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Dear friends at Discovery Channel and the New York City Transit Authority:

Thank you.  No, really.  Thank you and the horse you rode in on.

Consider this:  It's a Monday, a grey cold Monday.  Beautiful uptown Astoria is blanketed by a thick grey cloud cover that makes the whole neighborhood look silvery, but not sparkly.  It's a matte silver; the whole neighborhood looks like a living photograph.  It's getting colder out, but it's not frigid yet.  It would be a lovely day to stay in bed for another hour, and then get dressed up in one's woolens and walk around and just look at bridges, at railroad trestles, at the dried kudzu-like tangle of what were lush grape clusters in August -- this is a big neighborhood for homemade wine -- at everything that makes this neighborhood such a wallflower, one that doesn't boast the showy charms of the Upper East Side or the flash of Soho or the hipness of the East Village or Williamsburg, but that looks ordinary until you look closely; then you see that matte softness seeping out of every painted surface, and you realize there's something more here, something you can't put your finger on, and then the wind picks up and you remember a stormy day over the summer, when, right before the rain started, a gust of warm wind ruffled a wall full of ivy, creating a longitudinal wave that looked just like a waterfall.

But no, you cannot spend the morning contemplating beauty, for it is time to go to work.  So you head to the subway, realize you've forgotten your ATM card, turn around and head for home, tear your flat apart only to realize that the ATM card is in your pocket, you swear, you head back to the subway, you realize that in your haste to look for your ATM card you've left your subway pass at home, you swear again, you decide that if you go back home you will be much too late for work so you suck it up and buy a $20 pay-per-ride pass, you get on the subway, you sit down.

As you pull out your reading material, you realize you are in one of those spiffy full-car-ad cars, in which the advertiser pays for all of the ad space on one side of the car; all of the ceiling ads and all of the wall ads are of a common theme.  Why, it's the Discovery Channel, hawking their new show POMPEII: The Last Day, airing 1/30/05!  And just look at the ads they chose with which to hawk, to a captive, underground-bound audience, no less!

HOW DO YOU BREATHE WHEN THE AIR IS ON FIRE?

HOW DO YOU ESCAPE A BOILING MUDSLIDE?

HOW DO YOU OUTRUN AN ERUPTION THAT'S FASTER THAN THIS TRAIN?

WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN NOWHERE IS SAFE?

If you are not reduced to thumbsucking status yet, feel free to check out the wall advert, not five feet in front of you:  www.thelastdayiscoming.com.

No, really, the horse you rode in on, too.

I do, however, salute the puckish mind in ad sales at the NYCTA who sold the other side of the car to Budweiser, who reminds us that Fresh Beer Tastes Better.  Now that, dear friends, is synergy.

Dear friends,

How churlish of me.  Such kind words from all y'all about Thursday's non-post, and I didn't even tell you what the end result of all this hilarity will be.

I'm still in the midst of it all, hence the low profile (broken only by trips outside for fresh air and sandwiches, and to the laptop for leaving smartass comments on other people's sites).  During the planning stages of this year's Christmas Baking ExpoFest-O-Rama, my mom advised me to keep it simple.  Unfortunately, my idea of keeping it simple is picking recipes from a single baking book.  This year I am sticking with Maida Heatter's Brand-New Book of Great Cookies, which is no longer brand new (c1995, sigh), but the cookies are still great.   If you've never baked but have always wanted to try your hand at it, or if you're an ace baker looking for some inspiration, Maida is the girl for you.  (For fans of this sort of trivia -- Walt Lockley, I'm looking at you! -- Maida is the daughter of radio announcer Gabriel Heatter, whose introductory statement during his World War II broadcasts, "Ah, there's good news tonight," was a mood elevator during the darkest days of the war.  I knew that he was famous, and illustrious, but I didn't realize just how famous or illustrious he was until I heard "Ah, there's good news tonight!" appropriated by Daffy Duck.)

Here is my version of keeping it simple.  Feel free to point, laugh and generally ask me how nuts I am:

Palm Beach Brownies:  The brownies that made Maida famous, absolutely over the top.  Contains 1/2 pound of butter, 1/2 pound of chocolate, nearly two pounds of sugar, five eggs, vanilla and almond extracts, powdered espresso and just enough flour to hold it all together.  But wait!  There's a layer of York peppermint patties baked in the middle!  Status:  Sitting nicely in the fridge, waiting to be sliced into 32 1"x 4" bars, although if I were any kind of responsible human being, I'd cut them in half, because even though 1"x 4" doesn't sound huge, trust me, it is.

Bali Hai Brownies:  Basically the same as above, without the mints, with shredded coconut, diced candied ginger and almost 3/4 pound of macadamia nuts.  As I told a patient and long-suffering friend last night on the phone, these brownies are like the Death Star of baking:  expensive, heavy, high on the food chain, no socially redeeming value whatsoever.  Oh, sure, they're *good*.  What's your point?  Status:  Baked, cooled, wrapped in foil, ready to be individually wrapped.  (Yep, individually wrapped.  This will be elaborated on.)

Chocolate hermits with walnuts and sour cherries.  Now, these are a joy.  Chocolate devil's food cake-textured cookies, more espresso powder, walnuts, lovely shiny soft fat dried sour cherries from Kalustyan's, glazed with a thin sugar glaze.  Status:  Baked, wrapped, ready to go.

Cardamom snaps:  Actual name is "Craig Claiborne's Cardamom Cookies," but I have rechristened them in my own home because they really do remind me of gingersnaps, only without the ginger.  Claiborne's original recipe calls for 1/2 teaspoon of ground cardamom, but as far as I'm concerned, this will not do at all.  It is worth the palaver of shelling close to 1/4 cup of cardamom pods to get a tablespoon of ground cardamom, which, along with vanilla, grapefruit and fresh buttermilk biscuits, makes up the quartet of my favorite scents.  Status:  Baked, wrapped in foil, waiting for their individual wrappings.  (You may ascertain a theme here.)

Moravian wafers:  Based on a recipe from the Moravian community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  I love these, not only because I love spice cookies in general, but also because they taste just like Ivan's Spiced Wafers, which used to be available only at Acme Markets (yes, dear friends who do not live in eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware or Maryland: there is a supermarket chain called Acme.  No, they do not add rockets to everything.), and which were only sold around Halloween.  Now they're available year-round, made by some other company that has appropriated Ivan's orange-and-black packaging, and they're not the same.  I'm so glad that I can make my own now.  This year I decided to replace the molasses with sorghum, which I tried for the first time this summer in Arkansas, and which I liked enough to bring a case home with me.  Status:  Sitting in freezer, waiting to be sliced and baked.

Cornmeal shortbread ladyfingers:  They look plain, not particularly exciting, but as soon as you take a bite, their beauty is manifest.  Status:  Because they're so easy to put together, they will probably be the last thing I mix and bake today.

Pecan penuche bars:  Because I love the idea of cooking eggs and sugar together for 20 minutes before pouring them over snapping-fresh pecans.  Status:  As soon as I'm done here, dear friends, I start on these.

Milk chocolate and almond freezer cookies:  Between the brownies and the hermits, I probably don't need more chocolate stuff, but I have the ingredients on hand, and these really are lovely.  Status:  See pecan penuche bars.

Lemon squares with dates:  If I have to commit cookie triage and drop one, this will probably be it, but I am full of stubborn quirks, one of which is that my ideal cookie assortment includs something chocolate, something spicy and something citrus-based.  These have a shortbread base, a lemon curd filling, and sliced Medjool dates hidden inside.  I eat one of these and my lips pucker, which, along with the general citrus-based happiness, puts me in just the right mood for kissing.  Status:  Oh, who am I kidding?  I'm not committing cookie triage any time soon.

Now, it's not enough to bake all this stuff and store it.  I have to wrap it all, too.  Individually.  In cellophane.  This may sound like a Martha-based affectation, but it really is the only way to keep everything fresh, and keep it from crumbling, when you put it in the mail.  "Well, what's wrong with a tin, Jen?"  Well, tins are great, but I've found that they're best if you are shipping one item (or two if they're complimentarily flavored and textured).  I have shipped an assortment in tins, and the recipients have told me that while everything was tasty, it all ended up tasting the same.  So cellophane it is.  Yes, it is an insanely anal-retentive thing to do, but unlike most insanely anal-retentive activities, this one is worth it.

I nearly forgot:  somewhere in the midst of this, I will also pull the spiced beef out of the fridge and give it its daily massage.  Any inconvenience that comes from having 1/3 less available fridge space is more than made up for by the marvelous fragrance that hits my nose as soon as I open the tub.  When I smell this, when I feel the nubbly texture of peppercorns and crushed juniper under my fingers, I remember that I really am a cold-weather girl at heart.  It's not that I don't love summer -- you can't be the kind of tomato fiend that I am without summer -- and I do crave an eventual hot-weather vacation (my friends recommend Key West or Cancun, but I am thinking India or Morocco), but I was born in a cold green part of the country, descended from people from cold green countries on both sides of my family, and there is just something about dense spicy foods -- spiced beef, gingerbread, pickled vegetables -- that is wound firmly into my DNA.

With that, I return to the kitchen, but I will be back, honestly.

Dear friends,

Never has so little been done with so much.

There is plenty to consider, contemplate, share and discuss.  There are interesting changes happening at LuthorCorp -- interesting in a good way, not in a head-tilted, eyes-narrowed, "ohhhhh, you mean *interesting*" way.  I will be doing work that is just absorbing enough to keep me pleasantly distracted, but not so absorbing that I will find my eyes snapping open at 2 in the morning, wondering if I'd made some small screwup that has cost the company billions.  I will be working with a friend, someone I've known for years, a smart and terrific woman (and I'm not just saying that because she is a Friend of PTMYB).  I will be able to take the time I need next year to do more egg research.

There is dinner to consider as well.  Unlike last year, when I was still in mourning for my grandfather and thus not at all inclined to celebrate the holiday, this year I am celebrating in my own particular idiom.  In my fridge is a six-pound bottom round roast, which I bought on Tuesday, brought home, rubbed all over with dark brown sugar and confined to a Rubbermaid tub that takes up half my fridge.  Tonight I came home and made a dry curing mix of salt, black pepper, whole allspice and juniper berries, all crushed together in the Cuisi.  Rub, rub, rub, and back into the fridge.  I will be rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, imbuing my fingertips with the smell of speculaas and gin, for the next two weeks, at which point I will take the roast down to my parents' house.  The night before Christmas Eve, I will roast the roast for five hours in a slow oven.  I will take it out, put it on a board, put another board on top of it and press down on it, hard, while Lloyd ties the boards together.  The beef will pack down overnight in the fridge; when we take it out on Christmas Eve, we will be able to slice it into whisper-thin, nearly translucent slices.

Let's not forget why I'm here:  there will be baking, too.  Lloyd did a partial ingredient run for me last weekend, and I will be picking up the rest tomorrow after work, the better to spend my weekend in a dreamy swoon of almonds and rum, cardamom and brown sugar, almond paste and sour cherries, pecans and bourbon, chocolate and coconut and candied ginger and macadamia nuts.  I will pack it all up, wrapped individually to prevent crumbling, pack it next to jar after jar of preserves, all to be sent out into the world.

There is general news of the world, tales of rogues and scoundrels, always good for a pre-Christmas rant.  There is news of friends, good news, bad news, and plenty of love and wishes in either case.  It is, to paraphrase Stan Freberg, a grand, grand world, and at this moment I am at a total loss for words.  Dear friends, I am sorry.

Dear friends,

Well, that didn't take long.  I rediscovered my egg leitmotif on Friday, only to have LuthorCorp and Christmas (but mostly LuthorCorp) knock me flat on my tailbone.  I'm not disappearing, just regrouping.  There are too many interesting stories to tell.  As soon as I get my own personal interesting back, you betcha I'll share them.

Here's a small rant to tie you over in the meantime, inspired by the good (dear Regina Schrambling, whose writing is like a vodka gimlet in a sea of Sex on the Beaches), the bad (the Wall Street Journal article she mentioned in last week's post -- scroll down a bit; you'll know it when you find it) and the ugly (a certain episode of a certain program on Food Network I caught while visiting my dad in Maryland last month).  Dear food-industry-based friends:  For the love of Mike Nelson, please stop doing dumbass things with your Thanksgiving Day leftovers.  I have no issue with your putting cranberry sauce on your turkey sandwich.  I have no issue with your making hot turkey sandwiches, and inserting a level of stuffing between the turkey and the bread.  I do, however, draw the line at splitting a whole focaccia in half, throwing all your leftovers into it (and no, cold gravy is *not* a sandwich spread, like mayonnaise), grilling it and calling it "panini."  It is not panini, and it is not a good idea.  When even my father, whose motto is "If it tastes good, it doesn't have to be pretty", looks at that sandwich thing and says "that looks absolutely disgusting," then you know you've gone too far.

And for the love of god, leave the pie alone, already.  Pie is a beautiful, grand dessert.  If you have homemade pie for dessert, consider yourself lucky.  If you have leftovers, consider yourself luckier, because then you can eat pie for breakfast.  But if you look at that leftover pie and you honestly think, "Leftover pie is so boring!  Let's strip the filling from the crust and pack the crust pieces into individual ramekins, and then let's fill up those ramekins with the pie filling, and then let's sprinkle brown sugar over the top and torch it, and then we'll have Individual Pumpkin Creme Brulees, which are so much better than plain old pumpkin pie!," then you, sir and/or madam, you do not deserve to have pie.  Ever.  I may sound harsh, but on this issue, I am not harsh.  I am correct.  To quote David Sedaris, "Ayatollahs are flexible.  I am not."  Leave the pies to the people who deserve them.  Trust me, they're out there, and they know better than to take pie for granted.  (To the diner mentioned in Pascale Le Draoulec's American Pie that makes a "pie shake" by throwing apple pie into a blender and zizzing it...nahhh, screw it.  There's just nothing I can say.)

Those of you who are relative newcomers to PTMYB may wonder why I am so fascinated with eggs. Until roughly this time last year, I never thought that eggs would become such a compelling object of study for me. I was a breadhead -- well, I still am and always will be a breadhead, but for the past four years or so I was pretty much an exclusive breadhead. I had visions of baking bread in my own bakehouse. I had a business plan, and a city in which to shop it around. Then one day I didn't. I didn't have enough money, I couldn't qualify for enough funding, I blinked and lost my nerve. Looking around for something to do, I applied for a long-shot deal, a month-long fellowship at a writers colony in northwest Arkansas, to be used for a creative work on eggs, underwritten by the American Egg Board. It was such a long shot that I didn't put too much thought into what kind of book I would write if the opportunity came up. Imagine my shock when Mr. Opportunity came knock knock knocking at my door, and I found myself in Arkansas, surrounded by notecards and 19th century cookbooks and no fewer than three separate treatises on chickens and eggs.

So here I am, writing a book, or at least researching it, trying to find an agent willing to take me and this madhouse project on, and still shaking my head at the absurdity and silliness and sheer, unadulterated, unexpected fun of trying to study the history of eggs in baking.

Maybe it helps if you're a baking nerd, and I'm one of the nerdiest baking nerds ever to hoist a sheet pan. A well-prepared egg is soulful food, whether turned into an omelet, perfectly buttery, plump and self-contained; poached and served on braised spinach with a slight hint of garlic; beaten, enriched and turned into a towering, trembling souffle; made into a frittata, studded with vegetables and suitable for eating hot, warm or at room temperature; or simply boiled and fitted nicely into an egg cup, waiting to be pierced with a soldier of buttered toast. But the real fun of an egg comes when you pull your butter and sugar out of the fridge and turn the oven on. Madeleine Kamman refers to eggs as "miracles in a shell," and nowhere are those miracles more evident than in baking. Depending on whether you use the white, the yolk or both; depending on how, or whether, you beat it and how you apply heat to it, an egg can add smoothness and moisture to your final product, or make it drier and crisper. It will leaven a cake, and if you treat it with care, it will leaven without the assistance of chemical leaveners like baking powder. Heated gently with sugar and milk or fruit juice, it will turn into custard, as firm or as wobbly as you like it. Beating an egg white is a nifty and dramatic trick, traces of pale viscous liquid turning into billowing foam, but it wasn't until I got my first stand mixer that I discovered how neat it was to beat whole eggs to what is called the ribbon stage, the point at which the eggs are lemony and foamy and five times their original volume, when you pull the beater off the mixer and trail a line of batter across the batter surface, that batter ribbon will stay visible for ten seconds before vanishing below the surface. One thing I love to do is make a batch of brown sugar meringues, billowy and ivory-colored. I then boil the leftover yolks and turn them into sablees, delicate sandy French butter cookies that will fall apart if so you much as squint at them, and will melt the instant they hit your tongue. A little plate of meringues and sablees is a beautiful thing, especially if it is sitting next to a bowl of raspberry fool. If the taste doesn't seduce you, the colors definitely will. And I still shake my head at the day I learned that a traditional chocolate mousse contains only chocolate and eggs, no whipped cream. At school we learned how to make "light chocolate mousse" and "rich chocolate mousse"; the light was the traditional, the rich was the one with cream added, and I was surprised at how much more I liked the traditional mousse, its softer texture, its deeper chocolate flavor. Imagine how happy I was to discover that Gina Mallet agrees with me.

If you are not familiar with Gina Mallet, allow me to introduce you. Gina Mallet is a food writer for the National Post in Canada, the former theatre critic for the Toronto Star and the author of Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. She was born in England, to an American mother and an English father. She grew up eating well, fed by relatives and friends with fine (but not snobbish) palates and vigorous opinions, and she was lucky enough to be born at the right time to eat some of the finest cheeses, meats, vegetables and fish that a person could eat, and thus she knows just what we are losing as our food becomes safer and safer, and ever more tasteless. (If you think that this is another jeremiad by a Luddite who insists we must source all of our food from no more than 10 miles from where we live, I assure you that Ms. Mallet is brave and unflinching at examining her most deeply-held beliefs, notably her shock and disappointment to discover that the heirloom tomato she grew in her garden was tasteless and badly textured, while her friend in Pennsylvania raises bright and flavorful tomatoes from a seed hybrid she buys from Agway.) She is a tough, smart, grand writer.

Unfortunately, the story that that tough, smart grand writer tells is a sad one, and every time I think that I've heard this sad story before -- the disappearance of raw farmhouse cheeses, the deplorable conditions of egg factories (to call them "farms" or "ranches" now feels like a cruel joke), the bizarre produce distribution system that, along with the Alar scare, eviscerated the once-glorious apple producing regions of Washington State -- she has something new to tell, something to which I'm glad to have been alerted while simultaneously wishing I'd never heard about it. Today's food production and agricultural policies are driven by the global marketplace, not just in terms of an increased number of foods being available from an increasing number of markets, but also in terms of food being produced to a single homogenized standard, meant to be consumed by billions of people around the world, compromised in an increasingly futile attempt to render it pathogen-free:

As a child, I happily drank raw milk. For several years, it was considered the greatest of treats. In Shillingford, on Thursday afternoons, my sister and I used to stop at the farm on our way home from school. We would tap on the kitchen window, which was flung up by Cally, the farmer's cousin, a ringer for Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in the movie The Wizard of Oz, and she would beckon us into the sparkling tiled dairy, which smelled of washing. On a big wooden table lay large, shallow, stainless-steel pans of milk with cream rising slowly to the surface. Thecream was the color of daffodils. The cows were the superrich Jerseys and Guernseys. Cally poured us a glass of fresh milk still warm from the cow, and it was so good. The milk smelled earthy and complex -- today, I'd call it sexy -- and so rich compared to the gray stuff we usually drank. Then Cally would hand us each a piece of fresh bread, spread with farm butter and homemade strawberry jam, and lay on it a layer of the heavy cream that spread like cheese. This was quite simply the best food we had all week.

Raw milk, as I told a food scientist I know, is a cocktail with as many hints of vegetables and herbs as V-8 Juice, a meal in itself. He would have none of it. "You think it's safe, but it isn't. It's packed with bacteria. We're finding more bacteria all the time. You were lucky. For some reason, you're resistant to bacteria, but others won't be. You must remember we live in a global market now and there are thousands, millions of people who will never have had raw milk, won't be able to digest it, and may die as a result."

I thought he was overreacting until I found out that his reaction was public health dogma throughout North America. Tom Szalkucki, the assistant director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, gave me the reasons. He skipped over the cosmic bacterial menace for more practical matters. From a public health point of view, uniformity is essential for safety, and no regulatory agency such as the Food and Drug Administration can allow the sale of any food that is not safe for everyone. A pathogen in raw milk cheese could hurt those with AIDS, those on chemotherapy, the old. The old, Szalkucki reminded me, and now the fastest-growing segment of the North American population and the fastest-growing population in all the industrial countries, a triumph of health science. I had a sudden vision of aged people keeling over from a taste of raw milk cheese.

Now, of course I don't want to see aged people keeling over from a taste of raw milk cheese, and I don't want wholesale keeling over due to lethal pathogens, but I am more than a little worn out by our food policy being dictated by bacterophobes, particularly when some of the most lethal pathogens out there entered our food supply by our push to industrialize our food...which brings me back to our friend the egg. There are two reasons to eat eggs -- and I'm talking gastronomic reasons, not health reasons: 1. You like the taste of eggs; 2. You like what eggs contribute to your baked goods in terms of leavening and thickening power. What, then, are we to make of this?

You don't have to be a hen-hugger to suspect that nature was biting back with Salmonella E(nterides). Industrialized humans crammed together in slums with bad snitation were prey to many diseases of close proximity, notably typhoid fever. Why shouldn't it be the same for hens?...But the egg industry was less interested in finding the root cause of Salmonella E than in stopping it. In Europe, the hens were vaccinated. In North America, everything that could be cleansed was cleansed again, and warning bulletins about egg handling were broadcast widely. Salmonella E hasn't disappeared, but it has declined. According to the American Egg Board, the chance of anyone getting infected by an egg in America is about 1 in 20,000, and then if you're healthy, you probably won't get sick at all.

Even so, an industrial solution has to be found. In some parts of the United States, shell eggs are already being pasteurized. A computerized conveyor belt passes the eggs through successive baths of water, heated from 144F to 162F in order to destroy any pathogens. Pasteurization, of course, also wipes out any egg taste. The American Egg Board encourages the use of these eggs, even if they don't quite look right. The board advises: "The heating process may create cloudiness in the whites and increase the beating time for foam formation. When you separate pasteurized shell eggs for beating, allow up to about four times as much time for the full foam formation to occur, as you would in the whites of regular eggs."

The final solution is the irradiated egg. Irradiating eggs, or any food for that matter, is similar to radiation therapy. It is not likely to be good for an egg any more than a gamma ray is good for a human. But gamma rays, electrons, or X-rays that are beamed through the eggs will knock out all pathogens. The Food and Drug Administration admits that eggs lose 24 percent of their vitamin A when exposed to just one third of the approved level of radiation. The yolks of an irradiated egg are watery and dim, and the egg itself is no longer the cook's little helper. The irradiated egg is more difficult to cook, requires more time to whip, and yields angelfood cakes with half the volume.

If the eggs of our future don't taste like eggs, don't contain the nutrients of eggs, and don't leaven or thicken like eggs, why in the world would we continue eating them, outside of sheer dull, repetitive habit? Can we even continue to call them eggs?