Best Food Writing 2010 Part 17

I bowed my head and said a little prayer.

OF ALL THE potentially embarra.s.sing things I've told you so far in this book, the fact that I pray every day is the one I used to be the most sheepish about. All that drinking until I pa.s.sed out? No problem. Pull up a chair and let me tell you some war stories! But confessing that I believe in G.o.d? That's much harder for me to talk about.

I'm not a big Jesus freak or anything. My prayers are pretty simple. In the morning, I might say, "OK, G.o.d, here we go." And at night, especially after a bad day, I just say, "Oh well." I ask for some direction and the power to do the next right thing. I try to open my heart up a little more so the next day will be better. I don't tell many people I do this, especially the food people who make up the bulk of my professional life. Most of the food people I've known tend to get uncomfortable if you start talking about G.o.d and prayer unless you do it with irony or nostalgia. I know I used to.You might even be getting itchy right now.

Since I started making a living writing about people who grow and cook food, I've been invited to say grace-or even just pause for a minute to thank something bigger than us-maybe a dozen times before we all started eating. That's out of thousands of professional meals, and not counting Thanksgiving or Seder or dinner at my mother's house. But if you think about it, cooking and eating require the most consistent daily acts of faith of any activity, short of going to sleep and believing you'll wake up in the morning.

Each meal contains a thousand little divine mysteries. Who figured out that some beets should be golden, some red and others colored like candy canes? What blessed ent.i.ty invented sugar and cacao pods and vanilla beans or figured out that salt can preserve and brighten anything? What are we to make of a hundred little lettuces and gnarled apples with so many names you can't remember them all? Who created melons and pork fat and peanuts, for crying out loud? And what of the miracle that is cheese?

Things get more mysteriously divine if you start to think about baking. Or how oil and garlic and egg yolk can make a glimmering, thick aioli. Mixing hot stock into a cold roux so it won't make lumps or mixing cake ingredients in the right order-b.u.t.ter and sugar together first, then eggs, then an alternating mix of flour and milk-are but two of the grand mysteries of the kitchen we blindly believe in. And we believe because someone told us the recipes would work. And so, on faith, we tried them. And once we tried them, and we saw that they worked, we became believers even though we had no idea how they worked. We spread the word to others who then tried them on faith, too. They became believers. Entire culinary cultures have been built on this kind of faith and trust.

Maybe you want to argue that all of the magic of the kitchen can be explained away in the cold scientific light of day. It isn't G.o.d but yeast that makes bread rise. A properly braised short rib is the result of a predictable release of collagen in heated connective tissue, not some deity that believes a sticky, glistening sauce can teach us about the beauty of the human condition.

Fine. So let's move to something you can't use science to argue about. Can the cold facts of the natural world explain that magic moment that comes when everyone at the table has just settled in to eat? Or the one that comes just when the delirious rush of sharing a good meal has ended? We sit around like grinning, milk-drunk babies who've just pulled away from the breast. Laughing comes easy. People glow. Out of nowhere, you have compa.s.sion for the jerk who was bugging you before dinner, so you ask if he'd like seconds on the braised artichokes. You belong to everyone else at the table and they belong to you.

You can't create that kind of communion alone, and you can't create it without food. That one moment ought to be proof to anyone that something greater than us is at work. It's a big part of why I have faith, but it doesn't explain why I pray my a.s.s off every day. That's because it is the only way I have figured out not to have another drink. And trust me, no one wants me to have another drink.

Still, ever since that day in Alaska when I started praying, I have fought the complete embarra.s.sment that comes when I talk about it outside of a circle of people who feel the same way I do. I felt like it made me weak, somehow. The big intellectuals I knew would surely scoff. Opiate of the ma.s.ses and all that. It didn't help that I had grown up feeling the brunt of prejudice from people who use G.o.d to argue that I and my millions of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should have no children, no civil rights and no happy eternity. In our household, Katia is the skeptical one. She knows that my believing in G.o.d keeps me sober, and she doesn't argue with that. And sometimes, she suspects there's even more to it. Like maybe there is a higher power. "Well, I hope you're right," she'll say.

But why was I so gun-shy about talking about it openly? Why couldn't I be more like Mrs. Chase, who will tell you without a blink that G.o.d is behind her every move. In the year after Katrina, I would check in on her by phone, keeping track of how she was getting along. In every conversation, she told me straight up front and center that she prayed every day, and that she had a lot of work to do. But it would get done, she said. G.o.d would see to it.

Mrs. Chase believes in a G.o.d who has all the answers, and really wants what's best for her. This is a bold statement coming from a woman who grew up in a segregated country that would not allow her to vote or mix too much with white people. She is a woman who watched her city and Dooky Chase, the restaurant where she had been cooking for more than sixty years, drown mostly due to a greedy and corrupt government. But still she has faith. And she has the kind of faith I longed for: one that had been tested. In the ten years since my last drink, I had faced a lot of internal demons and few external ones. Maybe that was test enough. Maybe I just had to stop doubting my own experience regarding faith.

ONE STICKY MORNING nearly a year after Katrina, I went looking for Mrs. Chase. I wanted to see how the restaurant was coming along, if she thought she might reopen soon. But I was also hoping to learn more about G.o.d. I found her in her FEMA trailer, which had been set up on a side street across from Dooky Chase. The trailer was so small that her husband had to stand outside when she cooked. Mrs. Chase had an infected sore on her leg, and she had to ease herself slowly along a path made out of plywood to get from the trailer to the curb. It would have made sense for her to retire, to move into one of the refurbished houses her children owned in the neighborhood. The mold, the gouging by the contractors, the impossibility of getting her infected leg properly treated in a city where the health care system had all but collapsed-any one of those things would have made lesser women walk away.

I wanted to understand why she stuck it out, and how her faith got her through the devastation of Katrina. I wanted to see if through her story, I could find the strength to believe in my own. I asked her how she found the stamina to get back up when it all seemed so impossible. How did she not just crumble?

"The strong have feelings just like the weak, but they just don't show it," she said. Besides, she said, Katrina wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to her. She had lost a child.

Her beloved eldest daughter, Emily, her right hand and the woman most likely to carry on all the traditions and knowledge Mrs. Chase had acc.u.mulated, died giving birth to her eighth child in 1990. That child died a short time later after complications from the birth. The day after her daughter died, Mrs. Chase was scheduled to open the restaurant at eleven A.M. So she did. "I lost myself in the pots," she wrote in her memoirs. That day, I asked her why. "I could not put my sorrow on the whole world," she told me. "Life goes on, and that's what we have to understand with Katrina."

I pushed her for a better explanation. You don't come across eighty years' worth of courage very often. I needed to understand where her strength-her faith-came from. She didn't mind elaborating, using a baseball a.n.a.logy.

"I tell people all the time, I think G.o.d is just like a pitcher," she said. And He apparently favors the low, slow curveball.

"It's a fun thing to see. It's a hard thing to hit," she explained. "But if you work on hitting this low, slow curve, it's going over the fence. It's going out of here. So I just think that G.o.d pitches us a low, slow curve. But He doesn't want us to strike out. I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength."

But Katrina?

"I tell you, I think I had more tears in the gumbo pot than I had gumbo," she said. "But you just cry and you just keep moving. It's not fair to put your hurt on somebody else." And then she said something remarkable. Maybe G.o.d flooded New Orleans to show man his mistakes.

"When you saw those people floating around in water, you saw every mistake you made.You had too many people in this city who couldn't fend for themselves. Where were we? Why were we not directing these people?" she said. "The levees broke on us, but we had many warnings, many times before. Why were we not checking those levees out after each warning?"

Like anyone who was there, the images from those first few days still fill her head. She says she has heard people-her own neighbors, even-say G.o.d brought his wrath down on poor black people because they weren't living right. Or, they said, G.o.d just doesn't like people of color. After all, the rich white folks in the Garden District didn't get flooded out and didn't lose their family members and their homes. But Mrs. Chase sees it differently.

"Look at it this way," she told me as we sat in a back room at Dooky Chase. "If we would have been saved on this end, and the French Quarter and all the big, beautiful homes Uptown would have been destroyed, look what a predicament we would be in. We couldn't help them up."

Maybe the rich people were saved, she said, because they had the resources to help the poor people get back on their feet. If all the rich people had been washed away, no one would have been left to help the poor.

"Don't you see how good things work? No matter how bad it is, good things work."

Even now, when I'm on the floor, feeling sc.r.a.ped down to bare metal, I think about what she told me. And I try to follow her prescription: "Figure out what you have to do in life and then just go to work and do it. Look at your world as a beautiful world. And it is a beautiful world. It's just your job to make it a little bit better."

I figure I can do that. I can make the world a little bit better. They say religion is for people who are afraid of h.e.l.l and spirituality is for people who have been through it. Even though I haven't been through a hurricane or lost a daughter, I have had my own little trip to h.e.l.l. And I know I will have more trials. When I do, like Leah Chase and millions of other people on this earth, I will pray. Without shame and with an open heart.

ON HOLY THURSDAY, I made Mrs. Chase's gumbo z'herbes. It is a dish that requires faith. All recipes do, really. You have to trust the people who came before you, who burned a few things and threw out a few bowls of bad stuff in pursuit of a perfect dish. But in my interpretation of faith, whether recipe-based or soul-based, you have to have enough inner strength to change things up if you need to. G.o.d will send the directions, but you have to take the right steps.

The dish is served on Holy Thursday because for Catholics, that's the last day you get to eat a big meal before Easter. Catholics, my mother included, wouldn't eat meat on Good Friday. Those who hewed even closer to the faith would fast altogether. So you needed a good, meaty meal on Thursday to get you through to Sat.u.r.day noon, when people would start eating normally again. Some food historians tie gumbo z'herbes to the African-Caribbean dish callaloo, but there is some indication it really has its roots in the Lutherans who settled in southern Louisiana in the 1800s and made a green vegetable soup for Holy Thursdays.

There is often a point when I'm cooking a new recipe that I panic. Sometimes it's just for a second, when a sauce isn't thickening or a batter seems suspiciously thin. I often start by blaming the person who wrote the recipe, a.s.suming they didn't tell me that I need to whisk something for an extra few minutes or they left out an essential half cup of flour. Then, quickly, I turn the blame on myself for either hurrying through a step or doing something boneheaded like adding cayenne instead of paprika. I can be easily distracted, burning toast if the breakfast conversation is just too engaging. But I am also the kind of cook who can pull herself out of the culinary shame spiral pretty quickly, bravely plowing forward and hoping that some combination of good ingredients, strong kitchen fundamentals and a well-written recipe will allow me to pull off almost any dish.

Still, it was all I could do a few days before Easter to believe the thin, murky green swamp that filled my two biggest pots was going to taste any good at all.

My kitchen in Brooklyn is kind of a puffed-up galley, with a nice back door that opens to a patio. There is enough counter s.p.a.ce to make my friends in their tiny Chelsea apartments jealous of the setup, although those same counters elicit pity from my friends in the suburbs out West. I had plowed through Mrs. Chase's recipe, and my small kitchen told the tale. It was as if a chlorophyll bomb had gone off. The sink was covered with tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs from nine different greens, including carrot tops, collards and kale and a half head of lettuce I had in the fridge. Cutting boards held the remnants of ham, chopped brisket and andouille, smoked dark with pecan wood. In the two big pots, water seasoned with raw garlic and onions boiled. I had made a soft, brown roux in the grease from the hot sausage, and I had simmered a ham hock to make stock. I had pureed and pureed and pureed until everything was covered in green splatters, and the pots that once held ham stock now were filled with what smelled like a swamp with hints of forest fire.

Sara Roahen, an excellent cook and writer I met in New Orleans, spent some time cooking gumbo with Mrs. Chase. She recounts the experience in her fine, sweet book Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, which she wrote before and after Katrina. I called her when I was panicked over Mrs. Chase's gumbo recipe. There are several versions floating around, in Mrs. Chase's books and others. Sara's version begins with the warning that your kitchen will be a disaster. And she was right.

There I was, with two huge pots filled with muck. The thyme and salt and cayenne tasted raw and out of balance. It was too hot, maybe, or too bitter. I hadn't used Our Holy Mother of Lowry's Seasoning Salt, one of the great saints of the New Orleans spice rack. Maybe I used the wrong greens or should have added the chicken, like Sara advised.

"I think you just have to go with it," Sara said.

She was right. I said a little prayer and called people to the table. I had faith. Turns out the gumbo was awesome. It just needed time to come together.

THIS RECIPE IS my slightly tweaked version of Sara's recipe, which is a tweaked version of Mrs. Chase's. I have tasted both Mrs. Chase's and Sara's. They are both delicious, but different. Yours will be, too. This is cooking, not an a.s.sembly line. Just have a little faith in your own skill and in the experience of the cooks who went before you. Sara says that in every cookbook where the gumbo appears, the recipe requires an odd number of greens, say five or seven or nine, for luck. Don't get too worried about that. Mrs. Chase told Sara that the connection between the kinds of greens and luck isn't really that big a deal. Just select at least seven of the greens listed, although you can use what you have. But make sure the pile of greens seems like way too much to start.

Gumbo z'Herbes Gumbo z'Herbes Yield: Enough for a dozen or so people to have dinner, and maybe a little left over for the freezer. Yield: Enough for a dozen or so people to have dinner, and maybe a little left over for the freezer.

1 large or 2 small ham shanks or hocks At least 7 varieties of the following greens: 1 bunch greens, either mustard, collard or turnip or a 1 bunch greens, either mustard, collard or turnip or a combination of all three 1 bag fresh spinach or a box of frozen 1 small head cabbage 1 bunch carrot tops 1 bunch beet tops 1 bunch arugula 1 bunch parsley 1 bunch green onions 1 bunch watercress 1 head romaine or other lettuce 1 head curly endive 1 bunch kale 1 bunch radish tops 3 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped 3 medium yellow onions, roughly chopped head garlic, peeled, cloves kept whole 2 pounds fresh hot sausage (a local sausage called chaurice is best, but hot Italian without fennel works well) 1 pound andouille sausage 1 pound smoked pork sausage pound ham 1 pound beef stew meat 1 cup flour Vegetable oil as needed 3 teaspoons dried thyme 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper 3 bay leaves Salt to taste 2 cups cooked white rice teaspoon file powder (optional) 1. Place ham shanks or hocks in a large, heavy stockpot. Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer while you prepare the other ingredients.

2. Wash all greens thoroughly in salt water, making sure to remove any grit, discolored outer leaves, and tough stems. Rinse in a bath of unsalted water (a clean double sink works well for this).

3. Place half the greens, half the onions, and half the garlic in a heavy-bottomed stockpot or 3 to 4 gallon saucepan. Cover greens and vegetables with water and bring to a boil over high heat; reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 20 to 30 minutes, until greens are very tender. When they finish cooking, transfer them to a large bowl, using a slotted spoon, to cool. Repeat the process with the remaining greens, onions and garlic, doing it in two or three batches if necessary.

4. When all the greens have finished cooking, reserve the cooking liquid.

5. Place the fresh hot sausage in a skillet or medium-size saucepan and set over medium heat. Cook until rendered of fat and moisture. Remove the hot sausage with a slotted spoon and set aside. Reserve the fat.

6. While the hot sausage is cooking, cut the andouille and smoked sausage into -inch rounds and set aside. Cut the ham and the beef stew meat into -inch pieces and set aside.

7. In a meat grinder or a food processor, grind the greens, onion and garlic into a puree, adding cooking liquid to prevent the greens from getting too thick. Do this in batches.

8. Remove the ham shanks from their cooking liquid, reserving the liquid for stock. Once the shanks cool, pick and chop the meat and set it aside; discard the bones and the fat.

9. Pour the greens cooking liquid and ham stock into separate bowls. Using your largest pot, or the two stockpots in which you simmered the greens and the ham, mix everything together. (Divide the pureed greens, the sausages, the beef and the chopped ham equally between the two pots, if using two pots.) 10. Fill the pot or pots with equal parts ham stock and greens cooking liquid and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat.

11. Heat the skillet containing the hot sausage drippings over medium-high heat. With a wooden spoon, slowly but intently stir in the flour until well combined. If the mixture is very dry, add vegetable oil until it loosens some, making a tight paste that's still able to be stirred.

12. Continue to cook until the flour mixture begins to darken, stirring constantly. As Sara notes, you aren't going for a dark roux, but you do want the flour to cook. Courage is the key here. Don't be afraid to let it get dark.

13. When darkened and cooked, divide the roux between the two stockpots or put it into the single pot, dropping it in by spoonfuls and whisking to make sure that each is well incorporated.

14. Add thyme, cayenne, bay leaves and salt to taste.

15. Simmer for about an hour, or until the stew meat is tender, stirring quite often. Add more stock or water if it appears too thick.

16. Serve over white rice.

NOTE: File in its pure form is a bright green powder made from pounded sa.s.safras leaves. The Creoles and Cajuns picked it up from the Choctaw Indians, and used it as a spice and a thickener in the winter when okra wasn't available. If you like it, add it slowly at the end of cooking or even stir it into your own bowl at the table. Sara reports that Mrs. Chase told her, "It'll lump up on you" if you're not careful. Mrs. Chase's father used to grind sa.s.safras leaves for her, and she told Sara that Creoles always add file to their gumbo z'herbes, even if few cookbook recipes call for it. NOTE: File in its pure form is a bright green powder made from pounded sa.s.safras leaves. The Creoles and Cajuns picked it up from the Choctaw Indians, and used it as a spice and a thickener in the winter when okra wasn't available. If you like it, add it slowly at the end of cooking or even stir it into your own bowl at the table. Sara reports that Mrs. Chase told her, "It'll lump up on you" if you're not careful. Mrs. Chase's father used to grind sa.s.safras leaves for her, and she told Sara that Creoles always add file to their gumbo z'herbes, even if few cookbook recipes call for it.

THE LAST GOURMET SUPPER.

By Marisa Robertson-Textor From fastertimes.com

Last fall, the sudden demise of Gourmet Gourmet magazine sent a seismic shock throughout the food world. Of all the obituaries written for this iconic food magazine, perhaps the most poignant was this insider memory, written by one of the magazine's newest staffers. magazine sent a seismic shock throughout the food world. Of all the obituaries written for this iconic food magazine, perhaps the most poignant was this insider memory, written by one of the magazine's newest staffers.

Here's a dilemma: How do you have your Thanksgiving and eat it too? For me, the answer is to celebrate early, then head for warmer climes over the holiday itself. Imagine it: all your friends clamoring to join you at a family-style banquet without family-style irritations. There's no getting stuck at the kids' table. No Cool Whip. And most definitely no football. It's Thanksgiving for the Thanksgiving-lover-in a word, bliss.

But that bliss, officially known as Gobble Gobble Night, never would have been achieved without Gourmet Gourmet magazine. When I started fact-checking there five years ago, I was just another girl who loved to cook and thought she was pretty darn good at it-when she thought about it at all. During my first week, between making phone calls to price-check hotels in Rome and sending e-mails to establish the precise differences in aging techniques between tawny, ruby, and non-vintage Ports, I wandered the magazine's mazelike hallways feeling like the youngest ensign a.s.signed to the Stars.h.i.+p Enterprise. "Yes, but do you really braise it?" I'd hear a senior food editor ask with the sort of concern I'd always a.s.sociated with questions along the lines of, "Okay, but was it benign?" I had thought I loved food-thought I knew it-but clearly I didn't. Not at all. magazine. When I started fact-checking there five years ago, I was just another girl who loved to cook and thought she was pretty darn good at it-when she thought about it at all. During my first week, between making phone calls to price-check hotels in Rome and sending e-mails to establish the precise differences in aging techniques between tawny, ruby, and non-vintage Ports, I wandered the magazine's mazelike hallways feeling like the youngest ensign a.s.signed to the Stars.h.i.+p Enterprise. "Yes, but do you really braise it?" I'd hear a senior food editor ask with the sort of concern I'd always a.s.sociated with questions along the lines of, "Okay, but was it benign?" I had thought I loved food-thought I knew it-but clearly I didn't. Not at all.

To say that working at the magazine fed my culinary knowledge is like saying that going to elementary school endows you with a love of literature. In an ideal world, yes; but first you need to learn to read. There are disadvantages to being surrounded by professors when you're a fumbling fourth grader, but the advantages-like that particular brand of ferocious generosity one only encounters in chefs-more than compensate. And you never know where that generosity might lead you. Back in the fall of 2006, during a discussion of the best turkey roasting methods with my colleague Lillian, I told her about my vision for a best-of-all-possible-worlds Thanksgiving. "Come with me," she said promptly. "I have something for you." It turned out there was an extra Bell & Evans bird down in the test kitchen. Did I want it? I did. But that was only the beginning. "You need aromatics," Lillian announced firmly, pa.s.sing me several freezer bags packed with vegetable parings. "Wait, where are you going? Don't forget the turkey stock." One grocery bag was filled, then another. What ensign wouldn't seize the helm?

That first Gobble night was too much of everything: food, labor, stress. Everything, that is, except s.p.a.ce-my modest dining room couldn't accommodate fifteen guests. "Could. Not. Eat," says my brother, Alex, when he remembers that evening, gritting his teeth like a superhero whose powers are being taxed beyond measure. "No. Room. On. Table. For. Plate." But the food, oh, the food! People still reminisce over the b.u.t.ternut squash and creamed-spinach gratin. It should have taken me 1 hours to prepare-and as the person who fact-checked that recipe, you might say I had a moral obligation to clock in at under 75 minutes-but just slicing the squash into ribbons took me almost twice that long. Then again, what was two hours? Planning the menu, scouring a dozen Brooklyn markets for ingredients, set up, clean up, not to mention the cooking itself-a good week of my life went into that first dinner. Like any Herculean endeavor, it didn't seem worth it. But then, after the final guest departed and the final dish was put away, came the afterglow.

By the following year, I was proficient enough in the language of the recipes not simply to follow the instructions, but to antic.i.p.ate them: which vegetable would enter the pot next, when a hot liquid needed to cool off slightly before being incorporated into the remaining ingredients. That increased facility, combined with a Greek chorus of admonishments from the food editors-"Trust me, you don't need five vegetable sides." "Don't bother flavoring the whipped cream." "Outsource!"-made the second dinner far less demanding than its predecessor. (Although I realized I might have taken the outsourcing thing too far when my friend Daniel and his pals from Stockholm heroically carted six chairs and two enormous pots of caramelized-garlic mashed potatoes all the way from the West Village.) But these tactical advances-including turning my bedroom, the largest room in the apartment, into a makes.h.i.+ft dining room-didn't preclude new errors. Reasoning that I'd have more prep time if I held the dinner on a Sunday night, it never occurred to me that at 4 am Monday morning I'd still be in the kitchen, grimly rinsing pans.

Last year the guest list reached 25 people, but by that point the ritual was so familiar that it didn't occur to me to panic. And, in fact, there was only one tiny snag. Picking up my pre-ordered foie gras from a local shop the morning of the dinner, I realized I'd procured exactly that: a naked lobe of foie gras requiring hours of deveining, prepping, and seasoning. (If any of my friends noticed that their toasts with Sauternes gelee were in fact topped with chicken-liver mousse, they were kind enough not to mention it. Of course, some of them might have been relieved.) In the eternal dinner party battle between the immovable object of logistics and the irresistible force of pleasure, pleasure had triumphed. As I looked at my friends, their faces limned in gold by the flickering candlelight, something settled inside me. I had this night. I had them. And the unspoken corollary-the thing I didn't bother thinking about, because by now it was as natural as breathing-was that I had Gourmet Gourmet.

This September, when it came time to fact-check the Thanksgiving menus for the November issue, it took me just minutes to pick my favorites: roast turkey with cream gravy, bacon smashed potatoes, pumpkin gingerbread trifle. Perfect. What I didn't realize-what I still haven't quite realized-is that I was working on the last issue of Gourmet ever. Next Thanksgiving, as cooks across the country don their ap.r.o.ns, for the first time since before America entered World War II, the magazine won't be around to help.

How does one mourn the loss of a cultural inst.i.tution? It is a death, to be sure, but the grief is more amorphous, less straightforward, than what you feel for a person. It's like pa.s.sing by your childhood home, now in a strange family's hands; like finding out that the library where you whiled away your adolescence has been torn down. Something you loved dearly is gone forever, and it is beyond your power to get it back. Yesterday, you were part of 69 years of collective wisdom; today, you are meeting with HR; tomorrow, you are once again just another unemployed thirtysomething with a pa.s.sion for food. Ensign, where's your s.h.i.+p?

The only possible answer to that question lies in action. You've lost Gourmet Gourmet.What do you do? You cook, of course.You start small, with the dishes you've made so often you know them almost as well as their creators: Gina's seven-layer salmon bites, Paul's egg salad with fennel and lemon, Maggie's chocolate babka. Then, when you're ready, you slowly leaf through all your old issues, recalling not just the dishes you made but-more important-all the ones you had once planned to make. All the phantom culinary visions that, unlike Gobble Gobble Night, were never realized. Remember that snowy Sunday in February when you were too sleepy to bother with the coffee-glazed doughnuts? Or how you gave up on preparing the Danish menu from the March 2007 issue because you couldn't find five dinner guests who, like you, were part Danish? You didn't do it then, but dammit, you're doing it now. You're tackling all the things that frustrate you, the things you're still terrible at, like pastry dough and anything involving a mandoline. Because while it's true that, having lived with Gourmet Gourmet, you're now in a better position to live without it, there's a more enduring truth. You just don't want to.

RECIPE INDEX.

Roasted Garlic Guacamole with Help-Yourself Garnishes (from "Avocado Heaven"), pp..

Sardines in Escabeche (from "Sardines!"), pp..

Fancy Meatloaf (from "Potlucky"), pp..

Turkey Meatloaf (from "Potlucky"), pp..

Perfect French Fries (from "How to Make Perfect Thin and Crispy French Fries"), pp..

Roties a la Creme ou au Lait (from "Rather Special and Strangely Popular: A Milk Toast Exemplary"), pp..

Milk Toast (from "Rather Special and Strangely Popular: A Milk Toast Exemplary"), pp..

Betty Gilbert Roberts's Sour Cream Pound Cake (from "People of the Cake), pp..

Pan-Seared Trout with Mint-Cilantro Chutney (from "Does a Recipe Need to Be Complicated to Be Good?"), pp..

Gumbo z'Herbes (from "G.o.d Loves You and You Can't Do a Thing About It"), pp.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to all those who gave permission for written material to appear in this book. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. If an error or omission is brought to our notice, we will be pleased to remedy the situation in subsequent editions of this book. For further information, please contact the publisher.

"The FedEx Meal Plan" by Brett Martin. Copyright 2009 by Brett Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally appeared in GQ GQ, November, 2009.

"Forgotten Fruits" by Gary Paul Nabhan. Copyright 2009 by Gary Paul Nabhan. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in Saveur Saveur, October, 2009.

"And You Will Know Us By the Trail of German b.u.t.terb.a.l.l.s" by Jonathan Kauffman. Copyright 2009 by Village Voice Media. Used by permission of Village Voice Media. Originally appeared in Seattle Weekly Seattle Weekly on July 1, 2009. on July 1, 2009.

"Soul Food" by Amanda M. Faison. Copyright 2010 by 5280: Denver's Magazine 5280: Denver's Magazine. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in 5280: Denver's Magazine 5280: Denver's Magazine, April, 2010.

"The Need for Custom Slaughter" by Barry Estabrook. Copyright 2010 by Barry Estabrook. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared on politicsoftheplate.com, January 20, 2010.

Excerpt from the book Eating Animals Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran-Foer. First published in by Jonathan Safran-Foer. First published in The New York Times Magazine The New York Times Magazine, copyright 2009 by Jonathan Safran-Foer. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

"Attack of the Anti-Meat Crusaders!" by Lessley Anderson. Copyright 2010 by Lessley Anderson. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared on chow.com on January 15, 2010. on January 15, 2010.

"Dear Zagat: A Hearty Thanks for Your 30 Years of Service. Now Go Away." by Tim Carman. Copyright 2009 by Was.h.i.+ngton City Paper Was.h.i.+ngton City Paper. Used by permission of Was.h.i.+ngton City Paper Was.h.i.+ngton City Paper. Originally appeared in Was.h.i.+ngton City Paper Was.h.i.+ngton City Paper, September 18, 2009.

"El Bulli Gets Bested" by Carla Capalbo. Copyright 2010 by Carla Capalbo. Reprinted by permission of the author. Originally appeared on zesterdaily.com, June 1, 2010.

"Anonymous Online Reviews Affecting Twin Cities Eateries" by Rachel Hutton. Copyright 2009 by Village Voice Media. Used by permission of Village Voice Media. Originally appeared in City Pages City Pages on November 26, 2009. on November 26, 2009.

"Fried in East L.A." by Jonathan Gold. Copyright 2009 by Village Voice Media. Used by permission of Village Voice Media. Originally appeared in LA Weekly LA Weekly on November 26, 2009. on November 26, 2009.