Dear readers, I am in a funk. And not the good kind that allows you to wear a sequined gold dress and your sunglasses at night. The kind where everything you cook burns or tastes weird and everything you write reads cliché. It’s not a good place to be.

But onward we go, because cooking and writing is what we do here, however cringeworthy or awesome either turn out.

In the span of one week, four out of the five dishes prepared by my hands ended up as spectacular trainwrecks – ones that made microwaved frozen meals look like five-star food. The sole saving grace was this pasta with meat sauce, which is made annually at the first sign of winter’s chilly weather. It’s a hearty sauce thicker than blood, like an Italian chili almost, that goes well with garlic bread and even eaten alone in a bowl with a large spoon, should you be so bold.

In this case, it’s paired with a fresh pasta recipe adapted from Michael Ruhlman’s “Ratio,” using just the basics: flour and eggs. Nothing else.

I’ve been making this meat sauce for years, and thus it’s a recipe built on intuition. It’s a sauce that does its job and does it well, and with all of the flops I’ve been cranking out lately, it also helps to remind me that success, however little or large, is very, very sweet. And filling. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipes)

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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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There are just some things you never tell a bride-to-be and her groom. Especially if you’re responsible for making their wedding cake and it’s not finished yet even though you’re just four hours away from the start of the ceremony. Oh, and to top it off, you’re lost in the middle of a major metropolitan city 45 miles away from said nuptial confection. Give or take a few miles.

It was literally hours before my friends Marvin and Sarah would be married in a beautiful ceremony overlooking the San Pedro Harbor, and I was somewhere near Slauson and Crenshaw in the slums of Los Angeles, looking for a Mr. Wisdom and his wheatgrass farm.

“Hello,” my frantic voice screamed into my cell phone. “Mr. Wisdom? I can’t find you. Are you sure you’re down here?”

“I am on Slauson near West,” he answered slowly. “In a pink house.” Looking around, I saw dogs running rampant on the sidewalks and the thick layer of trash that lined the gutters, but no pink house. I began to wonder if it really was “wheatgrass” I was buying, and not the other kind of “grass” that might be awesome at first but could possibly result in my arrest. (I promised myself that upon my arrest, my one and only phone call from jail would be to a bakery for a new wedding cake.)

I drove around some more and finally, a bright pink house emerged from the dilapidated rows of buildings. He exists! I parked in a red zone, stepped over some homeless people lining the sidewalk and pushed my way through a creaky screen door. After weaving my way through bedrooms and hallways (and feeling weird about walking through a complete stranger’s home), I found an older, distinguished man in a white linen suit. Dazed, he looked up from his newspaper and smiled slowly. Oh my God, I thought. I really did commit to buying a massive quantity of weed.

“Are you Mr. Wisdom?” I asked tentatively.
He smiled even wider. “I am he.”
“Great! I’m Cynthia, here to pick up the wheatgrass I ordered.” Please don’t hand me the contents of a Ziploc bag.

Mr. Wisdom took me behind his house to a shed surrounded by another batch of homeless people. “You know, I’ve been growing wheatgrass for more than 25 years,” he said, ignoring all of them. One of them looked at me, nodding his head knowingly as if he was listening to some internal lecture and needed to convey his understanding.

“I will help you carry,” he said to me. I nodded back.

Mr. Wisdom opened the rickety shed to reveal his pride and joy – rows and rows grass flats, tall, in bright shades of emerald green. Some glittered under the sunlight that managed to make its way through cracks in the roof.

I grabbed a flat and started walking toward my car with Orlando, the bobble-headed homeless man. After I thanked him and handed him some cash, he admitted to me that he had a drinking problem.

“Do not,” I instructed while pointing to the cash, “buy booze or drugs with this.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” he promised. He swore to his God that he wouldn’t, and as I got in my car, he rambled on about the bible.

Orlando was interesting and I kind of wished I had more time to listen to his stories, but I had to leave. I now had three hours, including drive time, to get home, finish the cake, pack everything into the car and drive to the wedding location, which was about an hour and two freeways away without traffic.

But, at least I had the wheatgrass. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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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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We’ve all been though this. Moving, I mean.

I haven’t touched a stove in two weeks (unless you count the serious cleaning that was needed), mainly because I’m straddling between an apartment and a home of my very own. The new place is a condo that overlooks a small lake with ducks, lily pads and waterfalls. Inside my tiny, tiny space are cathedral ceilings and my very own kitchen pie window. I actually have a windowsill in which to sit pies. Heaven, anyone?

So while I heave and haul 28 years of my life into hand-me-down cardboard boxes, let’s spread a little link love, shall we? I haven’t poked around the blogosphere in awhile – and it looks like I’ve missed a lot. Regular posting should resume next week. Here goes:

• First, the heart-wrenching news we’ve all heard about Gourmet. It’s been a few days, but it still stings like rubbing alcohol in an open wound. I’m anxious to see what’s going to happen to food journalism in the near future, (and what next editor Ruth Reichl will touch with her golden hands) but man, what a low blow. And for the employees, too – who according to reports, got just a couple of days to pack up and leave. What happens now?
• Esquire mag has named Jose Andres’ The Bazaar as its Restaurant of the Year.
• Food Frenzy writes about a man who’s living off of nothing but grated cheddar cheese.
• Heart-of-gold blogger The Chickenless Kitchen makes Pineapple Citrus Tartlets with honey and gets creative with cutting pie dough (nice work!).
• There’s a neat muffin concept over at The Other Side of 50: Ham and cheese on rye. Big yum!
• I LOVE those super-awful supermarket brownie bites they sell in plastic tubs. These from Night Baking look so much more appetizing – so I may have found a new brownie to worship.
• It’s called the Sex Panther. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. But you can see it for yourself at This Is Why You’re Fat.
• One of my favorite blogs out there is Tea & Cookies. Our beloved Tea recently tackled Purslane.

Once upon a time, there was a young(ish) food writer who wanted nothing more than to go to a cooking club potluck. Sadly, each month on the day of the meetup, there was always something that got in the way. Usually, it was the same thing.

“I have to work.”

While she tackled her workload, visions of au gratin pans and Corningware platters danced through her mind, always in theme with the cooking club’s genre of the month. Once, it was Chinese food. Then Italian. As she wrote (and wrote and wrote), she thought wistfully of what she was missing out on.

“How I wish I could go,” she would say.

Then one day, she got her wish. Her absentminded fairy godmother had come back from a long vacation, tanned and ready to jump back in the game. It was time to go to the potluck.

This time, the theme was 1950s food.

“So, what are you going to make, muffin?” her Valiant Boyfriend asked.
“Hmm,” she pondered for a few moments. “Baked Alaska!” she declared, disregarding that the party location was a 45-minute drive on the freeway, and that the local news had declared it the Hottest Weekend of the Summer.

No, in this fairy-tale world, transporting a Baked Alaska in a steaming-hot car down the 405 on The Hottest Weekend of the Summer wouldn’t be a problem at all. So it began.

First, a batch of brownies came out of the oven and cooled on a rack. Then, chocolate mint, chocolate and vanilla ice cream was smooshed into a plastic wrap-lined bowl, layer upon layer until the bowl was full. Then, the platter of brownies was placed on a plate, the bowl inverted and the excess brownies trimmed. A cloud of egg whites and sugar haloed the ice cream, and a mini-torch containing the fires of hell singed the meringue with a brown crust.

The baked Alaska was finally ready for its entrance at the party. All three piled into the car to begin the trek, with Valiant Boyfriend at the wheel.

But oh, what a perilous journey it was! The Baked Alaska, tried as it might, seemed as if it was no match for the harsh, stagnant heat. It melted. A lot.

Knowing that the poor dessert was on its last leg, Valiant Boyfriend weaved in and out of lanes, dodging slow cars and crammed interchanges, while food writer scanned the horizon for signs of lurking police cars. It seemed as though the journey would never end, but at last, all three made it to the party. As for the Baked Alaska, its health was grave: A gaping hole and melting ice cream pooled at the bottom of its plate. Into the freezer it went for a recharge, and (much) later, it was as good as new. It was a showpiece dessert, and everyone lived happily ever after. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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Hey all, I had a column published in The Orange County Register today. It’s not available on the newspaper’s site, so here it is! Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

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You can tell a lot about a person by the way he takes his chocolate mousse. A chocoholic may often choose bittersweet chocolate over milk or white, while daring palates may choose fruit- and alcohol-flavored mousses or those with herbs and spices over the traditional versions. A voracious eater will inhale a mousse no matter how rich it is, licking remnants off of his spoon while other diners at the table will slowly relish every bite. (It’s fun to watch and analyze your friends.)

Traditionally, the French mousse au chocolat is made with melted dark chocolate and egg yolks, using egg whites to lighten. Modern versions call for things like whipping cream and even gelatin to achieve the desired airy state. Purists may claim that the only real mousse is the traditional one, but in reality, you really can’t argue that any of the recipes that steer away from the original are wrong. The beauty of mousse is because there are literally hundreds of recipes out there, so you can choose a recipe to suit every mood and accommodate every taste.

A close cousin of chocolate mousse is the chocolate pots de crème, a dessert that’s baked and served in lidded pots. (Since most of us don’t have these traditional pots on hand, we can achieve the same baking results by using espresso cups and covering the custards with aluminum foil.) The ingredients are almost identical to those of the mousse (eggs, chocolate, cream), the reason being they are both in the custard family of desserts. Making a mousse almost warrants making a pots de crème, based on that fact alone.

The following recipes omit the use of raw egg whites, using whipped cream to lighten them instead. While a mousse is light in texture, a pots de crème is dense, with an almost chewy mouthfeel. A mousse is put directly into the refrigerator to chill, while a pots de crème is baked in a bain marie, or water bath, before chilling.

I like to serve the mousse and pots de creme side by side, for a “chocolate two ways” dessert – thought it might be a bit too rich for those not completely addicted to chocolate.

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… lounging on powdery beaches with the scent of plumeria wafting through the breeze. I’m in Hawaii for the week. Regular posting will resume next Wednesday — thank you for reading and hope all is well with the rest of the world.