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Dear friends,

Is it a fitting tribute to Labor Day that I kicked off my Labor Day weekend by ranting about LuthorCorp?  It may very well be, but today I'm going to give it a rest, or at least interrupt it with a palate cleanser as it were.  I work for a company that has plenty of its own problems, in an industry that has veritable tablets full of problems and challenges, but today I come not to rage at working for The Man, but to breathe a sigh of relief.  I come not to bury LuthorCorp, but to thank them.

It is another topic for another time, but after a summer of hectic deskmonkeying, bad moods and broken hearts, I have relaunched into the egg book research with a vengeance.  (Those of you who have known me from the start of this book, rest assured that I can hear you falling to your knees, clasping your hands, sobbing and thanking Jesus that this is another topic for another time.  Those of you who are new to this space, trust me:  eventually you will suffer for my art.    This morning I emerged from my candy-scented bubble bath and made straight for the Big Box of Notecards, which included my notes from The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles Daniel (a really magnificent book that deserves a post all its own).  I opened the book to page 348, the midst of a chapter about the culinary uses of chickens and eggs, and found a passage that reminded me, once again, why I am glad that I am not a manageress in the Roman Empire (for this would indeed be included in the food preparation/chicken tending/egg gathering duties of the manageress):

In case an honored visitor caught a host without a milk-fed capon or hen, according to Horace, it was only necessary to dip a tough old bird into a basin of Falernum wine and water while still alive to soften it.  The same purpose, we are told, could be served "with a fig placed in the creature's anus."*

While my job is not as difficult, dangerous or low-paying as, say, stevedoring, I am often charged with unpleasant, soul-draining tasks on LuthorCorp's behalf, such as compiling time-consuming reports, letting customers yell at us for the mistakes they've made, and enough filing to kill a stoat.  But I can say with all honesty that they have never asked me to place figs in a chicken's anus, and for that, I salute them.  Thank you, LuthorCorp!

* I am still trying to figure out what it means that when I read this, my first thought was not "Euuuuuwwwww!", but rather, "Well, figs *do* have tenderizing enzymes, and that's why they were so often paired with hams, because ham meat tends to be tough, so it kind of makes sense that...euuuuuwwwww!"

A postscript:  I shared this observation with the lovely bunni, who is blogging side-by-side with me today.  I showed her the passage in The Chicken Book; she mentioned that she actually preferred the preceding paragraph:  "The poet and physician Battista Spagnoli (Mantuanus) wrote in praise of the capon: 'The greatest glory to you, cock, when you have lost your testicles, for then you are pleasing to sleep, to the stomach, to Venus, to Cybele.'"  We are now looking forward to dropping Spagnoli's quote into as many conversations as possible.

Dear friends, text will follow later, when I am feeling a little less poorly.  I am irked by this poorly feeling, for up until tonight, it was a quiet, bittersweet weekend, made sweeter by plums.  The dark purple prune plums, a varietal known as Long John, have been baked into plum cake, which sits in the kitchen, waiting for Lloyd and me.  The rest are for eating out of hand, plunging into your mouth as soon as you realize that they're just about to trip over the line of overripeness, these fat little beauties.  The green-yellow ones are greengages, floral and buttery with a flesh like amber.  The red ones are Elephant Hearts, tart-skinned, vaguely banana-scented and with a vivid magenta flesh.  I devour bags of these every summer.  And this morning, before my vague malaise set in, I put my energy to good use:  those five pounds of damsons that came home with me last weekend were finally turned into damson jam.  Or at least it was meant to be damson jam:  quality control revealed that it had actually been cooked into damson butter, thick, heady and gorgeous.  I probably should have pureed the whole mixture, to smooth out the skins, but there was something about the faint crunch of plum skin between my teeth that made the whole thing so much more captivating.  So we have ten jars of not-quite-jam, not-quite-butter, resting nicely in the pantry.  Recipes, for both the cake and the jam, will follow as soon as I get my silly act together.  Thanking you in advance for your patience.

(Come back, Doc.  Your country needs you.)

Trying not to fiddle while Rome burns, but...While I am not a person of fixed religious abode, I recognize that good work has been done by both individuals and organizations who are of fixed religious abodes.  As often as I am disgusted by the evil that has been committed in the name of religion, so am I also awed by the good that has been done in its name as well; the dialogue is not monopolized by the likes of Fred Phelps or Meir Kahane or Osama bin Laden (who is not so much a religious figure as a hateful rich boy who has learned to talk the talk to religious fanatics), but to those who would spread love and comfort and assistance as well.  I am lucky enough to count among my friends some truly principled believers.  So why do I feel so squirrelly every time I look at my employer's approved charities list for Katrina disaster relief? 

LuthorCorp announced yesterday that they would match, dollar for dollar, any charitable contributions made by their employees supporting the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.  The only conditions were that we make all contributions by October 15, and that we make our donations to one of the 13 charities on the list.  Of these 13, three are secular:  the American Red Cross Hurricane Disaster Relief Fund, AmeriCares and PACE Helping Hands; the rest are Christian charities.  Again, I'm not trying to split moral hairs when people are starving and drowning, but -- oh, why equivocate?  Yes, I am more than a little baffled that Second Harvest and Feed the Children and the UJA Federation and B'nai B'rith did not make LuthorCorp's cut of approved charities, but Operation Blessing -- run by Pat Robertson, the same Pat Robertson who said that we got what we deserved on September 11, 2001 -- did.

Trying not to fiddle while Rome burns, but...(Part Deux):  Nevertheless, I am going to follow LuthorCorp's rules and throw my support behind AmeriCares, not because they are a secular organization, but because they are doing good works, not just in New Orleans but also in Darfur and Sudan and Bridgeport, Connecticut.  (Even if you have already thrown your support behind another charity, AmeriCare's website is still worth checking out.)  I will confess, though, that my motives are less than pure.  My original plan was to eschew the matching funds, select the charity of my choice, and then just give double what I had planned to give.  Then I read the press release from LuthorCorp, in which they announced that they would be donating $100,000 to the relief effort.  While it's $100,000 better than nothing, it still seemed to me to be a tiny amount of money to a multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 company.  Then I read the second paragraph of the press release:  $50,000 is being donated now.  The balance of the $50,000 will take the form of matching contributions to employee donations.

Let me repeat that.  My multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 employer is donating $50,000 now and $50,000 in October -- as long as their employees pony up $50,000 out of their own pockets.  If we don't donate, they won't either.  There are salespeople in some divisions of the company whose base salaries are more than $50,000.  LuthorCorp is, for all intents and purposes, donating a salary.

I'm giving.  I'm digging deep.  You'd better believe I'm going to make sure that my -- all together now! -- multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 employer does not welsh on that other $50,000.  Ante up, LuthorCorp!

As told by Anderson Cooper on Bill Maher:  "[Survivors in New Orleans] are hearing politicians say 'We know you're frustrated.'  A man here came up to me and said 'We're not frustrated.  We're dead.'"

What the hell is going on in Astoria?, Part One:  Dear friends at NY1, it's not that I don't appreciate your Hurricane Katrina coverage.  What happened to Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama will have ineffable consequences on all of us for years to come, and it's important that we here in New York City know this.  Nevertheless, you are, first and foremost, a local news station, and while it's possible that someone out there feels a burning need to watch vox pops of motorists complaining about how much it costs to fill their gas tanks, some of us, particularly those of us who a) don't own a car and b) live in a certain part of northwestern Astoria have other questions, to wit:  What caused the four-alarm fire around the corner of my house, the fire that took out four businesses and sent 18 firefighters and a civilian to the hospital?  Why did I have to learn about this fire from a traffic-and-transit report, in which it was mentioned as an inconvenience to motorists ("Stay away from 31st Street and Ditmars Boulevard, due to Fire Department activity!"?  Was this really all you were able to learn?  Why was it aired on a very short cycle in the middle of the day?  Were the businesses adequately insured, and will they reopen?  (Since one of those businesses is McDonald's, I'm sure that that one is a big fat yes, but what about the little restaurant?  What about the optician's office?  What about the doughnut shop?)  Why were so many people on the scene overcome by smoke?  How long will it be before the block loses that stubborn smell of burnt tarpaper and putrefying seafood?  Can you understand that even though, in the great scheme of things, this fire doesn't draw a bead on the suffering of our New Orleanian brothers and sisters, some of us just might be curious to know what happened?  Why are we watching people complaining about the price of gas again?

What the hell is going on in Astoria?, Part Two:  Graffiti is nothing new in my neighborhood.  Sure, we have pretty little houses, but we also have apartment blocks, both large and small, and those blocks have flat roofs, all of which are a boon to graffiti taggers.  I have seen so much graffiti in my life that when I look out the subway window, it's just so much background clutter to me.  At least it was until this morning, when we passed a house on 31st Street covered in giant fierce letters:  YOU LIVE HERE, YOU DIE HERE, with an arrow pointing to one of the second floor windows.  It could just be smack talk, a battle of words between taggers.  But I have seen it twice now and it still makes my blood freeze, the way my blood froze when I was in college and the house down the road from my parents was sold to people who had company coming and going all hours of the day and night, and who had a van parked in the driveway, with crosshairs and SO MANY VICTIMS, SO LITTLE TIME painted on the side.

Is there such a thing as hot-weather comfort food?  Yes, yes, you can make an argument that much of the foofaraw surrounding obesity includes comfort food and comfort eating as a Very Bad Thing.  No, you should not find solace in your deepest emotional problems with food.  Nevertheless, sometimes you do want to eat something that is friendly and soulful, cheap to buy, easy to put together and slips down your throat with the greatest of ease.  It's not my own recipe; I found it in Rozanne Gold's Recipes 1-2-3.  I found it about ten years ago, and I've been making it every summer -- for it can only be made in the summer -- ever since.  Put a saucepan of water on to boil.  Cut into dice 6 ounces of ricotta salata or manouri cheese (you can use feta, but be sure to rinse it off, and be sure also to reduce the salt you add later, as feta is much saltier than ricotta salata) and 2 medium, 1 1/2 large or 1 giant ripe tomato.  Put the cheese and tomatoes into a bowl, add salt to taste, mix with your hands and let sit for about 1/2 hour.  Meanwhile, boil 8 ounces orzo (rice-shaped pasta) in salted water.  When the pasta is almost done, with the merest core of al dente hardness, pull it off the stove, drain it (do not rinse it!), pour it into the tomatoes and cheese, and stir until all is blended, but not so vigorously that you render the cheese into paste.  This will serve about 6-8 people, unless you find yourself picking at the bowl a lot.  You can eat it hot, at room temperature or cold.  I'm a fan of room temperature, myself.  It might not sound like much, but even after ten years, I still can't believe how good this tastes.

Closing with the punchline.  Last night, Bunni (to whom I would link except that TypePad just suddenly got cranky on me), Lloyd and I went to see The Brothers Grimm.  Without giving away any spoilers, I will say that everyone in the film (except for a hapless cat) gets what they deserve, and Jonathan Pryce, who plays an insane French general, gets exactly what he deserves.  At that moment, he mumbles, "All I wanted was a little order.  A piece of quiche would be nice."  The audience, which was small but enthusiastic, laughed loudly, but I'm sure I drowned them out with my own snorty laughter.  Bunni leaned over to me and whispered, "It's like you were in the room when they wrote it."  I love it when that happens.

An open letter to the persons who trespassed onto the future home of my brother and sister-in-law, decided to have themselves a little party, and left behind countless smashed beer bottles, badly damaged kitchen cupboards, and dents in the walls, including a big dent in the wall just under the cathedral ceiling in the foyer:

Dear Brain Trust,

In general, I am not a big fan of mindless destruction, but this week, I'm reeeeeeally not a fan of mindless destruction.  I am also not terribly rational about Wrongs Done to Me and Mine.

Praying will not help you now.  And don't even think of looking over your shoulder.  You may, however, invest in some nice soft pillows for which to cushion your bottoms.  But don't be getting any false senses of security.  You'll still be ruing the day your father and mother ever met.

Cordially,

Bakerina

An open letter to the builders of said future home, who I recognize are hardworking guys and who I'm sure just overlooked the fact that a nearly-completed house was still missing front- and back-door locks:

Dear Hardworking Guys, Etc.,

On the other hand, your prayers will be answered.  Just as soon as you fix the walls,  replace -- yes, replace -- the kitchen cabinets, and get those damn locks on the damn doors now.  Are you installing the locks yet?

Cheerfully,

Bakerina