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I Love This Neighborhood, Part I: What a lovely way to start the weekend:  a package slip left by my friendly neighborhood postal carrier last night yielded a package from the brilliant and lovable nakedjen, who found a hardcover first edition of Alexander King’s first book, Mine Enemy Grows Older, and snapped it up for me.  (She also sent me a PTMYB thematically-correct dozen-egg-photo refrigerator magnet, a card that continues the egg leitmotif and the world’s coolest wrapping paper.) Jen, I still can’t believe you found this.  I knew I would have fun with it when I read the note on the jacket:  “NOTE:  If this jacket (the author painted it) is too strong for you, take it off.  There’s a conservative jacket for conservative people underneath.” The jacket painting is a lurid and disturbing yet beautiful painting of a cellist atop a skinless horse, playing a cello that is shaped like a callipygean female torso.  I had thought that the note was another joke of King’s until I happened to peer at the book from the top and saw what looked to be another jacket.  I carefully unfolded the protective plastic coating.  Sure enough, there was indeed a plain green cover with the title and author’s name in a bigger font, taking up all of the front cover real estate.  I don’t know whether this was King’s idea or Simon & Schuster’s, but either way, it’s one more interesting flourish to a guy full of interesting flourishes.

News from the Egg Project: Research starts in earnest this week.  I have enrolled in a culinary history survey at the New School, one that promises to take us from Marcus Apicius to Julia Child in 12 hours.  It is taught by Andrew F. Smith, author of erudite, scholarly culinary histories on tomatoes, ketchup, popcorn and peanuts, which I will get around to linking, I swear.  I have also picked up a book on how to keep a flock of chickens in your backyard, as nice a place to start as any, and, much to my surprise, I have a pair of research assistants, two friends who have offered to visit libraries and ag extension offices for me, since I can’t take any more vacation time to visit them myself.  I am actually feeling a creeping sense of competency, of being qualified to research and write this book after all...but shhhh, don’t let that get out.

Because you asked:  Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the town where I will be living during my fellowship, is in northwestern Arkansas, near the Missouri border.  I can get there either by flying to Fayetteville and driving for about 1 1/2 hours, or by flying to Springfield and driving for 2 hours.  Hmmm.  Eureka Springs is also near Branson, MO, once described by Bart Simpson as “Vegas as if it were run by Ned Flanders,” and Bentonville, AR, home of Wal-Mart corporate headquarters.  If you’d like me to engage in any demonstrations against bad corporate practices, or to pick up some B-list celebrity autographs in Branson, just drop me a line.

I Love This Neighborhood, Part II: Because I received so much kind feedback on Wednesday’s apple post, I have decided that Twenty Hour Apples are in our immediate future, and if I’m going to make the apples, I might as well make that tart about which I fantasized, with the sauternes pastry cream and the cinnamon shell.  Unless it comes out too, er, rustic, pictures will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, if yinz guys keep giving me feedback like that, I will get all swollen-headed, and have further delusions of competency, and I will become insufferable to live with, and poor Lloyd will walk around looking even more haunted than he usually does.

How often do we get the chance to experience a really truly unfettered pleasure? I got to have mine at lunch.

Today:  what a lollipop of a day, filled with all kinds of karmic repayment for yesterday. Yesterday was just a mishegoss of a day, a day that started with the death of my work computer, a creaky old laptop that had already been passed around the company when I inherited it in 2001. I never knew how much I depended on my computer - it’s not just for reading the blogs of your friends and for chatting in baking chat rooms anymore! - until I was without one. From there we proceeded on to an indifferent lunch; a doctor’s appointment that made me feel like a combination of misbehaving child and underpaid hooker; a cold and ferocious rainstorm, the kind where you think, as rain drips into your stinging eyes, “oh, so that’s what they mean by nor’easter”; a soup for dinner made from chicken broth, gnocchi and pecorino toscano, so sexy in the conception but so underwhelming in the execution; and an unpleasant discovery that the New York State Department of Revenue is late in mailing tax return forms because it is adding a line requiring all residents to estimate how many purchases they made online or out-of-state in 2003; if you didn’t pay any New York state tax on this stuff, time to ante up, suckers!

By noon today, the rain had dried up, the skies were crisp and blue and the temperature had hit 45 degrees. Since I am still recovering from last week’s vicious head cold - hey, 99% better is still “recovering,” ta very much - I felt completely justified in bypassing my lunchtime workout and heading down to the Greenmarket.  (Yes, yes, normally I am suspicious of a warm day in February, but I already know that we’re going back into the 20’s on Sunday, so today I can enjoy the weather, which, really, is still too cold for spring.) Even though the pickings at the market in February pale in comparison to those in August, a body can still feed itself well on them.  There are stands where you can buy rabbit and ostrich meat.  You can get eggs, bread and milk, so you can be prepared for blizzards. (evil grin) You can get terrific storage-friendly root vegetables, twelve kinds o’taters, and Savoy cabbages pretty enough to put fractals to shame.  Best of all, you can still get apples.

Years ago I wrote an essay about apples for foodies.com.  It has long since been archived, but go check out the site anyway.  (If you like what you see, be sure to let Joy, the site owner/sysadmin/food goddess, know.  Tell her that Jen sent you.) At the time I’d written it, I had just read Jack’s Skillet:  Plain Talk and Some Recipes From a Guy in the Kitchen by Jack Butler, and as much as I love Jack and respect his palate, I could not let lie unchallenged his assertion that apples were too straightforward and sincere to be really desirable eating.  He is more of a peach guy, prone to raptures over a sun-warmed peach fresh off the tree.  Far be it from me to gainsay the very real pleasures of biting into a tree-ripened peach, spraying juice all over your chin, hands and shirt, but I take exception to the idea that apples wear their charms too plainly for enchantment.  They can be straightforward and sincere.  They can also be mysterious, brash, complex, resonant, deep, nuanced and, if you get the right varietal, sexy enough to make even a peach-fancier blush.

From the first brisk days of fall to the pre-rhubarb days of April, I buy a lot of apples.  I usually go through a run of pie-baking and jelly-making; occasionally I’ll throw some halved apples into the roasting dish with the ubiquitous chicken; at least once I’ll make roasted or braised pork and cabbage with apples; I’ll do at least two batches of apple butter, one dark, one light.  I’ll talk a big game about tarte tatin or caramel-baked apples, but more often than not, Lloyd and I end up eating them out of hand, and then I have to go buy more.  One of my favorite things to make is the magnificent Twenty-Hour Apples from Desserts By Pierre Herme, by Pierre Herme and Dorie Greenspan, in which you slice apples paper-thin, toss them with butter and sugar (the recipe also calls for orange zest, but I find the flavor of orange invasive in this dish, so sometimes I’ll omit it entirely, or substitute a vanilla bean), wrap the roasting dish in plastic wrap, weight everything down with a plate and roast the apples in a just-barely warm oven (175 Fahrenheit) for ten hours.  Take them out of the oven and throw them in the fridge, still weighted down, for another ten hours.  If you resist the temptation to shave any time from the baking or chilling times, you will be rewarded with a deeply buttery, candied, collapsing little pile of apples, suitable for topping with whipped cream or plain yogurt, or for mixing into ice cream, or for turning into a tart, maybe with a cinnamon pate sablee shell and a pastry cream flavored with sauternes. You can also just grab a fork and eat them in situ from the fridge.  I usually dispense with the fork and curl them around my fingers.

If you are lucky enough to live near an orchard or to buy your apples from a farmer’s market, you will be surprised and charmed by the varietals still available, and the evocative names for them:  Cortland, Ida Red, Paula Red, Rome Beauty, Stayman, Winesap, Stayman-Winesap, Empire, Black Twig, Opalescent, Baldwin, Rhode Island Greening, Mutsu, Esopus Spitzenberg.  For about four weeks in September, the stand from which I buy my apples has a small crop of Cox’s Orange Pippins, a grand old British varietal that turns up often in British cookbooks.  I love them like mad, and I tend to buy them in quantity, leaving almost none for the other shoppers at the market.  They are so good that I don’t feel guilty about doing this, as I normally would.  For my non-Cox’s buying sprees, I tend to favor the Winesap, near-perfect in pies and even better eaten out of hand.  Lloyd is a fan of Opalescents and Baldwins, two more varietals that straddle the cooking/eating divide admirably.

This is all well and good, Jen, but what did you buy today? Why, thank you for asking.  I took a pass around the stand, could not find any Winesaps, decided to get some Black Twigs instead.  Maybe some Cortlands, too.  As I was about to give my bags to Lucas, the greatest apple seller the Union Square Greenmarket has ever known, I heard him pointing out the bin of Winesaps to another customer.  Oh, no, can’t leave without some Winesaps!  By the time I was done, I had well over 12 pounds of apples, for which Lucas charged me only a fraction of what they were worth.  Did I mention that Lucas is the king of apple sellers, and he treats good customers like gold?

Those apples sat on my desk, bags half-opened, for three hours this afternoon.  By the time it was time to leave for the day, I thought I would go out of my mind with desire.  Oh, the way these apples smell.  The Black Twigs are tart and bright, and smell of the cider they could eventually be pressed into.  The Cortlands are sweet, and smell vaguely of leaves and blossoms.  The Winesaps, forever and always my favorites, they smell of earth, wine, cold cellars, lying on wet grass, mystery.  I can’t stop myself.  I pull out one of the more oversized of the Winesaps, almost the size of a Red Delicious, large for this varietal.  It snaps, then gives, against my front teeth.  The flesh is a little softer than it is at the height of season, but it still provides plenty of the resistance that makes apples so satisfying to eat out of hand.  The juice is both tart and sweet, apple wine, and there is plenty of it.  It is tart and zippy, smooth and piercing, cidery, winy, round and gorgeous, here baby, there mama, everywhere daddy daddy.  How could anyone consider this too straightforward and sincere to be a real pleasure?

My own sense of timing is beginning to spook me. The day I wrote my valentine to the wonderful food journal Petits Propos Culinaires, which spawned both Prospect Books and the collection The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy, was the day that the Guardian published the obituary of PPC founder Alan Davidson. The day I wrote about May This House Be Safe From Tigers, written by Alexander King, “artist, playwright, raconteur and frequent guest on the Jack Paar program,” Jack Paar passed away.  Hmmm.  I wonder if I am living in some Bizarro World version of The Sixth Sense, where I am actually Death but no one remembered to tell me.  Or maybe I am more like Eric Idle’s character in the Prawn Salad, Ltd. sketch on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, where a quiet, pleasant young man unwittingly triggers death and destruction around him (bookcases collapse, maids fall on daggers, police officers suffer fatal heart attacks, mansions collapse like the House of Usher).  Note to Self: Don’t Write About Anybody.

Since Paar’s death was announced last week, CNN and NY1 have been running footage of Jack Paar’s famous on-air meltdown/resignation after NBC censors edited three minutes of show time to excise a joke about a water closet.  It is almost painful to watch Paar say, haltingly, “There must be a better way of making a living than this,” knowing that he was this close to bursting into tears on live television, in front of millions.  Of course, Paar was back within four weeks, and he was able to take that fine wire edge of pain and turn it into one of television’s finest and funniest hours.  “As I was saying, before I was interrupted...I had said that there must be a better way of making a living than this.  Well...I’ve looked...”

I thought about Jack Paar a lot today as I returned to LuthorCorp, the Monday After The Week That Was.  Fact is, until somebody tells me this isn’t my job anymore, it is still my job, and I still have to do it.  But something is new.  Something has changed.  In the past, even in the worst moments on the job, even with the angriest or meanest customers, even with the biggest snafu’s, even with the overwhelming sense that our work contributes in a very real and measurable way to the degradation of the environment, there was still a certain measure of satisfaction in doing the job well.  Here is point A, there is point B, and here are the loops and hairpin curves in between; now go make it work.  At the end of the day I would be tired but relieved, and glad to work with people who valued the work I did.  Now, though, I have been afflicted with the kiss of death for people in sales-support jobs:  I no longer care.  I can fake it, certainly; that which was urgent shall be continued to be treated as urgent, and, of course, the three salespeople I report to will continue to receive the benefit of my care and feeding.  But in the midst of all this activity, it runs through me like a pulse:  I don’t care, don’t care, don’t care, and that, dear friends, is the real answer to the question how do you know when it’s time to go? As Jack Paar said, there must be a better way of making a living than this, and I do not want to be back four weeks or six months or ten years later, saying, “Well, I’ve looked...”

Tonight I was welcomed back into a community with which I’d lost touch, actually one from which I’d shrunk away, and yet they welcomed me back immediately, as if I hadn’t been gone.  Until recently, I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing happily on The Baking Circle, an online bulletin board group hosted by King Arthur Flour’s website.  (Registration is required, but it’s free, and you get a really nifty newsletter every other week.) This is an excerpt from a comment I posted tonight, my first one since the end of October:

In truth, as winters go, it was a tough one. It started with the death of my beloved grandfather at the end of October, and continued with some hard decision-making on my part, namely my decision to stop working on the business plan for my bakery. I was continuing to refine it, re-estimating my costs, trying to get a better picture of my space needs. I don’t know what stopped me, but at some point I just became convinced that I couldn’t proceed, couldn’t get the money I needed without some more industry experience, and because of the job situation my husband and I are in, I couldn’t afford to quit my current job and take a job within the industry. In addition, we had been hearing the hard economic news coming from Pittsburgh, where we’d planned to relocate, and we decided that maybe this was not the right time to start a business in Pgh.

Funny thing: since I received the good news, I have been baking like mad. Rice bread from [Elizabeth David’s] English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Sandtortes from Maida Heatter’s Cakes and Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts. Pumpkin breads from Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Cafe. Biscuits, every kind I know how to make. And I finally took my white and rye starters out of the fridge and started feeding them again. They are each a party out of bounds. I also started a weblog and have been writing like crazy. I just can’t stop. And my mom told me last night that my stepfather found an ad for a bakery for sale outside of Philadelphia, on the Main Line. I can’t afford it yet, but maybe soon...who knows? I’m so glad to be baking. So glad to be writing. So glad to be back.