Baked Whole-Wheat Penne & Roasted Eggplant

When I have plenty of eggplant on hand and a few hours before dinner, this is one of my favorite things to make. The original model for it comes from Nancy Harmon Jenkins's Flavors of Puglia, a wonderful cookbook that's apparently out of print. I've adapted her recipe to use whole wheat pasta, prepared sauce (hey, we're all human, right?), and much less oil. The dish is hearty, it's healthy, and because it's layered beautifully, it's almost elegant. Serve it with a simple tossed salad (here's where that Fig Balsamic I mentioned in an earlier post would come in handy).

Serves 8
(S and I usually get two, maybe three good meals out of it, so I guess we're a little piggy!)

2 lbs eggplant, sliced 1/4 inch thick
Olive oil cooking spray
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 lb whole wheat penne or other short, stubby pasta (I like De Cecco brand)
2 cups good quality jarred tomato sauce (Barilla is my brand--S is Italian-American, and until we found this one he refused to eat any but homemade)
4 or 5 ripe plum tomatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick
a healthy 1/2 cup of plain bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated parmigiano reggiano
4 or 5 coarsely chopped sprigs fresh basil (if you've got some it gives the dish a nice boost, but don't worry if you don't)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 450. Spray two foil-lined baking sheets with cooking spray, and divide eggplant slices in a single layer. Lightly spray the tops of the slices, and season with salt and pepper. Roast in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes, or until the slices are browned on both sides (they'll brown on both sides without turning).



Remove from the oven and set aside.

Reduce oven to 375.

Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a rolling boil, add the pasta, and cook until it is not quite done--about 9 minutes. Drain the pasta and immediately toss with about 1 1/2 cups of the sauce.

Generously spray the bottom and sides of a glass or ceramic oven dish (I use a 3-quart souffle dish) with cooking spray. Layer half the tomato slices over the bottom and sprinkle with half the bread crumbs, plus salt and pepper to taste. Spread half the sauced pasta on top, then half the eggplant slices. It may look like everything isn't going to fit--push down on the eggplant a little with a spatula or your clean bare hands. Drizzle about 1/4 cup of sauce over the eggplant and sprinkle with half the grated cheese and half the chopped basil (if using). Now add in layers the remaining pasta, the remaining eggplant, the remaining tomato sauce, the remaining cheese, and the remaining basil. Top with the remaining sliced tomatoes and push down again, then sprinkle on remaining bread crumbs.



Drizzle olive oil over the top and place the dish in the oven.

Bake for one hour. Remove from the oven and set aside to rest for at least 1/2 hour before serving.



Serve with extra sauce, if desired.

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Aww, Shucks...

It's sort of pathetic how obsessed I am already with this infant blog o'mine. Earlier today I was looking to see where my visitors were coming from and noticed a sudden flurry from Too Many Chefs, a smart, informative blog I've admired for some time (in fact, when I bought a mess of small potatoes yesterday at the Union Square Farmer's Market, I was thinking about their Roast Potatoes with Thyme, Sea Salt, and Lemon Juice). Curious, I clicked over there to see what was driving this mini-flood of traffic, and discovered this. Barrett has graciously named my post about NBC's depressing reality show "The Biggest Loser" one of his three Picks of the Week! He posted it yesterday, but I only discovered it today--Words to Eat By's one-week birthday. Talk about your super-fine birthday gifts...

I'm shocked. I'm honored. I'm thrilled. And most of all, I'm glad to know that somebody's reading. Thank you, Barrett!

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Some of My Favorite Ingredients

In no particular order, here's what I find myself using a lot lately:


Fig balsamic vinegar. Sometimes I'm tempted to eat this with a spoon. It's tart and sweet at the same time--really livens up a simple salad.

Dried cherries
Pecans
Nonstick cooking spray
Pine nuts


Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup--the one and only, what I grew up with. S puts it in his coffee, and I use it in a really dense and shockingly simple brownie recipe.

Fleur de sel
Lolla Rossa and Oak Leaf lettuces
Scharffen Berger 70% dark chocolate


Peperoncino piccante paste. I use this several times a week, to liven up soups & pastas & quick stir-fries. (Sorry, I couldn't find a link--don't know what I'm going to do when I run out!)

Parmigiano Reggiano
Extra virgin olive oil


Dark Chocolate Dreams peanut butter: on a piece of crusty fresh bread it's like an American Nutella, only with a texture that's somewhere between crunchy and creamy peanut butter.

Brussels sprouts
Jonagold and Mutsu apples
Pappadew peppers


Plugra butter
King Arthur unbleached flour

What are your current faves?

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A Most Exciting Development (Well, Two of Them, Actually)

I've been avidly reading about the various Is My Blog Burning events for some time now. The launch of Words to Eat By barely missed the last one (terrines) so I've been anxiously awaiting word of the next theme. Just yesterday, though, I discovered an event that speaks even more directly to my candy-coated heart: Sugar High Fridays. Run by the inimitable Domestic Goddess Jennifer, it seems to be pretty much the same idea as IMBB only entirely dedicated to all things sweet. The first one, dedicated to white chocolate, was held earlier this month. While I was disappointed not to be in on it from the beginning, I must admit that I was glad not to have to make something with WC--it's one of my Chocolate Snob pet peeves. It isn't chocolate, people! It's like eating a blob of congealed sugar butter. Reading the recap was great fun, though, and My Little Kitchen's Chocolate Bread Pudding with White Chocolate Sherbet sounded pretty damn good. I wondered how long I'd have to wait for the next SHF to be announced, and even posted a query to that effect. But today I noticed that--duh--DG had already written about the next theme, and somehow I'd missed it. Apples! This is truly exciting. I love apples--my mom makes a killer Apple Cake for Rosh Hashanah every year, and I've always been disappointed that I can't seem to get the knack of pie crust. But S doesn't care for cooked apples, so for most of the time we've been together my opportunities for experimentation have been slim (I'm not about to make a whole pie and eat it myself, intentionally...). At last, an excuse! We're going to a party tomorrow night and I think I may make some Apple Spice Cupcakes to bring along.

The other, even more thrilling news, also via Domestic Goddess: The next IMBB is all about cookies! (I'm not a big fan of exclamation points, really, but I'm having a hard time limiting myself to only putting one at the end of that sentence.) Cookies are my all-time, absolute favorite thing to bake. It's another opportunity to revisit childhood, I guess, when tearing open a taxi-yellow bag of Nestle chocolate morsels meant not only hours of fun baking, but also several days of chewy, chocolatey treats. I have a huge binder filled with cookie recipes I've cut out over the years, most of which I've never even tried. Choosing which one to bake will be a challenge, indeed. But a fun one! Thank you, Jennifer, for this wonderful early holiday gift.

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The Biggest Loser

When I first heard that NBC had created a reality show about weight loss I cringed, and something tells me I wasn’t the only one. Reality shows (the ones on network TV, that is) strike me as being inherently degrading to begin with. But inviting America to watch (and snigger at) a group of obese people compete over a profoundly difficult, highly personal issue is far more disturbing to me than gathering a bunch of gold-diggers and dangling a pretty “millionaire” in front of them. I had the same initial response to “The Swan,” and managed to steer clear of that one completely. From the looks of the terrifying Stepford-drones in People magazine, I’m glad I did—I would’ve had a hard time not putting my foot through the television.

"The Biggest Loser," though, resonated a little too closely for me. Losing 100 pounds was the hardest thing I ever did, and keeping most of it off for the last six (or is it seven?) years has been a never-ending challenge. I think about it every day: what I’m eating, what I want to eat but won’t, what I did eat and wish I hadn’t, how much exercise I did (or didn’t do) today. When they tell you at Weight Watchers that it’s not a diet, it’s a way of life, they really mean it—without that kind of vigilance I am absolutely certain I would’ve gained back every ounce and then some within the first year. But the thing is, it’s worth it to live like this. I’m healthy, I’m happy, and I like who I am. For many, many years, none of those things were true. But I digress…

I did stay away from “TBL” the first week, but this past Tuesday S was out of town and I was in front of the TV at the right time and, well, I succumbed. It was worse than I could’ve imagined: cruel, misleading, and downright scary. In case you missed it—it’s a freakin’ elimination show! This isn’t about helping desperate people to regain some control over their bodies. It’s about strategy and who can lose the most weight the fastest so they won’t be sent home.

Every week we watch two teams of fatties exercise—hard—for what looks like hours each day, which in itself can’t be healthy. I mean, how can a 300-pound person go from a sedentary existence to working out six hours a day, every day without risking cardiac arrest (or at the very least a blown knee)? Each team has its own extremely fit trainer, who is also in charge of their diet plans. In the interest of educating the masses through contrast, no doubt, the producers selected a bitch-on-wheels drill sergeant of a woman trainer for the Red team, and a touchy-feely nice guy trainer for the Blue. She feeds her team as little as possible and works them until they drop. He gives his group six small meals a day and talks a lot about not wanting to push them past their limits, which sounds nice—but it still looks like they’re in the gym several hours a day, every day. We never see them actually teaching their teams anything about metabolism or how to make the right food choices. We never hear them offering encouragement beyond “give me another five!” And after the excruciating weigh-in (more on that below), we never hear them offering a viable explanation as to why these poor suckers got the results they did.

One of the crueler aspects of the show, and there are many, is the taunting. No, they’re not calling them “tub-o-lard” or anything—they’re forcing the contestants to work with and live with all the comfort foods they’ve been told to resist. For lunch one day the producers threw the famished contestants in front of a lavish BBQ spread. There were salads and chicken, yes, but there were also mashed potatoes and brisket. Their point was that this is the real world and you have to learn to make choices, but in MY real world I never went near any of that stuff while I was losing weight. You don’t have to sit at a table overflowing with it if you don’t want to, in the real world. Hearing one woman’s pathetic, wobbly swoon over those mashed potatoes made my heart ache. Oh, and the weekly competition, which gives the winning team an advantage in the weigh-in? A bake sale. Eleven people, all of whom would probably kill for a single cookie, had to bake as many goodies as they could and then hawk them at Universal Studios. I cannot imagine how degrading that must’ve been for them. It’s bad enough being a lone fat person in this world—not fitting into subway seats, getting worried looks on elevators—but being one of a group of fatties in matching t-shirts, shouting at passersby to come buy your brownies? I shudder just thinking about it.

By far the most damaging element of the show, though, is the weigh-in. About halfway through the episode, both teams assembled to be weighed on national television. The team who lost the least total pounds had to send one contestant home. We’re talking straight pounds here, not percentage of body fat lost, not BMI, just pounds—which anyone who’s ever lost a serious amount of weight can tell you is the most meaningless measure there is. One at a time they climbed onto a huge platform scale. A giant LED display clicked through assorted weights like a computerized roulette wheel, some above that person’s previous weight, some below. Breaths were held until the number finally settled, with lots of fast edits to amp the tension. Apparently the week before they’d lost something approaching 150 pounds all together, with some of the men losing more than 20 pounds in just one week (itself a scary and unhealthy fact, which went unacknowledged—everyone seemed to be expecting to replicate that loss). This week: a total loss of 16 pounds. One guy gained three pounds and dissolved into tears while still on the scale. By then I was so frustrated at the whole proceeding I was shouting at the television. OF COURSE they lost almost nothing! This whole plan is absurd! They’re not being taught to live well or wisely; they’re being manipulated in front of millions.

I don’t even want to get started on the inescapable gender issues raised by the whole thing: it’s virtually impossible for a woman to win the competition, simply because a) women lose weight slower then men, which means that both weeks so far the slimmest women have been expelled; and b) the producers managed to snare some truly behemoth-sized men, while the largest woman weighs less than I used to. When you’re playing a numbers game like this, the results are practically predetermined. A guy will win. It’s only a question of which guy.

Gosh, I’m glad I got that off my chest. And for all my grandstanding, I have a confession to make: I’ve already got my Tivo set up to record the whole series.

For more thoughts on "The Biggest Loser," click here and here.

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Mmm, Popovers

S and I got married in May. We figured we'd take a nice long honeymoon in the fall, after we'd had a chance to recover from all the wedding frenzy and settle in a bit. Not to mention that we couldn't afford much more than a weekend on the Jersey shore... But then I got called for a gig from August through late October, and who knew what project S would be on after that, so in July we decided to just rent a car and point it somewhere.

We're Roadfood people--last summer we drove from NYC to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and then back north along the Blue River Parkway, using the book to plot our stops, staying in motels wherever looked promising. I'll dig up some of my notes from that trip and post them another time, but let me just say this: Barbecued. Fried. Chicken. For this trip we did even less planning--we must've hit the road less than a week after deciding to go. Not like most people's honeymoons, I suppose, but it was exactly right for us.

Our idea was to head north, into New England and maybe as far as Nova Scotia. My mom is from outside Boston originally so I spent a good deal of time in that area growing up, but since my grandparents died in 1987 I'd only been a handful of times. S hadn't really been up north at all. In the end we spent three weeks driving around Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont--hey, another idea for a post--but on our first day we stopped for a late lunch at a place I remembered from my childhood, the Yankee Silversmith Inn in Wallingford, Connecticut. On car trips up to visit my grandparents, we'd often pit stop there. I don't think we ever actually had a full meal, though--with my three brothers and me we were a large family, and money was always tight. As I recall, we mostly used the restrooms and got popovers to go. My wealthy grandparents, however, would stop there for a leisurely lunch every time it was their turn to make the journey. Some of my favorite pictures of them were taken in front of the main entrance over the years--sort of funny, now that I think of it, that they'd take souvenir pictures for us of a place where we couldn't afford to eat.

The Silversmith is in a rambling landmark building with an antique train's parlor car attached to it. The idea of eating in a train car that wasn't actually part of a train used to fascinate my brothers and me, and that's where S and I were seated. The whole thing was much kitschier Olde New England than I remembered (hey, forgive a kid for not noticing!), and the other patrons had mostly blue hair, but one thing brought me right back: the popovers. They were huge, and warm, and served with honey butter. My mom used to bake them for us kids, and I loved watching her pluck them out of the oven one by one, each towering impossibly high over its own custard cup, and then seeing the steam stream out as she poked small holes in the tops to keep them from going soggy. There was a cartoon we watched growing up, maybe a Looney Toons, where one of the characters swooned at the thought of the puffy treats: "Mmm, popovers." We'd laugh and say that as we tore into them, loading butter in quickly so it would melt into puddles in the center.

If I could, I think I'd eat popovers every day--there's something about that eggy, custardy inside and the toothy, almost brittle outside that comforts me in a way very little else does. S had never tasted one before he met me, but he's as devoted as I am now. Here's the recipe I've been using lately, courtesy of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (yes, Ina Garten again--I promise I'll lay off for a while after this!). One of these days I'll get my mom's recipe and compare.

Ina says it best so I won't even try to embellish/rewrite:

Popovers
Makes 12
"There are three secrets to great popovers: Make sure the pan is hot before you pour in the batter, fill each section not more than half full, and no peeking while they're in the oven. They're much easier than you expect, and they make any meal feel festive."

1 1/2 T. unsalted butter, melted, plus softened butter for greasing pans
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
3/4 t. kosher salt
3 extra-large eggs at room temperature [I'll often use 2 whole eggs and 2 egg whites]
1 1/2 cups whole milk at room temperature [I use 1%]


Right before they go into the oven. The brown part is Pam that's pre-heated with the pan.

Preheat the oven to 425.

Generously grease aluminum popover pans or custard cups [I use muffin tins--I don't have room for 12 custard cups!] with softened butter. You'll need enough pans to make 12 popovers. Place the pans in the oven for 2 minutes to preheat. Meanwhile, whisk together the flour, salt, eggs, milk, and melted butter until smooth. The batter will be thin. Fill the popover pans less than half full and bake for exactly 30 minutes [in my old oven it was 28 minutes, so your mileage may vary]. Do not peek.

Serve hot.


Fresh from the oven

S and I eat them with gobs of butter and an assortment of jams: strawberry, cherry, and Maine wild blueberry. They're the perfect thing on a Sunday morning, and they were a memorable first meal for our honeymoon.

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Hey, if it's good enough for Francois Payard...

Just stumbled across this in the new New York Magazine: The Candy Bar Taste Test. They blindfolded pastry god Payard and fed him exactly the kinds of candy I've been so tempted by lately. Results are, predictably, mixed, but I'm surprised at how much good he had to say. His winners: Dove Milk Chocolate (though I suspect there's a typo in his assessment--he says it's clearly dark chocolate, and this strikes me as a near-impossible mistake for him to make), Caramello (my brother A's all-time favorite), Nestle Crunch, and Baci. Sadly, he didn't get to savor the magical treat known as Twix.

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The Threat Down the Hall

This week I'm wrapping up a 3-month freelance gig, filling in while someone's on maternity leave. While I can't say I love working 9-5 (the shlep on the subway, the work-appropriate clothing, the alarm clock, the rules that govern pretty much everything in corporate life whether we realize it or not...) the money's been nice and the people are pleasant. One little perk, and lately I'm finding it more of a hazard than a perk, is the woman down the hall. Or more precisely, the small bowl of candy she keeps on her desk. In August and September, it really was a small ceramic bowl, usually filled with Hershey's kisses of one variety or another (ahh, brand extension--so many kisses to choose from these days). I had no trouble walking past a dozen times a day without reaching for one. But in mid-October that small bowl morphed into a large plastic Jack-o-lantern, brimming over with all kinds of snack-sized treats.

Most of the time I'm something of a chocolate snob--I used to keep a 7 oz bar of Scharffen-Berger 70% dark in my kitchen, shaving off just enough of the rich, smoky stuff to satisfy a craving. It melted so slowly on my tongue, I never seemed to need more than a taste. And don't get me started on Fran's Dark Gray Salt Caramels...Milk chocolate is for wusses, in my book. But this damned orange beacon three doors down the hall has become something of a problem for me. In recent days, the selection has included bite-sized Three Musketeers and Milky Ways, single fingers of milk and dark chocolate Kit Kats, mini-Twixes, chunky little Double Chocolate Nestle Crunch (whatever those are--something about the plain colored foil wrapper failed to pique my interest), mini-York Peppermint Patties, and the aforementioned kisses. None of these are treats that trouble me in real life. I can walk into any convenience store in the nation and emerge without succumbing--a quick check of the nutrition facts statement is usually enough to make me realize it's not worth it. But something about the jumbled assortment of flavors, the sheer abundance of the bowl, and the fact that it's five steps away from me at all times has pushed me over the edge. I have become an instant addict.

For three days I held out, resolutely refusing to go anywhere near the office in question when its occupant wasn't there (I'm somehow too ashamed of my chocolate fixation to take any while she's watching). I averted my eyes if I had to walk past--I just didn't want to know. But after lunch one day, when nobody else was around, I found myself jonesing for a little piece of sweet. I could've gone to the cafeteria and bought a cookie, but that seemed like more than I needed. Just a taste, a hit of chocolatey goodness was all it would take. I decided to make a mocha at the Flavia coffee machine in the kitchen. Off I went, down the hall... It couldn't have taken more than three or four seconds for my mind to process the fact that there was a GIANT ASSORTMENT of free chocolate goodies between me and the Flavia machine, debate the merits of starting down that path, and decide to forge ahead with a mini-Twix--it only takes that long to walk from my office to hers.

Twix had been my candy bar of choice years ago, before I lost all the weight, when KFC was dinner twice a week and I actually kept multiple candy bars in a drawer Just in Case. But before last week I hadn't had one in years. When I bit into it, that morsel of crisp cookie and caramel enrobed in milk chocolate was quite a shock. It was so much sweeter than I remembered, and yet exactly the same. It was good. While I was still swallowing, I went back and got another one, plus a mini-Musketeers. Then back for a mini-Milky Way Midnight and a dark chocolate Kit Kat (as if opting for the dark was somehow more virtuous).

Now I find myself looking forward to the later edge of the lunch hour each day, when most of the people on my end of the floor are either elsewhere or behind closed doors. It makes my multiple trips to the Jack-o-lantern of good/badness so much easier. Sometimes, if I see the owner of the bowl walk away, I'll leave my desk in the middle of whatever I'm doing just to grab a piece or two. Or three, and then I'll stash the "spare" in a drawer until I need it. So far I've managed to hold out until lunchtime, but honestly I'm a little afraid of tomorrow morning--apparently most people will be in some kind of meeting, and that big, inviting plastic pumpkin will be sitting there unguarded...

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Roasted Vegetable Barley Soup

There's a small, but pretty good, farmer's market on Saturdays in a scruffy park near my apartment, and now that the weather's turned so has the produce. Last weekend I made the mistake of buying some tomatoes, thinking if they were fresh from the farm they might still be pretty good. No. Tart and mealy, they were. This weekend I didn't fall for the tomatoes' tease. The early fall vegetables were in, in abundance. There were parsnips and white turnips and shallots and brussels sprouts and eggplant and some still-small zucchini. As I wandered around the market, pulling my jacket tighter against the chill in the air, I found myself dreaming of soup. Warm, filling, healthy soup.

When I got my goodies home I realized I wouldn't have time to make the soup that day, so instead I roasted the brussels sprouts and had a huge bowl of em for dinner (my absolute favorite way to do it, courtesy of my idol Ina Garten: trim the sprouts [cut in half if they're big], toss with olive oil & plenty of kosher salt, and spread on a cookie sheet in a single layer. Roast at 425 for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes, until they get all brown and caramelized, and the outer leaves start to crisp up). Then yesterday I had more time than I needed to just whip up some soup, so I decided to boost the flavor by roasting most of the vegetables first. It turned out great, exactly the kind of meal-in-a-bowl I was dreaming of. This recipe will work with virtually any mix of vegetables, but I think using root vegetables adds a nice level of sweetness to everything.

Roasted Vegetable Barley Soup

2 carrots, peeled & cut into 1/2-inch dice
2 stalks celery, diced
1 small white turnip, peeled & diced
1 medium parsnip, peeled & diced
1 small eggplant, skin left on, diced
1 small zucchini, diced
6 or 8 brussels sprouts, halved lenthwise then roughly sliced (I used leftovers, threw em in at the end)
4 cloves garlic, peeled & smashed
4 sprigs fresh thyme
a few glugs olive oil
sea salt or kosher salt, to taste
freshly ground black pepper
another glug or two of olive oil
5 shallots, roughly chopped
1 small red pepper, diced
2 more cloves garlic, minced
1 t. dried thyme
2 bay leaves
pinch cumin
1/2 cup barley
10 cups liquid (I used mostly canned chicken broth & some water, but this would work with vegetable broth too)
3-inch piece parmesan rind
5 sun-dried tomatoes, sliced & reconsitituted in 1/2 cup boiling water (you could also use dried mushrooms this way, just be careful not to let any of the sediment fall into your pot)
1 T. pesto (I used homemade from my freezer, but I'm sure packaged would work equally well)
Salt & pepper to taste
toasted pine nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 425. Prepare two baking sheets with foil and non-stick spray. Put the first nine ingredients (carrots through fresh thyme) in a large bowl and toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Divide mixture between the two cookie sheets, spreading in a single layer. Roast for 35-40 minutes, taking out the trays halfway through to toss everything and rotate tray placement.

After turning the trays, heat some olive oil in a large stockpot. Add chopped shallots and diced red pepper, and let them sweat for 2-3 minutes. Add the minced garlic, dried thyme, bay leaves, and cumin, and when the kitchen begins to smell wonderfully garlicky, add the barley. By now the vegetables should be nicely browned--remove from the oven and toss the thyme stems. Stir the pot for another minute or two, then add the roasted vegetables, broth/water, parmesan rind, and sun-dried tomatoes with soaking liquid. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer 35-40 minutes, or until barley is al dente. Add pesto, and stir until it's blended in. Remove from heat and add salt & pepper to taste. Before serving, fish out and toss bay leaves and parmesan rind. Top each bowl with toasted pine nuts, if you like.

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Why read me?

Does the world really need another blog? And one about food (among other things)? Maybe not, but here's a list of reasons why I've created Words to Eat By:

• The urge to write, and cook, is not new to me—I've been writing fiction since high school, where I was an earnest, quiet, fat kid, baking cookies for my girl-crush: the English teacher who encouraged me to write it all down.
• In college, still fat, I majored in creative writing, won the fiction prize at graduation, and expected to be published in The New Yorker within a few months. (This was the era of Bret Easton Ellis, when it seemed like all the hot new writers were under 25.) You can guess how that turned out.
• Fast forward twelve years, and I’m a VP at one of the many divisions of Random House. Haven't written a word in a decade that's not related to someone else's book, and, truth be told, not even thinking about it all that much. All I can think about is how miserable I am. Throwing dinner parties and baking cookies for my department (eating most of them myself) is not cutting it.
• I’ve gained enough weight that when I finally decide to do something about it, I have 100 pounds to lose. It takes three years on Weight Watchers and some of the hardest work of my life, but I do lose it. Throughout that time, and even now, food is both a challenge and a pleasure.
• When Ina Garten (aka "The Barefoot Contessa" comes in to discuss her upcoming cookbook, she tells her story: She was working in the Nixon White House, of all things, and saw a classified ad for a gourmet shop in East Hampton, NY. She checked it out and, pretty much on a whim, bought it. As I listen to her talk about the ups and downs of her life since then, I find myself thinking: I WANT THAT. I want to make people feel good by feeding them. I want to make other people’s lives easier and fuller at the same time. I want to see the results of my effort firsthand. Most of all, I want the enterprise to be mine, not some giant German media conglomerate’s.
• Time passes, and while I’m still fiddling around with a business plan, I’m told that I have to reduce my department’s overhead by 10%. This means laying people off. It’s a gift from above, I decide; I lay myself off. I get severance, I get to leave a job that’s making me miserable, and I get to save the jobs of three other people who want/need to be there. Two weeks later, I start to write fiction again. It feels good. Really good.
• I take a job with a woman who owns a restaurant and takeout shop. I’m to be her Director of Sales and Marketing. It sounds like a lofty title for such an operation, and indeed it turns out to be too lofty for her cash flow. Six months later I’m laid off, having learned a ton about the food business and very grateful for the experience. I do not want this to be my life, after all. I want to write.
• Freelance copywriting jobs come my way from my former colleagues. Between that and my savings, I decide I can give myself a year to write a novel.
• 150 pages into that novel, I join a workshop. It’s helpful and motivational, and I feel my work getting better even as I’m writing it. I also realize that my 150 pages are crap. I can do better.
• In the time it’s taken me to get to this point, I’m pretty sure my entire being has changed. I’m looser, I’m certainly calmer, and I do a lot more baking. Now when I bake, I eat the batch of cookies slowly, over days instead of hours. When I meet S, the man who will become my husband, things seem to fall into place. There is no angst. I am happy. I cook for him, soups and roast chicken and American Chop Suey and pasta primavera and he eats it all and has seconds. Brownies, many variations on chocolate chip cookies, breads, blueberry crisp, popovers…I am a baker. I don’t need to sell my wares; sharing them with S is enough.
• Almost exactly a year ago, S proposed. I was knee-deep in a major freelance project, we had extensive work to do on his apartment (the bigger one) before I could move in, and we were planning a wedding. One element in my life had to go, temporarily, so I stopped writing. Again.
• Now, the work on the apartment is nearly finished (though I moved in eight months ago), the wedding and honeymoon are memories, and I’m finishing up another major freelance project. The time has come to refocus. What do I really want? I fantasize about opening a used bookstore-café. I fantasize about actually writing a novel, a different one I’ve been outlining in my head all this time. I fantasize about becoming a food writer.
• I’ve decided that, if nothing else, a blog will keep me disciplined about aspects of each of those things. Even if nobody else is reading, I’ll pretend you’re out there waiting to hear from me. I’ll cook, and bake, and eat, and write about it. Hopefully, you’ll like it and want to hear more.

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