Guilty pleasures

I read trashy romance novels on occasion. Not serious bodice rippers, though; the 187-189 pages of the Harlequin Presents series is about as much as I can take.

For good cover art, check out this site: http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/

When I have the cash, I'll buy the book Gallery of Regrettable Food. My sister-in-law, who clued me in on the romance-novel Web site above, has just sent me another gut-wrenching URL: http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/spectacular.html.

The headline cure

Aug. 31, 1998:

Writing headlines for a living should make me immune to human suffering. In fact, I've thought it could make for lucrative therapy.

I could see the money crammed into groaning bank accounts, riding up and down with the Dow and firming up a few old mattresses. Yes, and there I'd be on "Oprah" and "Jerry Springer," amazing the world with my panacea for misery.

The Headline Cure. It seemed so obvious, yet so ingenious! Over the past six years, I have dealt with all manner of pain, death, destruction and horror, and I'm still only mildly demented. How many deaths have I personally announced in big type? I haven't a clue, but I do it day in and day out without dissolving ceaselessly into gulping tears.

Clearly, I said to myself, it's the objectification of the cause of grief, the headline-writing process, that saves me. Plug any disaster, I reasoned, into headline specs, and it will seem bearable, almost mundane. I was all ready to tell you about this grand discovery last week, but I found, to my horror, that it didn't work. My oldest cat died, and I couldn't make headlines. I was unable to write at all. Sorry.

Still, headline therapy has its merits for cooking disasters.

Let's take one of my culinary tales of woe. To treat the poor News-Leader newshounds one Sunday, I decided on basil dip -- a step above the standard French onion dip and glazed doughnuts (not together!). But our victory garden was sadly defoliated. A local grocery (no names here, to protect the guilty) did have a sexy-looking box of dried basil-dip mix, and I pounced despite the rather outrageous cost. The cost reassured me: If it's expensive, it has to be good, no? I mixed the stuff blithely into sour cream and sashayed into the newspaper, expecting loud applause.

I should have tasted the dip first. When co-workers use the term "interesting," you know you're sunk. The stuff was bitterly, dangerously inedible.

Obviously I'm still suffering from the memory, so let's headline (sic) away the pain by putting a worst-case scenario into big type. NOTE: The following is fabricated for an imaginary tabloid.

"Headline hussy charged with murder try in chip-dip shocker." "Tainted-chip-dip victim tells all: 'I gagged; I swooned; my life passed in front of my eyes.'" "Basil-dip Borgia 'seemed so nice and quiet,' co-workers sneer." "'Dip suspect mulls suit against grocery chain; 'I'm the victim,' she wails from behind bars." And then the inevitable follow-up: "5 years after dip scandal, journalist suffers in blistering Texas exile."

I feel better already. You can try this one at home -- gratis.

************************************

I was recently given a "healthy" cookbook. What a shock! Over the years, I'm afraid, I've grown suspicious of any cookbook that touts healthful eating -- so many rely simply on cutting down fat to unnaturally low levels, putting in two egg whites (a part with far less nutrition than the yolk) instead of one whole egg, or using margarine (evil! evil! evil!) instead of butter.

But I found a number of interesting recipes in Jane Kinderlehrer's "The Smart Baking Cookbook: Muffins, Cookies, Biscuits, and Breads" (Newmarket Press, 1985, 1998). True, the version of breakfast bars that this book set forth did not wean the errant spouse of his soggy-oatmeal horrors. Truth to tell, the things I made were undersweetened and overdry. But we BOTH ate them, and I'm sure, with all the soy flour, oat flour, wheat germ, milk powder, etc., etc., we were better for it.

Not that I'm about to offer it to y'all -- I can see the Ozarks rising up against me and sending me e-mail raspberries. I give instead Kinderlehrer's recipe for high-protein Blintz Muffins, which would make a nice entry at tea, or for a snack, or brunch. If you don't happen to have lecithin granules around, I won't tell on you, but I'll have you know *I* had the gumption to run out and buy a package of the nutritious little things. And, yes, the spouse snarfed the muffins up. I don't have to drive away disaster with my patented headline therapy.

BLINTZ MUFFINS
3 eggs
1 cup cottage cheese
3 tablespoons sour cream (you can substitute other things, of course -- use your intelligence)
2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
2 tablespoons wheat germ
2 tablespoons lecithin granules
1 tablespoon grated orange rind
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
sliced almonds for garnish

1. In a mixing bowl or food processor, blend together the eggs, cheese, sour cream, honey and vanilla.
2. In another bowl, combine pastry flour, wheat germ, lecithin granules, orange rind and cinnamon.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 12 regular-size muffin cups, or three dozen minicups, or line with foil baking cups.
4. Mix liquid ingredients into dry ones, and spoon batter into muffin cu[s. Top each muffin with a few slices of almonds. Bake regular-size muffins for 25 minutes, minimuffins for 15-18 minutes. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Not woman enough

From February 2000:

Shop as if you mean it, I said. But do I mean it?

Last year, I served up a recipe using frozen artichoke hearts, and a reader complained -- these thistle treats were nowhere to be found in town, she said. I was stern; I rolled my eyes heavenward.

It may be called a supermarket, but you're really the top dog, I said, or words to that effect -- don't let its choices master you.

Easy for me to say: I was sojourning in Austin, Texas, where there's a heavy infestation of yuppies and techies, and stores are crammed with almost anything the wildest recipe requires.

Springfield, I hate to tell you, isn't yet in the same league. And here in the Ozarks, I'm not woman enough to get my food.

I'm an Aries, so I should be a pushy broad, and the spouse and my co-workers think I live up to my stars. But with strangers, I wimp out. No, I haven't even found my favorite brand of *canned* artichoke hearts here, let alone the frozen variety. Yet the remedy is easy, for any of us with guts: Ask our favorite supermarket to order what we want.

My timidity means serious hunting and gathering. Which store has cannellini, which boasts loose portobello mushrooms, which carries the best coffee, and which stocks onions that fit in one hand? My memory is a tad flabby; I often find myself ranging through two to four stores to gather ingredients for one simple recipe.

Or the memory works, but the store doesn't. Not long ago, despite time constraints, I chose the supermarket farther away because of its coffee, the French Roast that the spouse likes best. And the bean bin was empty. Grrrrr. Aaaaccccckkkk. Funny how stores don't seem to catch on, to stock *more* of the things people *actually buy.*

The nice woman at the checkout counter asked me if I'd found everything I wanted. A formulaic phrase, a mere rhetorical question, I'm sure. I usually smile and gibber, "Yes, of course!" -- I cringe under the tarring-and-feathering stares people in line throw at anyone who holds them up with chatter or price problems.

This time, though, my anger and anguish, my utter java woe, spilled out. Then I looked up. The cashier was gaping at me, wounded, nay, crushed. I didn't dare glance behind me at the seething line of shoppers. I quickly pretended I was joking -- can't afford that yuppie stuff anyway, I said -- and I scurried out with head bowed, an eternal stooge of the marketplace.

********

I chose our recipe of the week because it seemed so easy, in two big respects -- not much work to toss together, and with all ingredients readily available everywhere.

In fact, I got it from a fellow Gannetteer, one with a good reputation -- food editor Sarah Fritschner at the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal -- who writes a column titled "The Fast Lane," for busy cooks (check her out online at www.courier-journal.com/sarah/).

In her introduction to the recipe, Fritschner says: "My nomination for best convenience product of the year: baby spinach, sold washed in plastic bags. At my house, we stir-fry it with garlic to serve with pasta; we add it to fried rice; we put it on sandwiches; and we make casseroles ..."

I'd never bought baby spinach, I must confess, but I was ready to shell out for the privilege. Still, I wasn't married to the idea; I was prepared to pounce on a good 10-ounce package of washed adult spinach if that was all I could find.

The supermarket I hit had bags of baby spinach; indeed, it did. But the Depression mentality handed down from my parents held me back -- the store wanted $2.99 for 5 ounces of the stuff, and I blanched. Six bucks for 10 ounces of spinach? Hopelessly cheap, I went to Plan B. I also went to another store. And the one I chose didn't have *any* 10-ounce bags of washed fresh spinach on hand. Aiiieeeee. I am cursed.

Black-eyed Peas With (Baby) Spinach and Cheese
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced (about 1 teaspoon)
10 ounces clean, fresh spinach
1/4 teaspoon crushed red-pepper flakes (or hot sauce to taste)
2 (1-pound) cans black-eyed peas
1 cup freshly grated Cheddar, Parmesan, Taleggio, provolone or other cheese
1 cup unseasoned breadcrumbs

Heat oven to 425 degrees. Grease a gratin dish or 9-by-9-inch baking pan with a tablespoon of olive oil. Mince garlic. Heat another tablespoon of oil in a wide skillet over medium-high heat and add garlic. Cook until aromatic (about 1 minute).

Increase heat to high. Add spinach and red-pepper flakes and stir until the spinach wilts. Put the black-eyed peas in the gratin dish. Spread spinach on top, then sprinkle with grated cheese and breadcrumbs. Drizzle with last tablespoon of olive oil. Bake 20 minutes, or until hot. Crumbs should be brown and mixture should bubble.
Serve with whole-grain rolls and roasted carrots. Serves 4.

An occult hand

July 16, 2000:

It was as if an occult hand had unfurled its delicate fingers and patted me lightly on the head. Placed lovingly in my e-mail box - OK, and about 100,000 others - sat a recipe for Chocolate Hazelnut Truffles.

Heavens, it looked easy: five basic ingredients and about 90 words of instruction, and no candy thermometer. And I had every ingredient called for - a sign to be sure!

The recipe also gave me a chance to score points against the spouse, for it would let me try out the chopping function of my new hand blender. “Look, doll, I don't just buy the gadgets," I could say. “I actually use them, once in a while."

Surely, the hand of fate had smiled upon me. But was the hidden force hiding things? One minute I saw an essential piece of the blender/chopper, the next it had vanished.

But I wasn't about to be sidetracked in the middle of a divine mission. I wheeled around the kitchen like a madwoman, peering under heaps of newspapers and behind motley gatherings of spice jars and nutritional supplements, in the drainer, on open shelves, in high-heaped drawers, on the stovetop, behind the sugar and the cookies and the flour. AARRGGHH. I tore that miserable room apart. After half an hour of anguish, I was frazzled, dispirited and wrathful, prepared at last to defy fate and turn to my conventional blender or my food processor to chop the hazelnuts.

But then, that occult hand seemed to step in and save me: The beaker lid suddenly turned up in the crockery cabinet, atop a pile of dinner plates. I was still seething, but my new gadget buzzed the nuts so quickly and nicely, my gloom lifted, and I strode on toward destiny.

After melting butter and chocolate, then adding sugar, I blithely dumped in half of the finely chopped hazelnuts. Once this die was cast, a strange force guided my eyes to the remaining nuts. Odd. Lurking amid the nut pieces, a whole passel of white flakes glinted forth. As the chocolate cooked on unattended, I investigated: The plastic cover on my new appliance's chopping blades had disappeared. Something had diverted me from reading the instruction “Remove blade cover before chopping."

I did taste the truffle mixture. Do you like scorched chocolate with a bitter plastic taste?

I'd clearly misread the occult hand. All along, it was giving me a rude gesture.

Ah, Julia!

A New York Times book review on Julia Child's "My Life in France" (written with Alex Prud'homme) boasts a sentence by Child that is particularly worth reading.

The prose, direct and energetic, abounds in one-word summations like phooey, marvelous, yuck, and yum. Every day in France brought a thrilling new discovery, but Child's capacity for wonder and delight coexisted with "show me" skepticism. When a woman in Marseille tries to tell her that real bouillabaisse never, ever includes tomatoes, she tosses that opinion right out of court. "Such dogmatism, founded on ignorance and expressed with a blast of hot air, irked me," she writes.

The review, "Julia Child's Memoir of When Cuisine Was French for Scary," can be found here (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/08/books/review/08grim.html).

'Badge'

I grew up in more liberal times. When I was in high school -- in Texas, no less -- I played Cream's "Badge" to my English class. It was part of an assignment. Now I have no effing idea what the lyrics mean.

Granted, I'll never forgive Clapton for screwing Pattie over.

Class warfare

Inspired by the author of That's Nice, Cheeks, I'm posting an old food column of mine that outraged the advertising department in my newspaper. I was flummoxed. Sure, the ad people had the nice parking spots, but I was also trying to get a shot in against other day-siders who made my life miserable, the reporters. And I was just joking. The piece is from August 2001.

Civilization as I knew it was nearly blown apart by popcorn.

Who really thinks food is a force for good? Granted, in prehistoric times -- or so the scholars tell us -- hunger bred cooperation: Heroic hunters strode forth and slew the ill-starred woolly mammoth, hacked away manfully at its massive carcass, and dragged all they could carry home to the grateful clan.

But when, at the dawn of the 21st century, the great popcorn behemoth willingly spills its guts in the company cola room, life at the News-Leader grows nastier and more brutish.

Your trusty daily newspaper, sad to say, is riven by serious social divisions. In one corner, you have the prosperous day-siders, with their well-coiffed tresses, sleek suits, shiny shoes and assigned parking spaces. Then there are those of us who labor by night, too often clad in the ratty and the recycled, hungry at every turn, and likewise angry and snarling.

Yet the two classes aren't quite as divergent on Fridays: The so-called communal popper makes our upper class shed much of its thin veneer. When the less favored among us stagger in after a grueling, desperate search for a place to put our ancient and bedraggled vehicles, we see the unmistakable signs of the day-siders' animal frenzy: the greasy tracks, the sad shards of popcorn kernels, trailing here and yon across the hallowed newspaper's otherwise sanitary halls.

Night-siders trudge upstairs to the break room to see a popcorn desert, all kernels of civilization now wiped away. Grrrr.

I'll admit it -- I can be a professional malcontent. Every week, I sowed seeds of revolution among my peers with three simple words: "Out of popcorn." I buttered up my night-sider comrades with the cry of "Equal kernels for equal work."

"We need an act of snack subversion, uncivil disobedience." They were popping mad. I proposed sneaking in early with a large paper bag and, while no one was there to witness, looting all I could for the cause. But "while no one was there"? As if! -- those vultures circled constantly.

So, Plan B: espionage and exposé. I came in early for some subtle reconnaissance, insinuating myself into a gaggle of well-groomed women who circled the popcorn trough with crammed cornucopiae in hand. Pretending to study the contents of a soft-drink machine, I aimed my quivering ears outward, to learn "Who hogs the corn?"

But the only clear sound I picked up was a resolute munch, crunch, chomp. Then all of a sudden the gaggle flew the coup, casting scornful glances and a shower of crumbs. Dang. I had forgotten to dress for my part as agent provocateuse. But, lo, the plundered popper came into full view. And it wasn't quite empty. I gathered up one of the last paper cones and started scraping away at the faux-yellow remains.

I'd come, I'd seen, and I was ready to start snarfing. I'll just take this plunder back to share with my comrades --or not. Glorying in the spoils, I danced down to my desk with my trove of kernels. And then I looked up. Right there, staring at me with a bristling sense of betrayal, were the righteous have-nots of the night-side copy desk, extending the hand of solidarity, to share in the wealth.

To which I snarled, "Hey, you want to be able to type with that hand?"

****************

I wouldn't be surprised if the grand poobahs at the News-Leader had caught some whiff of the popcorn discontent. Suddenly, when night-siders trudged upstairs, popcorn was waiting there for us. On a few nights, a fresh batch appeared in the evening! What luxury!

The work place is all the more civil for it, although I miss those days of animal wrath, of seething hunger.

You really shouldn't need a recipe this week, for popcorn is at its most glorious without one -- a little salt, a little butter, or whatever the food companies put into the little microwave packages. But I'll give you something that's really more like candy than like popcorn.

I hope it appeases some of you; I know, alas, that one of my co-workers, Michelle, will be outraged by the marshmallows it contains. As y'all doubtless know, marshmallows contain gelatin, which is made of bones. Oh, well.

If you don't like the recipe below, you can easily find other ideas for popcorn, or just about any dish you can think of, at www.allrecipes.com. The site is divided into a lot of categories, and has several useful ways of searching. Many of the recipes have also been rated by readers.

The Popcorn Cake, by Linda K.

14 cups popped popcorn
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup peanuts
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup peanut butter (preferably natural)
5 cups miniature marshmallows

Spray with vegetable spray a 10-inch tube pan (preferably with a removable bottom) or other 12-cup.

In a very large bowl, combine popcorn, chocolate chips and peanuts and mix well. (If you don't have a very large bowl, your life will be a lot easier if you cut all the ingredients in half and mix up two batches in large bowls, then combine).

In a double boiler or in medium saucepan over low heat, melt butter (or do by halves, again).

Stir in peanut butter. Stir in marshmallows and continue
stirring until marshmallows melt and the mixture is smooth. Remove from the heat. Stir marshmallow mixture into popcorn mixture until well coated.

Press mixture into prepared pan. Allow to cool completely before removing from the pan; refrigerate to make firm and more easily cut into slices. Of course, you can always just grab big hunks by hand.

Progress

I fixed the glitch on my DVD of "American Dreamer." On a whim, I ran one of those cleaning sheets for eyeglasses over it.

Speaking of romantic comedies, I must recommend "Cherry 2000," another film that I fell in love with during my cable days. Apparently it's now a cult classic, whatever that means.

Bad move

Last spring, I saw that a minor local rag, one that one can get free at the supermarket, was hiring. I was in school and not eager to work (who is?), but I e-mailed the company, asking whether any part-time copy-editing jobs were available.

Almost immediately, a nice man who worked for the company that owns the paper, a man based in Branson, Mo., telephoned me. I became a bit worried when I realized that the man wanted a reporter, and reporting is no decent life for anyone, but the interview went well, I think. We were chortling.

At the end of it all, I promised to e-mail him some of my stuff, but I told him that he could find some of my old work on my blog.

I never heard back from the guy. I looked again at the blog, only to find that an old column I'd posted here, the top one at the time, was one crowing about the ease with which some of us oldsters can make public errors.

My set of links didn't help, I'm sure. I put them up with a passive-aggressive purpose. The second one (by a copy editor) shows far more about my character, in one sense of the word, than I'd like. The penultimate one, a thing that one of my siblings and I have guffawed about for decades, discusses the use of giving blow jobs to make it ahead in business.

'Collateral'

Sometimes dictionaries help. Consider the title of the movie "Collateral." I worked myself into knots over the title until I consulted a dictionary or three. The noun "collateral" didn't make much sense here. The phrase "collateral damage" helped, but it still had holes. Look at the meanings of the adjective. The physical idea in the adjective "collateral" assists greatly in the interpretation. See the elevator scene. And note the position in which Cruise and Foxx sit in most of the scenes.

OK. The following definition was also useful: "secured or guaranteed by additional security, especially by personal as opposed to real property."

Never, never, never involve yourself in literary criticism.