about a community that was so gravely down on its heels for so many years--you couldn't walk the streets in Williamsburg in the 1970s and most of the 80s--and that's come back, while managing to retain some level of its former grittiness. The area has certainly has been the butt of hipster jokes over the years, and it's true; there is virtually no one in the area under the age of 25. We had lunch at the Roebling Tea Room--a gigantic, baked apple pancake for Susan, and for me, a scoop of whitefish unaccountably sitting atop a white baguette--surrounded by lovely, young hipster people who take their food very, very seriously. There was not one cell phone ringing. Not an iPhone in sight. No one was talking into any electronic device of any kind or reading a Kindle. Everyone was concentrating on the food. And each other.

Before we left town, we drove over to Marlow & Sons, a small, much-heralded market specializing in responsibly-sourced, hand-cut meats, specialty packaged goods you'll never find anywhere else, local-ish cheeses, cured meats from La Quercia, and chickens with heads and feet. The head butcher came out, and when I told him what I wanted--one pound of the bright red pork shoulder that was sitting in the meat case--he didn't balk and tell me that a one pound chop would never be enough for two people; he took it out, sliced it lovingly for me, and then gave me the fat that he'd carved away from the meat so that I could make my own lard, should I be inclined to. It was a work of art: the pork was the color of a ruby, which is the color that pork always was until industrial pork farming squeezed the flavor out of it like toothpaste out of a tube and turned it into The Other White Meat. We bought a half pound of La Quercia Speck Americano and a chunk of Pecorino Toscano. And then we went home, back across the Kosciusko Bridge that, when I was a child, used to mean that I was on my way to visit my grandparents in an outer borough that felt stuck in another century and that made me feel just a little bit nervous.

In this Brooklyn, I don't feel nervous anymore.

Pork shoulder chop, from Marlow & Sons. Doesn't look like supermarket pork, does it?

Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper, and sear in a very lightly oiled cast iron pan while oven preheats to 325 degrees F.

Set pork down on sliced onions, and drizzle with half a cup of stock.

Cover, place in oven, and let braise for 35 minutes. This is the result.

Slice against the grain.

Top with onions, and serve with something green.

The Season's Must-Haves

So the other day was my mother's birthday; every year, I struggle with what to give her, because, since she doesn't cook, it can't be anything at all for her kitchen. And as a former model, she's completely in-the-know about What They're Wearing, and I don't want to mis-hit either style or size-wise. One year I gave her a jacket -- a cool, caramel brown safari jacket made out of butter-soft leather -- and it was a medium. It might as well have been a tent for the way it hung off her.

"You must think I'm really big," she said to me, although she did quietly confess to loving it. She returned it for an extra small, and on my birthday bought me a sweater that appeared to be cut for a Biafran six year old. "Hope it fits," she said. "And happy birthday."

More problematic is where to take her for dinner because, speaking generally, she doesn't much like food. She likes crowds--or at least the right crowd--and certainly being seen, but food? She'll push it around her plate like a maid rearranging dust. When I comment, she'll say, "Must I eat fast? I eat slowly. S-l-o-w-l-y. Like most people." And then they come to get her plate and it's still full and she just smiles and nods yes, I'm done. We could be at Le Cirque and she could be eating an entire boned quail stuffed to its eyeballs with a brain-sized white truffle from Alba. But when you're done, you're done. My mother is a tough sell when it comes to food. And gifts.

Things were a little simpler when I lived in Manhattan, where shopping for interesting and unique things in almost any category was easily accomplished and there were virtually no mall stores; now I live, at least for the moment, in suburbia, where the nearest shopping is the mall and the nearest restaurants sometimes all blend together in a big preservative-laden, acid-washed amalgam of homogeneity. You can go to a mall in any part of my state and if you walk into Williams-Sonoma or The Gap or Banana Republic or Pottery Barn, you'll be faced with not only the same items for sale; you'll be faced with the same displays, right down to the faux autumnal leaves. Likewise, go to a McDonald's in Dubuque or Denver, Dallas or Des Moines, and it all tastes exactly the same. It's meant to. And this is exactly the place where the fast food model has draped itself over general retail, from clothing to cookware.

What's left for the imagination? What ever happened to finding exactly the right gift for the right person, and that feeling of delirious excitement when you know that it's one-of-a-kind, and that you picked it--a 1938 child's cream pitcher from an England on the cusp of war -- specifically for them, and that they'll likely cherish it forever? What ever happened to the not-crazy-overpriced local restaurant that's in fact not owned by a gigantic conglomerate (and therefore a sort of furtive chain)--a place where you know the chef, and he knows that your son is allergic to peas and that your mother-in-law is a diabetic and yet he still manages somehow to make her favorite passion fruit macarons without sending her into a coma? Are those experiences gone forever from everyday life? Maybe it's just me, but it certainly feels that way.

And now, it's getting worse: we're heading into the Christmas shopping season, which means that when I come home every day, I have to use a crowbar to remove the vast amount of catalogs stuck in my mailbox, proclaiming "This season's must-haves! Give them the gifts they want!"

Who is they? Will they want the All Clad Ultimate Chicken Roaster which cantilevers the bird over the pan and looks like (with good aim) you could put it on the stove and catapult your roaster through the room, over the heads of your guests, and onto the platter waiting in the middle of your table? Will they want a must-have table-top tomato slicer? What ever happened to a knife? Or how about an electric vacuum marinator? Wouldn't a zip lock bag and time in the fridge work just as well? Or how about a Handpresso, which looks rather like an enlarging device for men, and for $99 will allow you to create creamy espresso whilst on the hiking trail? Merry Christmas! Where will these gifts wind up on January 21st? Either back in the box and being returned, or in the FOR TAG SALE bin you have set up in your garage for next spring.

Of course, there are big box companies out there who have managed to make the leap from pointless, single purpose items to one-of-a-kind collectibles meant for well-meaning shoppers who want to give incredibly unique gifts to the right people, but just don't really have the time, energy, or will power to get out there on foot and search for that perfect thing; if you're one of these people, you can buy a vintage Rajasthani butter churner from CB2, the hip and modern catalog arm of Crate & Barrel. But hurry...only 250 of them are available, and when they're gone, they're gone.

For some reason this year, I was feeling really peevish about my mother's birthday, about taking her to some uptown well-draped dive where the food is expensive, tall, and vile, and you get to trip over voluminous Goyard shopping totes carried by all of the cherry tomato-pushing patrons who, because they all see the same plastic surgeon, appear to be related. I just wasn't having it. I didn't even give her a choice. We went to Il Buco--loud, crazy, wild, and serving the best non-tall Umbrian food I've had this side of Perugia. We ate cauliflower and gorgonzola croquettes, polenta with butternut squash and sage, lasagnette, and ricotta dumplings. There was a great bottle of tannic Montefalco. By dinner's end, my mother had managed to inhale a cocktail table-sized veal Milanese, the greens that were sitting on it, and a slice of a dense, walnut chocolate torte stuck with a candle. "Per mamma," a black-clad waiter said, as he plunked it down in front of her.

She blushed and flirted.

"Much better than uptown," she admitted. She loved the short, black A-line wool gabardine jacket we bought her.

"Very Audrey Hepburn," she said. "Banana Republic says it's this season's must-have."

"Well mom," I said, "now you have it."

Polenta with Butternut Squash and Sage

Unfancy, cheap, and delicious, this is a great dish to serve as a side during Thanksgiving or Christmas. Better still, do what I'd do: dollop it into a bowl, light a fire, put up your feet, pour some wine, and eat.

Serves 6

1 3 pound butternut squash, halved, seeds removed

2 garlic cloves, halved

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

salt and black pepper, to taste

1 teaspoon fresh sage, minced

3 cups vegetable stock

2 cups water

1-1/2 cups polenta

1 cup freshly grated Parmigiana Reggiano

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Rub the squash halves with the garlic cloves, drizzle with the olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and the garlic clove halves, cover with foil, and roast until the squash is tender, about an hour. Remove, let cool, and scoop out the flesh. Puree in a food processor together with the sage and roasted garlic cloves, and set aside.

2. Combine the stock and water in a medium sauce pan, and bring to a boil over medium high heat. Slowly whisk in the polenta, stirring constantly. Reduce heat to medium low and continue to cook until the mixture is creamy, about 20 minutes; fold in the squash puree and the cheese. Season to taste, and serve immediately.

What We Bring to the Kitchen

It happens to all cooks when they merge two households: they wind up with doubles of everything. Two cheese graters. Two food processors. Two blenders. Two ten inch chef's knives. Two copies of The Joy of Cooking. Two of everything, unless you're my father and stepmother: when they merged their households, they wound up with twelve basket steamers--the totally annoying and mostly useless kind that fold closed and that are always breaking. How do I know they had twelve: when I helped them move, I counted them.

When I moved to Connecticut almost ten years ago, I was coming from a sizable studio apartment in Manhattan, where space was precious; I had one floor-to-ceiling bookcase housing my favorites of the sacred volumes that I'd managed to hoard in fifteen years as an editor. My more frequently-used cookbooks--Diana Kennedy's first book on Mexican cooking, the first Union Square Cafe cookbook, Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- sat on a small oak table in my 7 foot square kitchen, where I regularly cooked dinners on my 24 inch apartment stove. The Mauviel copper cookware that I'd collected while working at Dean & Deluca sat on top of the kitchen cabinets, unused for almost 9 years. My everyday cooking was done in one white 5 quart Le Creuset round pot (purchased with the sole intent of making Cassoulet) and two smallish cast iron pans. I had a small stick proof pan in which I reheated leftover pasta and Chinese food. I had the three required knives that my mother bought me when I went to cooking school. That was pretty much it.

So when I arrived at Susan's house in Harwinton, Connecticut, I was astonished at the mounds of cookware she'd managed to squeeze into her gigantic 12 foot square kitchen (it was a tiny house): still, the only place we really overlapped was in can openers, microwaves, food processors, and cast iron (mine immediately was banished to the basement, because hers were 1930s Griswolds in perfect condition). Most importantly, our book collection didn't overlap much; on a small shelf over the kitchen sink she had the peculiar combination of whimsy and function: Patio Daddy-o (a kitschily illustrated collection of spectacular 1960s American recipes), Maida Heatter's dessert book, Larousse Gastronomique (a very old copy), and one jacketless, unidentifiable volume that was cracked down the spine from overuse.

"If I had to have one cookbook--only one--this would be it," she said, taking it down gently to show me, proudly.

"You're treating it like The Gutenberg Bible, you know," I said, rolling my eyes.

It was The Doubleday Cookbook by Jean Anderson and Elaine Hanna--a splattered and stained edition from around 1975 that Susan had picked up at a used bookstore. Whenever Susan cooked anything--really, absolutely anything--it was this book that she turned to. Sure, she had The Joy of Cooking (so did I) and neither of us ever (ever) used it; we both had Mastering, but who can cook from that book so regularly (Julie Powell not withstanding)? But it was The Doubleday that was the cornerstone of her kitchen, and by extension, mine. I had never cooked from a book where literally every single recipe I made out of it came out so perfectly; I had never cooked from a book that offered cooking times with such frighteningly remarkable precision. Usually when I cooked at home for myself in my little apartment, I did so by feel and generally resisted any hard and fast instruction. But after a year of living and cooking in Susan's kitchen, if Jean Anderson was going to tell me to roast my five pound standing rump for exactly 23 minutes per pound for medium rare, by god, I was going to do it. There are few cookbooks that have that effect on me, but Jean Anderson's does.

Beyond that, if I have a hankering to cook Goose Braised with Onions, Hangtown Fry, Taramasalata, Guinea Fowl, Kedgeree, Roast Beef, or Spitzbuben out of a single book, this would be the one.

One chilly Fall day after we moved from Harwinton, Susan and I found ourselves sitting on our back deck perusing a stack of cookbooks. As always, her slightly decrepit copy of The Doubleday was there among the glitzier ones written by famous chefs with television shows. We were planning on making soup, so we were poking around for a great recipe that was also inexpensive, since we were both freelancing at the time.

"Pea soup," Susan said. "Jean's pea soup is the best I've ever made." Suddenly, my partner was on a first-name basis with the author.

She found it, scribbled down the ingredients, and off we went to the grocery store.

While we were out, it rained. Susan was just this side of hysterical. I started dinner while she took the book down to the basement to dry off. I think a blow dryer might have been involved. A week later, her beloved Jean Anderson was covered with mold.

"Good thing I bought another used copy, then, isn't it?" I asked, gloating, since I'd been admonished for buying a duplicate at a time when both space and money were at a premium.

"I want my copy," Susan said. "I know where everything is. I have little scribbles in it. It's just not the same." There were tears, if I remember correctly.

And you know what? Susan's right. It isn't the same. We now own both the duplicate older edition and The New Doubleday Cookbook, and while I cherish and cook from them frequently, they're not the actual book that rocked my world when we merged our kitchens. Where is that one?

Still sitting in the basement. Because no matter what we do, we can't part with it.

Golden Split Pea Soup with Ham

(from The New Doubleday Cookbook)

I've never been a big soup eater until I started to make this one on a regular basis; it's highly addictive, freezes beautifully, is ridiculously simple, and, if you use oil instead of butter or bacon fat and omit the ham, vegan. The fact that it's cheap as dirt doesn't hurt either.

8-10 servings

2 medium-size yellow onions, peeled and coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons bacon drippings, butter, or margarine (we use a combination of olive oil and butter, split 50/50)

2 cups diced, cooked ham

1 pound yellow split peas, washed and sorted

3 quarts water (or vegetable stock, or a combination of the two)

1/8 teaspoon rosemary

1 tablespoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

Stir-fry onions in drippings 5-8 minutes in a large saucepan over moderate heat until pale golden. Add ham and stir-fry 5 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, cover, and simmer 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Serve steaming hot with buttery chunks of garlic bread.

Dog Spelled Backwards

Addie's angel, Glenda

The other day, I was listening to a great Terry Gross interview with performer Rosanne Cash, whose remarkable new cd, The List, is just out. One of the things that Gross asked her was about religion; Cash had gone through a particularly challenging time recently, and the question was what sustained you? Her answer was so poignant that I had to pull over to the side of the road. She said "Well, I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children...."

And when I heard it, I thought "well, finally." Because the things that people say about this extraordinarily personal thing that makes many of us get up in the morning are sometimes so canned and trite that I often find myself feeling really peevish about it. It got me thinking, too, because I've had a lot of challenge in recent years, and I don't generally point my prayers northward either. Instead, my own personal aha moments come in gardens, in recognizing how stunning things like Japanese turnips can be when they're still small and sweet, in my baby cousin Malcolm's drooling grin, in the fact of Susan, and when I turn around in my kitchen to find that Addie is staring at me quietly, smiling, and wagging. For no apparent reason.

I was thinking a lot about this on Saturday, when Susan and I took Addie to the place where it all began for the three of us: a parking lot in Glastonbury, Connecticut, next to a Dunkin' Donuts. It was there that Addie's transport from Arkansas to Memphis and Memphis to our home began when we adopted her, sight unseen, from an organization called Labs 4 Rescue, which specializes in bringing needy dogs up north. Once the adoption or foster is agreed-upon, another remarkable organization, P.E.T.S -- Peterson Express Transport Service, run by Kyle and Pam Peterson of Cookeville, Tennessee -- drives the dogs up in a retro-fitted, climate controlled horse trailer on a trip that takes 3 days and makes stops from Pennsylvania all the way up to New Hampshire. On this trip, Glenda, the woman who first connected us to Addie, would be in attendance. Could she see Addie again? We jumped at the chance for a reunion, and for us to finally meet this incredible lady who has changed the lives of hundreds of dogs and their people. Like us.

The transport arrives.

Would Addie remember Glenda? Would the sight of the transport, packed with barking pups of all ages destined for new homes upset her? Honestly, we weren't sure. Sometimes you just don't know. But when she decided to take a quick nap on the pavement, we figured it out.

Exhausted from stress. She needs a fig leaf.

No one really knows for sure who finds religion in what, and really, no one can ever know; it's just very personal. For Rosanne Cash, it's music and art and children. For me, it's my family, and food, and feeding people, and the velvet brown eyes of a dog who is finally safe and happy.

And it's Glenda, Addie's angel.

Addie's Biscuits

When Addie first came to us in March, she actually didn't know what biscuits were. Needless to say, that's changed. But, it's not easy to find truly good biscuits that aren't either packed with a whole lot of dreck, or cost a mortgage payment for a box that's going to be gone in less than 8 seconds (not literally). If your dog eats biscuits the way Addie does, things can get expensive. What to do? Make your own. And if you run out of crackers at your next party, you're set. This recipe comes from a terrific site called The-Hunting-Dog.com

2 cups cornmeal

2 eggs

2 tablespoons molasses

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 cup chicken broth

1/2 cup powdered milk

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients, and blend until smooth.

2. Roll out the mixture 1/4" thick, and cut into shapes. Place 1 inch apart on a greased cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

3. Let cool. Store in an airtight container.

* Many thanks to all the people who supplied us with the terrific picture of Addie and Glenda.