My column ran today in The Orange County Register print edition today. It’s not available online, so I’ve posted it here. Thanks for reading!
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Every year, we look forward to the annual holiday eating rituals: A golden, grand dame of a turkey, savory sides and a sweet finale with pumpkin pie front and center. (And if you’re household is like mine, the obligatory post-feast nap follows soon after.)

Though there’s nothing wrong with these traditions, why not mix it up a bit? This year, you may want to surprise your guests by serving pumpkin pie at the beginning of the meal instead of at dessert. How? By turning it into a soup. The transformation can be made even easier by using canned pumpkin instead of fresh, yielding fantastic results.

Canned food often gets a bad rap for being, well, canned. And rightly so; fresh ingredients are almost always better in recipes. But there are few exceptions to this rule, and canned pumpkin is one of them. For one, the canned variety is way easier to use. When you’ve got your hands full with roasting a bird and preparing sides to go with it, chopping, boiling and mashing fresh pumpkin isn’t making the best use of your time. Tip: When buying canned pumpkin, make sure you’re getting “pumpkin puree” instead of “pumpkin pie mix,” which is offered in similar-sized cans with almost identical labels.

This recipe yields a spicy soup that’s just reminiscent enough of a pumpkin pie to seem like a before-dinner treat, but packs enough savory ingredients to warrant it a place as a starter or first course. And with the welcome addition of bacon, cream and butter (necessary ingredients for happiness, in my opinion), everyone’s a winner.

The following long list of ingredients may look intimidating, but I promise the procedures are quite simple: You simply cook everything in one pot. If you have a formal party and want an elegant soup, you can puree it for a soft, velvety texture. But it’s just as good when left as a hearty, rustic soup.

When I make this soup, I like to serve it with pie crust “crackers” on the side. Take some ready-made pie dough (or homemade, if you have it), roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut rounds from the dough. Bake rounds on a baking sheet according to package directions.

Another fun way to serve this soup is in shot glasses. If there are appetizers before dinner, you can easily slide a tray of these onto any table, and guests can help themselves to pumpkin soup shooters. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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Every now and then I wish I could poke little children with spoons. Why? Because there are few things in this world that we like to see inflated. A soufflé is one of them. A bratty little puffy-cheeked child is not.

Somewhere in time, children learned that the way to personal satisfaction was to fold one’s arms, inflate your cheeks and take as deep a breath as your little lungs will allow. You’d hold your breath until you got your way, no matter what kaleidoscope color action was happening on your face. Often, there would be a pleading parent in the immediate vicinity. This is called the Face-Off, and it ends horribly each time — with either a passed-out toddler or a bruised adult ego.

Ego-wounded adults, this is where spoons come in. We know that poking any soufflé with a spoon results with its collapse almost upon contact. My clever mother knew that the only way to deflate me during these patience-trying times was to poke me — lightly, but firm — with a spoon (or a pointer finger, if a spoon was not available). This resulted in giggles, which signaled that I had started breathing again. Mom, 1, me, 0. The experiment concluded with positive results every single time.

Children and souffles weren’t meant to remain inflated for long periods of time; they have to depuff at some point. With both subjects,  a little prodding allows the depuffication to happen sooner rather than later. I hope this information is helpful to the moms and dads who suffer through the public tantrums of their children (like the family I ran into at the supermarket a few months ago).

(Click “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

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When someone yells “FIRE!!” from your walk-in closet, one of two things can happen: You’ll either respond in ways that would make a ninja press his hands together and bow, or you’ll trip, faceplant, and yell back something totally unintelligible. How do I know?

So I’m in my kitchen measuring ingredients for a friend’s wedding cake (full rundown next week), elbows deep in cake flour and with a 38-pound tub of high-ratio shortening at my feet. I had hired Robert the Repairman to hook up the stackable gas washer/dryer I bought off of Craigslist (which by the way: not recommended.)

It was a totally uneventful evening until that frantic call-to-action of “FIRE!!” was put into place. I dropped my sifter and in an effort to bypass 38-pounds of fat, I tripped over my own toes and faceplanted slow-motion style into the speckled Berber carpet, rug-burning my lips in the process.

But I got up! I got up and as slowly as I seemed to fall, I yelled a stretched “WHAAAAT?” in the general direction of where smoke was now wafting from.

Robert the Repairman came running into the kitchen and together we filled glasses of tap water and ran back to the closet, where flames and ashes were shooting out of the dryer’s drum. And all the while I’m thinking, I’ve owned this home for a week and already it’s burning down?

Luckily, it only took a few minutes to put the fire out. Then we moved the behemoth appliance outta my house and waited for the Craiglist guy to pick it up. I got my money back (thank goodness), but I’m still working on my sanity.

So how do you go back to sifting flour after something like that? Well, you don’t.

Catastrophes give me the munchies, and all I wanted to do was eat away the buzz that was coming from my nerves. After that debacle, the question wasn’t “how long are my clothes going to smell like burning lint,” but rather “what am I going to stuff my wounded lips with?”

The answer was pie. Pie heals all wounds.

One of the first things I did on the day I moved into this place was make an apple pie for the sole purpose of watching it cool on my very first pie window. At various times of the week, I would be a geek and take it out of the fridge to place it on the pie window – just so I could see it there again. The whole pie was still sitting in the fridge, so I pulled it onto the counter and ravaged most of it like it was the last time I’d ever eat pie. Crisis-driven hunger solved. Lack of sanity, however, is another story. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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