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From those wacky funsters at Google comes the best hit I’ve ever had:  “funny shaped onion aphrodisiac.” To say that the mind boggles is a gross understatement.

Dear friends, it is close to D-Day, mere hours away from T-37 until I head off for my Awfully Great Adventure.  On Monday afternoon I will be speaking to the nice woman from the Egg Board who is interviewing me for a feature for their web page.  She suggested that I take a look at the interview with last year’s winner.  Sure!, says Bakerina, brightly.  God, god, god.  Lesson Number One:  Do not read the interview with the previous year’s winner if said winner is a regularly-published, polished, intelligent, thoughtful charmer.  Lesson Two:  Breathe deeply.  Lesson Three:  No more blogging for the duration.  Go away, don’t come back until July 15, when a month in Arkansas will be a fresh but increasingly-distant memory.

Oh, like hell.  Of course I’m not going to stop blogging for the duration.  I am too much a creature of habit, too curious about the lives of my friends on and offsphere, and, let’s be honest, too much of an attention slut to go away.  So no, I have no plans to vanish, but I feel it only fair to warn you, dear friends, that the verbiage around here might be a bit staccato, the thoughts short and easy to digest, like in USA Today.  I will probably be all over the map (not to be confused with all over the map.  Hi, Kenneth!).  Bear with me, please.  Eventually I will get my brains back.  (Now I’m hearing the zombie voice in my head:  “Braaaaaaaaiiiiiiiins...") In the meantime, some interstitials for your consideration.

I have received an e-mail from someone who did not want to comment on this page, asking why I had nothing to say on the creeping horror coming from Iraq this past week.  I won’t reprint the e here; I will only say that I have been accused of dumbing down the discourse on the web, retreating from the harsh realities of the day into a kind of denial that mixes equal parts class snobbery, ivory-tower disconnectedness and Stepford-wife-soccer-mom-style cocooning.  This did actually bring a smile to my face, because anyone who would mistake me for a soccer mom need only come to my apartment and see the way Lloyd and I live.  Our kitchen sink alone is straight out of Withnail and I.  But no, dear angry would-be friend, I have not been silent on Iraq in the vague hope that if I just closed my eyes and kept on baking, it would all go away.  I have been quiet about it because I don’t have the words in me to convey the full force and depth of how furious I am, and how I despair for my country and my fellow human beings.  Luckily, I have very dear friends indeed who are brilliant, reasoned and http://www.orionoir.com/2004/05/ashamed_of_my_c.html>eloquent in their anger, and I encourage you to visit their sites and let them show you how it’s done.

Tomorrow Lloyd and I are going to see this movie, followed by lunch at this restaurant.  If the person who wrote the review for newyorkmetro.com is reading this, please note:  to call a deep-fried Mars Bar “improbably edible” shows that you either need to eat more deep-fried food or more Mars bars.  A few years ago, I took French classes at the Alliance Francaise.  One of my classmates lived in Kearny, New Jersey, which has a large Scottish expat community, and she told me that for the right price, the chip shops in Kearny would deep-fry anything.  Just take your food and your cash and head to the chippie and hey presto!  Deep-fried Bounty bars!  Deep-fried broccoli!  Deep-fried pigs’ ears!  Deep-fried turkey giblets!  I am wracking my brain (braaaaaaiiiins!) trying to decide what to fry.

So was today a market day, Jen? Why, yes, it was.  One of these days I will try to get an actual picture of the market—Thursday’s picture from Broadway and 17th was taken with my back to the market—but I’ll admit to being a bit of a coward, as I think the market managers are sticklers about who is permitted to take pictures and when.  I did manage to sneak a picture of hydrangeas for Snowball from the Wednesday market, so I know it can be done.  Today’s market haul included four little bunches of arugula; two bunches of stinging nettles for soup; a bunch of drydock, suitable for sauteeing; several pounds of all-red potatoes, gorgeous potatoes, red-skinned, pink-fleshed, the exact color of ham, low-starch, and tasting intensely of potato, no other way to describe the taste but intensely potato-y; two bags of onions, one yellow, one red; and, literally, the last pound of rhubarb to be had at the market today.  Let this be a lesson to all:  do not wait until after 11 to go to the market if you want to score enough rhubarb for jam and maybe a dessert or two.  It was such a good haul that I thought the least I could do was take myself out for a nice cheapish lunch, which I found at Kati Rolls on MacDougal Street.  I bought a spicy aloo roll and a chicken unda roll.  My, but these rolls are grand.  The cook takes a piece of homemade paratha, slaps it on a griddle, scrambles an egg on the grill, slaps the warm paratha on top of the egg, cooks a skewer of chicken, then rolls the egg and bread around it, after first seasoning everything with pickled red onion and lime juice.  Because this restaurant seats about ten people max, and because every seat was full up, I took mine to go and sat in Washington Square Park, eating my lovely hot lunch, thinking quiet pleasant thoughts to myself, sitting by and watching the traffic go, as Debbie Harry sang once upon a time.  Thus fortified, I went home and turned that single pound of rhubarb into a rhubarb grunt, which always sends people into paroxysms of laughter when I say that, but really, guys.  A grunt is nothing more than a type of cobbler, cooked fruit topped by a biscuit or scone dough.  Tonight’s grunt came from How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson; Nigella in turn got it from Marion Cunningham’s contribution to The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook. The biscuit topping is interesting, unlike any I’ve made before:  no leavening, no butter, just pastry flour, sugar and whipped cream, dropped on top of rhubarb and sugar and a little butter and baked in a 375-degree oven.  Dear friends, this is a perfect example of a dish where using a really good cream pays off, where if you use a nasty ultrapasteurized cream, it’s going to tell in the final crust, but if you use a good cream, specifically a good Jersey cream you were lucky enough to find at the supermarket (which will probably never carry it again), you will be rewarded with the cleanest, sweetest taste, a taste you just would not believe possible.

One of my favorite corners of the planet.

Even though this is just asking for trouble, practically begging the universe to show off its sick sense of humor, I think that I’ve licked the existentialism virus, at least for now.  Consider the following:

We have a fast-moving rainstorm running through the city tonight. I got home just as it started, one drop tapping me on the cheek, just below my right eye.  By the time I got inside, the thunder had started, low long thunder, sounding as if it were running through a tunnel.  There is a light wind coming in through our living room window, bringing with it scents of the beach, grilled fish from the taverna around the corner, wet concrete, grass and tea roses. It smells so springlike in here that it makes me want to head into the kitchen and make risotto with the asparagus I bought at the Greenmarket on my lunch hour, even though the hour is late and I’ve had more than enough food for dinner tonight.  But we can have it tomorrow, having decided to postpone the Guy Maddin movie outing until Sunday, and have it tomorrow we will.  The asparagus risotto comes from Faith Willinger’s brilliant book on vegetable cookery, Red White and Greens:  The Italian Way with Vegetables. Her risotto recipes are great because they do not require a stock; rather, you take the tough ends of the asparagus (saving the tips and tender ends for cooking in the risotto proper), along with an onion, carrot, celery and parsley stems and prepare a mild vegetable broth with them.  There are people who will tell you that risotto will not attain its unctuous mouth-filling glory unless you use a rich meat stock, but I am not one of them.  The right vegetables, the right rice (Ms. Willinger recommends carnaroli, vialone nano or baldo, rather than the standard arborio), the right olive oil, the right cheese, all these things will make a risotto that leaves me weak in the knees.  If you really want to gild the lily, you can open a nice bottle of white wine, and throw a little of that lovely wine into the bottom of your bowl, and drop your risotto on top of it.  I learned this trick from Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, and it never ceases to cheer me up. Even though asparagus tends to react harshly with wine, making it sweeter on the palate, the wine trick still works nicely on asparagus risotto.

Walking back to the subway to catch the 6 train from Union Square back up to midtown, I felt as if I were getting my own feet back.  This is still a tough time for the market because there isn’t a lot in season.  Rhubarb is almost but not quite here; the only fruit to be found is the last of the storage apples; the most plentiful items in season are asparagus, ramps and potatoes.  On the other hand...mmm, asparagus, ramps and potatoes.  Ramps are tiny wild leeks, much more oniony than “regular” leeks, and, sauteed lightly and tossed into an omelet, they are the very essence of spring.  I walked to the east side of Union Square, swinging my little bag of spaggers and ramps, thinking to myself that if I didn’t have to go back to work and if I had some music to listen to, it would be as close to a perfect afternoon as I’d had in months.  At that moment, a beat-up, cream-colored Volvo pulled up to a red light, blaring “Mary Anne” by Marshall Crenshaw, from his first album, an album that I played nearly into oblivion when I was 15. It was all I could do not to slip a $50 to the guy behind the wheel and ask him to cue the cd up to track 1, “There She Goes Again” and let me ride around with him until the last note of “Brand New Lover.” I felt like I had been picked up by the collar and placed down gently in a place I hadn’t been in years, a place where the music you loved really did make better any place you happened to find yourself, made you glad to be in its presence, made an afternoon out of staying in your room, letting pure tones and emotion wash through and over you as you wrote or painted or solved puzzles or built models or just sat quietly and listened.

More kitchen foofaraw: Because so many of you, via comments and e’s, have asked so sweetly, yes, I have a recipe for homemade ricotta.  The recipe comes from Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Cafe, the best book of breakfasts I’ve ever read.  To make 2 cups of cheese, whisk together 1/2 gallon milk (if you use lowfat or skim milk, your yield will be lower and the taste and texture will be less rich, but it will still work) and 1 cup yogurt in a saucepan and heat until the milk simmers just enough to bulge slightly.  Remove from heat, stir in 1/2 cup lemon juice and leave to coagulate for 1 hour. Do not stir the cheese during this time.  Prepare a quadruple-layer square of cheesecloth, about 16 inches long by 8-to-10 inches wide, and place in a colander, which should either be placed inside another bowl or in the kitchen sink (assuming that the sink is not full of dishes).  When the hour is up, pour the cheese into the cheesecloth and let the whey drain off the curds for another hour. You may be tempted to squeeze the cheesecloth a bit, to help things along, but if you do, you will end up squeezing some of the cheese out with the whey.  Just let it do its thing.  After an hour, take the edges of the cheesecloth and tie them together just tightly enough to put some gentle pressure on the surface of the cheese (don’t knot them, though, or you’ll have a bear of a time getting to your cheese when it’s all done).Continue to let it drip.  It will take a total of about 4 to 5 hours for the cheese to assume a ricotta-like texture, although you can let it drain longer if you like a drier texture, more like farmer cheese.  Unwrap the cheese, salt it to taste and transfer to a container, where it will keep for up to 5 days.in the fridge (although I like this best unrefrigerated and very, very fresh).

Because it’s getting late, I’ll have to save this for another night, but I have to shill shamelessly for the book I just finished reading, Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven:  Reinventing Dinner in 1950’s America.  I bought this book as a little breather, to give me a rest from the egg research, only to discover that there is great information in here.  Among the best stories is the oft-repeated tale of how cake mixes didn’t take off until researchers discovered that adding eggs to the mixture gave women the illusion that they were still making a “real” cake.  Like so many oft-repeated tales, the truth is more complicated, but much more interesting, than the apocrypha.  I could go on and on—and rest assured, I will—but I just have to thank Laura Shapiro for filling me with the desire to track down a copy of Margaret Halsey’s With Malice Toward Some, just to read the scene where the newlywed Mrs. Halsey, emigrating to England with her husband, was given a form to fill out and ended up going toe-to-toe with the immigration official who demanded she give her occupation.  Her initial answer, “none,” was rejected, so she followed up with “parasite.” In the end, the official wrote down “housewife,” at which Mrs. Halsey replied, “Be a prince...Make it ‘typhoid carrier.’” This is the kind of friend I want to have.

Oh, dear friends, I can’t even begin to be eloquent tonight.  I hate to do this to such a kind and patient crew as yourselves, but I am afraid I have to rant.

Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit.  Big jobs.

At the moment, the exact moment, that the existentialism virus showed signs of lifting, at the very moment that I knew it was time to resume my long-winded bloviating, maybe with a recipe for homemade ricotta included in the mix(yes, Vicki, there is a recipe, and it’s coming soon), my laptop decided to freeze up, in a manner completely impervious to ctrl+alt+delete, necessitating hard shutdowns and reboots.  Now, this has been happening a lot over the past few days, but only tonight has it happened seven times in 30 minutes.  And each time, it has taken sizable chunks of the post I was writing.

Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit.  Big jobs.

Lloyd and I are trying to determine whether it’s because of the machine overheating or because my web-based e-mail contains a piece of Java scripting that gives my laptop indigestion.  Either way, if this means the near-death of a laptop I’ve had for all of six months, I will be ever so pissed.

Okay, rant over.  I think.  Nope.  Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit.  And, uh, big jobs.

In non-ranting news, in exactly six weeks from this moment, I will be in Arkansas, settling myself down to sleep under the cover and comfort of the Ozarks.  Keep your fingers crossed for me in the meantime.