“I think it would be cool to fly a helicopter,” my boyfriend said while pummeling his Xbox controls one afternoon. He had spent the last 10 minutes maneuvering his way through the skies of “Grand Theft Auto” on the Annihilator, a chopper with a seemingly endless supply of manly ammo. He’s right, I thought. It would be cool. Just not on the Annihilator. I made a reservation for an intro flying lesson soon after.

Whenever I’m on a plane, I like to stare out the window and imagine that the tiny world below is edible. The plowed, circular fields of Iowa look like wheat crackers. The Grand Canyon is an artsy bowl that can be filled with almost any kind of soup. Red barns and silos pass for sausages, and clouds are either wisps of cotton candy or the fluffy tops of meringue pies. (I always request a window seat.)

Helicopters though, are nothing like planes: instead of hurling down the runway for takeoff, it was more like God himself had cupped his hands together and carried us calmly upward and across the sky. I snapped panoramic views of the city with my camera, stopping only when I noticed that everything was looking rather edible.

Huh, I thought. The Queen Mary looks like a sushi roll. I closed one eye and pretended to pick the ship up between my fingers. Tree clusters resembled broccoli, and roads became thin strands of black licorice. Even buildings looked like Chiclets and petit fours. The world was just a giant, crowded dinner table.

It went on like this until I noticed the clouds, which weren’t quite the meringues they usually are when they form fluffy pictures in the sky. Seeing that, I made a silent promise to make my own. Clouds, that is.

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There’s this story of a famous journalist who started his career at a daily paper in a town so tiny, that there was no real news to write about. I mean, we’re talking daily AP photos of squirrels on skis and a whole lotta bake sale stories.

But he refused to settle for those ho-hum tales. Instead, this guy would throw a dart at a city map that was hanging on his wall, and wherever the dart landed was where he was going to find his next story. It didn’t matter if the dart pierced the middle of an intersection or the corner of an open corn field. He would find a story.

Using that method, he met all kinds of interesting people, and equally interesting stories ensued. Now, he’s a big-deal reporter in a metropolitan city. Bake sales be damned.

I never learned the name of this guy – and that detail alone makes the tale scream fiction over fact. But real or not, it reminds me to think creatively when developing recipes: Pick an ingredient and develop the flavors around it, just as he picked a place and developed a story around it.

The tale also helps when choosing one recipe over another to try. But instead of using the dart method, I close my eyes and mix up all the cookbooks on my office floor, then point a finger at a page. There. Done.

It was a similar situation when I made this Gorgonzola and leek crème brulee. It was one in a handful of recipes that we testers at Leite’s Culinaria had to choose from in order to fulfill our monthly testing duties. I closed my eyes, and with finger poised at the computer screen, I made a selection.

Only, as luck would have it, my fat, sausage-of-a-finger landed on three recipes instead of one. Of course, I thought. Just when this dart method of choosing was proving to be foolproof, this happens.

But fat finger be damned. I made them all.

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Being in a sour mood doesn’t always have to mean that you want to plant crossed arms in front of your chest or scrunch up your face and hold it there for as long as you can. Being in a sour mood can be a good thing.

Like when you’re in the mood for something sour, for example.

I for one am a big advocate for putting sour cream in quick breads like muffins, pancakes and coffee cake. Sour cream adds a moistness (fat! Yes!) and tang without even a mutter of its presence. If it’s added in the right quantity, you won’t even know it’s there. It’s ummph, and just because it’s pucker-worthy doesn’t mean it’s having a bad day.

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In my early years of college, I was editor-in-chief of our campus newspaper. The first decision I made under that title had nothing to do with breaking news or investigative stories, however. Instead of getting down to business, I planned a party.

It was kind of business-related. I thought it would be cool to have a summer bonfire at one of the local beaches as kind of a get-to-know informal event, so editors could befriend some of the incoming writers and vice versa. We’d have a united staff, I thought, bonded equally by our love of sniffing out the news and the strong friendships that would stem out of this gathering. It was gonna rock.

And initially, at least 30 staff members also thought it was gonna rock, all agreeing to come after we settled on a date in August that worked with everyone’s schedule. As it drew nearer, I started stocking up on goodies like booze and s’more ingredients.

On the day of the bonfire, people slowly trickled in — until the attendee flow just stopped completely. In all, seven people, including myself, showed up. I’ll never forget the moment we gathered around the fire, outnumbered by the boxes and grocery bags that lay before us. I sat there lost in my thoughts of failure in bringing our staff together. But then I heard a laugh, breaking my concentration. “Well, we can have a bottle each,” he said, pointing to the cooler full of vodka, rum and juice. Hmm. There was a bright side after all.

So there we were, all seven of us, with a gazillion boxes of graham crackers, a boatload of family-size Hershey bars and an estimated 3 pounds of marshmallows. And at least 10 bottles of top-shelf rum and vodka.

We drank like kings that night.

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