Overnight pancakes.

For the past two weeks, this household has been in the sick of things, each of us weighed down by an assortment of pains and ailments, from migraines and colds to flus and sinus infections. I wish I could say that I have taken charge of our healing by simmering wholesome and restorative meals rich in love and nutrients. That would have been nice of me.

Last Wednesday the sick was so bad I skipped lunch and napped under my desk for an hour. The next day I took a sick day, and by the weekend I was sure I was going to die. I begged Nick to smother me, and when he wouldn’t I chastised him for not taking advantage of the out I had offered him. I tried to smother myself but the cat thought we were playing a game and ruined it.

By Monday this past week I was certain I had cracked some teeth coughing, so I made a dental appointment. The good news is the teeth are fine; the bad news is my sinuses are pretty angry and infected. The worst news is that my wisdom teeth are pretty much one with my skull now but they have to be removed so it sounds like it’s bone-saw time. That’s the worst time!

2013 has not been off to a good start. And now that I have managed to attain a functional balance of NyQuil, antibiotics and codeine, the baby has finally succumbed and is fevered with a face full of ick.

It’s times like these when I can’t fathom coming down off my prescription and cough syrup high to go to the grocery store. We are out of eggs. And we had a late night. So somewhere between rescuing the little guy from a coughing fit and the two of us passing out in the dark, I whisked together some flour, water, yeast, honey and salt for pancake batter. If all three of us woke up in the morning, we would have pancakes. It would be a kind of reward.

 

This recipe makes 6 pancakes, and will serve between two and three people, depending on how hungry you are, or how much bacon your version of Nick decided to make. I like these topped with berries, or with chestnut cream. Because they are more like fried bread than flapjacks, you could take savoury liberties with them – try them with sour cream and apple sauce, or with cottage cheese and thinly sliced scallions, if that pleases you.

As a note – the berries on these were a mix of a pound of frozen strawberries, a tablespoon of cornstarch, a tablespoon of honey, and half a teaspoon of vanilla, simmered until the berries softened and released their juices and the whole thing thickened pleasingly.

Lazy pancakes

• 1/2 tsp. dry yeast
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. honey
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup water
• 3 tbsp. vegetable or canola oil
• 1 tbsp. butter

Whisk ingredients together in a bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and stick it in the fridge overnight.

30 minutes to an hour before you’re ready to cook, take the bowl out of the fridge and let it rest at room temperature. Heat the oil and butter in a large pan over medium-high heat.

Gently spoon your pancakes into the pan, taking care not to stir the batter. Cook until edges appear crispy and bubbles form through each cake, about two minutes. Flip, and cook an additional two minutes, or until golden and puffed.

Serve hot, with a compote of berries, or maple syrup, or sour cream and apple sauce.

Into the pantry: Lentil Sloppy Joes

Nick and I grew soggier in 2012, rounder and softer than ever before and at the end of it, we felt so tired. I can’t recall a vegetable in December that I didn’t eat coated in sauce, and every time I had a feeling I covered it in cheese and chased it with a handful of chocolate. So while we finished 2012 in a food coma, we’re starting 2o13 a little lighter.

I made a critical error in weighing myself the morning after an epic New Year’s Eve feast. (Never do that.) The sum of every bad choice I made this year is much higher than I’d anticipated, but that’s okay – it sets the bar for success this year lower. I have been fretting over what I am going to do with my life – 30 is fast approaching and good lord, what have I done? – but the weight-loss excuse buys time. “I had to lose 20 pounds!” I’ll say, and then maybe no one will notice that I still haven’t lived up to that potential people used to threaten me with.

If you are wondering what to do with your life, I suggest starting with a simple, hearty meal. Sloppy Joes remind (reminds?) me of meals on weeknights in a time when bad choices weren’t measured by weight, that I would always eat without fussing, and that would more often than not finish with a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream from a bucket (heavy on the strawberry for me, please) and maybe a drizzle of chocolate sauce. This grown-up version eschews meat and ketchup, but is no less satisfying … perhaps more so, because it’s delicious but not to the point of discomfort. 2013. We can do this.

Lentil Sloppy Joes

• 1 cup green, brown or French lentils
• 1 bay leaf
• 4 tbsp. olive oil
• 2 stalks celery, finely chopped
• 2 carrots, finely chopped
• 1 small onion
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 lb. mushrooms, finely minced (or whizzed until almost puréed in a food processor or blender)
• 1 tsp. smoked paprika
• 1 tsp. chili powder, such as ancho chili powder
• 1/2 tsp. mustard powder
• 1/2 tsp. ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
• 1/2 tsp. dried thyme
• 1 x 5.5 oz. can tomato paste
• 1 cup water
• 2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp. honey
• Salt to taste

Simmer lentils and bay leaf in 2 cups of lightly salted water until tender, 20 to 30 minutes. Drain and rinse, then set aside. Discard bay leaf.

Meanwhile, cook celery, carrot, and onion in olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot over high heat until glistening, cover, reduce heat to medium, and cook for 10 minutes. Remove lid, add garlic, and cook until the mixture is caramelized and reduced by two thirds, an additional 15 to 20 minutes. The longer you cook this, the sweeter it will get.

Add mushrooms, and cook until moisture has mostly dissipated and the bottom of the pan is dry. Add spices, thyme and tomato paste, stir until combined, then add lentils. Add the cup of water and the apple cider vinegar and honey. Stir to combine, and cook until the mix begins to bubble. Serve over lightly toasted sourdough or buns.

Eggnog chocolate pudding.

Three days before Christmas, can you believe it? Where did the fall go? Are you ready for these next few days? I think I lost a few months somewhere, and I really should be packing in some last-minute holiday shopping, but instead I’m sitting in my new living room, listening to the rain against my window and the dishwasher – no sweeter music than the sound of your first dishwasher cleaning dishes you’d otherwise be scrubbing on Saturday – and the cat and baby batting ornaments off the tree. We are festive, sort of.

The baby is more festive than the rest of us, and he has taken to holiday eating with vigor and enthusiasm. No truffle, cookie or eggnog escapes his sticky grasp, and I’ve stepped in crumbs and smears and tacky patches of floor all over the apartment – his theory seems to be that if he can’t see you, then you can’t know what snack he’s stolen. With his reach he’s just shy of three feet tall, but he can get at anything, and has not figured out yet that his silence works against him – he’s only quiet when he’s up to no good. That goes for all of us, but I am not big on self-discipline.

He loves eggnog, and since introducing him to it we have found it challenging to get him to drink anything else. But he is starting to understand the concept of dessert, and that if he endures his bowl of broccoli and carrots, there might be something sweet in it for him. And so, on occasion we throw him a bowl of something sugary and then there is no happier person in the world. Last night, after a day of squishy stomach and bouts of whining, I made him a bowl of eggnog pudding, warm and creamy and exactly what a little boy needs after a big bowl of mushy green despair. I gave him a taste as he crawled by while I was making it, and he scaled the cupboards and tried desperately to climb up my leg for more.

 

This recipe is the easiest thing in the world, but it is very rough – the eggnog I buy is very sweet, so I have never had to add sugar. Sweeten to your taste with maple syrup, if you have it, or a bit of brown sugar if you prefer. If your baby can hold his liquor, a tablespoon of rum or bourbon is very nice.

Chocolate eggnog pudding

• 2 cups eggnog (not light or reduced fat)
• 4 tbsp. cornstarch
• 3 tbsp. cocoa
• 1 tbsp. spiced dark rum (optional)
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• Pinch salt
• 1 tbsp. butter

In a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat, whisk together half a cup of the eggnog and cornstarch until a slurry forms and no lumps remain, then add the cocoa, whisking again, before adding the remaining eggnog, rum, and vanilla. Maintain medium heat, and whisk continuously until the mixture thickens until just bubbling – don’t bring to a rolling boil (or you’ll end up with a gross scrambly egg pudding which ew). Once mixture has thickened – it should coat the back of a spoon – remove from heat, season with salt, and whisk in butter. Pour into four ramekins, cover with plastic, and cool until set, 1 to 2 hours.

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! I hope your next few days are warm and delicious.

Toad in the Hole.

We’re moving next week, and we’re hiring movers, which we have never done before. We can’t really afford them, but I figure it’s the cost of saving our marriage and friendships, because while our new building has an elevator, our current one doesn’t and we’re on the third floor. This, and the fact that it’s Buy Nothing Day, have reminded me that we have too much stuff – so much stuff, and I wonder how much of it we would even miss if it was gone. You’d be surprised at how many chicken figurines and plastic dinosaurs two people can cram into fewer than 1,000 square feet.

Or maybe you wouldn’t?

One of the things we don’t need to spend so much on is take-out, which we’ve been eating too much of because my job is less a job and more a way of life, and because the dishes are dirty and one of us has to clean them and it isn’t going to be me. But those are excuses, and I know that. I am never so busy that I can’t just take half an hour and make dinner; that I’m doing so little of that is laziness. During the Depression, no one got to say “Uggggh, work sucked today, let’s just get wine and Thai food and watch dumb crap on TV with our pants off.” They might have wanted to, but they turned their powdered milk and canned tomatoes and elbow macaroni into a dish that would span four meals because that’s just what you did.

We need a little more “that’s just what you do” and less “eff, I just don’t feel like it.” I need to stop using fatigue and ennui as an excuse.

It’s Friday, and I probably could have gotten away with just calling in for sushi, but I wanted something homemade, something made out of stuff I have in the cupboards and fridge. So here’s a dish I’ve made a million times, one that won over Nick in the very beginning when he was just a fetus of a husband, back when we were young and never watched TV because we had too many roommates hogging the remote and no cable anyway. It’s something I made here a few years ago, but that has evolved and grown into a better dish – why did I never think to add cheese before?! Anyway, here’s Toad in the Hole: Version 2012. It’s an eggy, pancakey thing – basically Yorkshire pudding with stuff baked in – and it’s good with salad, but it’s better if you serve it with onions and cabbage fried with bacon. Because what isn’t?

Make it vegetarian by folding mushrooms and shallots fried in butter into the batter. Use what you have, but don’t make a special trip to the store. It’s best if your milk and eggs are at room temperature, but it’s not the end of the world if they aren’t.

• 2 tbsp. butter or two strips of bacon, chopped
• 2 to 4 sausages
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup milk or buttermilk
• 4 eggs
• 1 tsp. Dijon mustard
• Pinch salt and pepper
• 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese

Preheat your oven to 425°F.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, milk or buttermilk, eggs, mustard, and salt and pepper until smooth. Set aside.

In a cast-iron pan over medium-high heat, melt butter or cook bacon. If you don’t have a cast iron pan, stick a pie plate in the oven as it preheats.

Melt butter or cook bacon. If cooking bacon, scoop out of the pan and drain it on paper towel. Brown sausages in melted butter or bacon grease – it doesn’t matter if they are cooked through, but you want them brown on all sides. Remove from the pan and slice into bite-sized pieces.

Add bacon, if using, and sausages back to the pan, or to the heated pie plate (if using), pour batter over top, sprinkle with cheese and stick in the oven for 25 minutes, until batter has puffed and turned golden. Slice and serve immediately with mustard or sour cream.

 

Corn waffles.

Do you ever feel like someone just reached into your head and squished your brain like a giant stress ball, and that it’s taking forever to regain its shape? I’m all out of smarts. I barfed the last of them onto the table at today’s job interview and now I’m just sitting around, watching remixes of Gangnam Style on YouTube with my mouth hanging open.

The sorry sight of me in my pajamas looking lobotomized in the evening is becoming too common, and is the one drawback to the sudden increase in interviews I’ve had lately. I’m drained. The average hour-long job interview is preceded by at least eight hours of performance anxiety and trying to remember all the stuff I’ve ever done at work while wondering what compelled me to get this stupid haircut that I have no idea how to style.

The interview is then followed by five days of questioning, of wondering “WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!” and doubting all of my life choices. I’ve gone through this eighty-thousand times since April. Was my mother right? Should I have learned a trade? Would I have owned a home by now?

Awkward first Internet dates might be less fraught.

To remedy the constant feeling of mental stupor, I’ve been dragging people into my dining room and forcing them to entertain me in exchange for food. This provides me with opportunities to do something that isn’t worrying, while also allowing Nick and I to interact with people who have verbal skills and whose pants we are not responsible for changing. (On the upside, I’ve been able to relate to the baby on an intellectual level lately. We both watched a Baby Einstein DVD all the way through without blinking today.)

This past week, with corn season underway and my friend Missy’s desire for fried chicken and waffles at an all-time high, we invited both Missy and Greg over for a weeknight dinner party and ate fried meat served on carbs and drizzled with maple syrup and hot sauce until we felt no more feelings but fullness. They talked and we laughed and everyone felt okay about life as we slumped onto the couches afterward.

That sounds weird, doesn’t it? The chicken, waffles, hot sauce, and syrup combo? It does here in Canada, because until recently that combo was only available to us through our TV screens via Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. I promise you that it’s delicious. It works for reasons I am not even sure I can explain.

I mostly wanted to tell you about the waffles though. They have corn in them, and the kernels pop in your mouth as you bite down on them, and they’re sweet. Some people think corn is a vegetable, so a plate of waffles is practically a square meal (regardless of the shape of your waffle iron). Well, maybe not. But they’re quick and you can have them in the time it takes to complain about not knowing what to make for dinner. You’ll be back to watching PSY videos online in no time.

(Serves three to four.)

• 2 cobs corn (or 1 cup frozen corn kernels)
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 1 tbsp. maple syrup

Cut the corn from the cob. If you would prefer not to get it all over everywhere, cut the corn into a bowl. Once the kernels are off the cob, scrape the cobs with the knife to get any remaining kernel bits and corn juice into the bowl as well.

Sift the dry ingredients onto the corn kernels. In a separate bowl, whisk together the liquids. Stir the liquids into the dry/corn mixture and stir until no flour lumps remain.

Heat the waffle iron according to your waffle iron’s instructions. Spray the thing down with canola oil, top and bottom.

Pour batter into waffle iron, drop the lid, and cook until waffles have stopped steaming, and are golden and fluffy. Don’t lift the lid during cooking, or else they flatten out and get floppy.

Serve hot from the iron, doused in syrup. Or topped with chicken. Whatever gets you where you need to go.

Potato-crusted halibut cheeks.

The trouble with the Internet is that you can never really be sure that what you’re being given is the truth. It’s easy to zoom in and capture the beauty of a plate of cookies without all the mess that’s around it, or to choose long strings of delicate, pretty words when one’s situation might be better described more … colourfully. On the one hand, I tell you about risotto because I love it, but on the other hand, I’m still paying off my student loans and I lost my job but still have to make rent and rice and chicken stock and cheese go a long way toward filling a belly; risotto never made anyone feel badly about her lot.

Most food blogs would have you believe that everything is idyllic, all the time – we write as if MFK Fisher would be on her way over with chilled rosé and a spare page in her next manuscript for our quiche or bread or pound cake. A certain amount of this is contrived, because the point is to get you to want to sit down with us. We want you to like us, and to tell your friends about us. This is marketing, to various degrees, but it is not inherently dishonest.

When I zoom my lens in on a plate of food, it’s both because I want you to see it and because I don’t want you to see that I keep spilling things on the tablecloth so it’s stained pretty much anywhere I’d put a plate down but my only other tablecloth is plaid and meant for Christmastime but it went into the dryer even though it wasn’t supposed to and is now misshapen and faded. And I accidentally ruined the finish on the table because I still don’t understand which cleaning product to use for which task, so I need a tablecloth, or place mats, or something.

I’m broke. But, like the banner says – well fed. And even though it’s always messy here and I screen my calls for bill collectors, I can climb out onto the roof of my building and eat dinner while the sky turns orange and then pink before the sun disappears behind the mountains. And sometimes I’m maudlin and feel sorry for myself, but then I find halibut cheeks – which are the cheapest and most delicious part of a halibut – to crust and fry, and a new brand of booze sends me a case of freebies and my favourite stretch pants are clean and folded and waiting for me.

Sometimes a visit to the garden the day after it’s rained yields the crispiest red and green lettuce and sorrel I’ve had all season, the kind of greens that only need oil and lemon for dressing.

I might not be selling a lifestyle (though if I was, it would be the opposite of GOOP’s which should count for something), but I hope I’m selling the idea that there is good in even these bleakest of days. The job will come, the bills will get paid. I will lose 20 pounds. But right now, we have a few pieces of fish, a salad of greens fresh from the ground, a partial view of the mountains and English Bay from the roof, and nothing lasting to complain about.

These are good. That is a piece of information from the Internet that you can be sure is true.

(Serves two. If you can’t find cheeks, cubes of your local white fish will work just fine.)

• Oil, such as grapeseed or canola
• 1/2 lb. halibut cheeks
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour or cornstarch
• 2 tsp. Old Bay Seasoning
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1/2 cup potato flakes (dry instant mashed potatoes)
• Salt

In a pan over medium-high, heat enough oil to coat the bottom of a heavy-bottomed (such as cast-iron) pan.

Meanwhile, mix flour and Old Bay. Dredge halibut cheeks in this. I find the most effective way to do this is to shake the flour mixture and cheeks in a paper or plastic bag – here in British Columbia, our BC Liquor Store bags are perfect for this.

Coat floured pieces of fish in beaten egg, then dredge on both sides with potato flakes. Fry for two to three minutes on each side, until golden and crispy. Sprinkle with salt and serve hot, with sauce for dipping. I prefer tartar sauce (with pretty much everything), but go with what you like.

Disclosure: I got free drinks.

If you’d like a summery beverage to go with your cheeky bites, American Vintage Hard Iced Tea is pretty all right. It’s got a true tea flavour, but with a not-subtle boozy punch. If you’re fond of any of the canned Jack Daniels lemonade drinks, you’d like these. I don’t know how reliable I can be about a review of free alcohol, because FREE ALCOHOL, but they are a kind company and sent me samples at the precise moment when the urge to drink my feelings was strongest. This endears me to them, and a result I encourage you to try their product if you enjoy coolers. They don’t have a website (what? Is it not 2012?), but here’s a fairly thorough review I can agree with.

Making rainbow pasta at Project Space.

On East Georgia here in Vancouver, just up the block from Phnom Penh, a lot of little art spaces are starting to appear beside the lot of little restaurants I have long enjoyed. One of these is Project Space, a bookshop/art studio/everything-space run by the fabulous folks behind OCW Magazine, who have kindly published my words over the past five or six years.

For the past few days (and tomorrow), Project Space has been home to Summer School, a series of free classes hosted by artists Erin Jane Nelson and Ming Lin. So, because I’m there any time someone wants to combine art with something I can eat, today I went back to school.

The class was led by Ming Lin, who taught us to make rainbow pasta. Natural dyes are a passion of Lin’s, and food is an obvious medium for the exploration of these.

Making pasta is easy. For this class, we poured three cups of all-purpose flour into a pile on the table. We dug a well into the centre of the pile, and cracked an egg into it. We added salt, beat the egg gently in the well, then added about one tablespoon of puréed vegetables – either spinach, beet, or carrot. We’d then continue stirring, this time gradually folding flour into the the mix. When the dough began to form a ball, we’d pull it from the well and knead it, incorporating more flour until the dough was firm but pliable and no longer sticky. The dough went into the fridge for 15 to 20 minutes.

The same pile of flour lasted three rounds of this, and I ended up with three colourful balls of pasta dough, each time re-piling the flour, adding egg and salt, stirring, then adding a spoonful of purée.

After resting in the fridge, the dough was ready to be rolled. At this point, I’d recommend the use of a pasta roller, unless you have the upper-body strength of someone over the age of eight. I do not, but no machine was available, so I rolled my pasta out with an empty wine bottle. Though the idea is to get your sheet of dough as thin as possible, mine was thicker than if I had run it through a pasta machine, which made the boiled noodles thicker and chewier than I prefer. But that’s okay.

Some people trimmed their pasta into long strips. That’s how I did mine, as fresh strands of pasta tossed with browned butter and grated Grana Padano combine to form one of those perfect, simple dishes we ought to make more of. Others were more creative (and patient), and attempted to fold their pasta into bow-ties and penne.

Our teacher cut hers into tiny squares perfect for a pot of soup.

I ended up with a pile of purple and orange noodles, enough for two people to enjoy a small plate of pasta each. I boiled it for about three minutes, then tossed it in a pan with butter and cheese and chopped fresh chilies, and then scattered parsley over top.

Pasta-making was a pleasant diversion, and a reminder that a small amount of effort can yield delicious results. Why not dawdle over a bit of dough the next cloudy day and treat yourself to something simple and delicious? I hope it rains tomorrow, as I’d like to purée some chilies for a batch of dough and see what happens. What’s your perfect pasta? I’d love your tips and recipes. Bonus points for butter and cheese, obviously.

Strawberry lemon pancakes.

If last year’s strawberries – mouth-puckering and tannic – were the bitter embodiment of everything wrong with last summer’s weather, then this year’s fat, sweet berries have more than made amends. I can’t tell if I’m sunburned or turning into a red Violet Beauregard, I’ve eaten so many strawberries – handfuls and handfuls every time I’ve passed the fridge this past week. Berries dipped in sugar, berries sprinkled with cracked black pepper, berries melted into caramel and crushed into smoothies and boiled into jam.

I’m not tired of them, and raspberry season is already here. But we have to finish these before I can move on to a new berry – I am aware that this is the best problem a person can have.

So this morning we had pancakes.

There’s a breakfast place in New Westminster I liked to go to called The Jiffy Wiffy Waffle House. It’s changed, cleaned up, and isn’t the delightfully dodgy waffle purveyor it once was, but in its (my?) waffly prime, I would go there and order the waffle with peaches or berries baked right in. This was a novel idea, at the time – maybe it still is, because the last time I tried to do that here I burned frozen raspberries between the grooves of the waffle press and it took forever to scrub the thing clean. Don’t press fruit in your waffle iron unless you know what you’re doing, I guess.

Anyway. I like fruit baked into carby things. Who wouldn’t? And these pancakes, thin and crisp and lemony, topped with sliced fresh berries, whipped cream, and this strawberry caramel? It’s like breakfast strawberry shortcake, which is the embodiment of everything right with this summer in Vancouver at this very moment.

(Makes eight pancakes.)

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup cornmeal
• 2 tbsp. sugar
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 lemon, zest and juice
• 2 cups milk
• 3 tbsp. melted butter
• 1 lb. fresh strawberries, hulled and diced

In one bowl, stir together flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl, whisk together eggs, lemon zest and juice, milk, and one tablespoon of butter. Stir in diced strawberries.

In a large skillet heated over medium heat, pour half of the remaining butter into the pan and turn to coat. When it begins to sizzle, pour in four equal portions of batter, turning once the edges of each pancake have started to look crisp and bubbles have formed on the surface of each cake. Turn, cook another one to two minutes, until golden on the bottom. Repeat until you’re out of batter.

Serve with fresh berries, whipped cream if you’re feeling indulgent, and this strawberry caramel I keep talking about if you feel like you’ve sweated away enough calories already this week and therefore deserve it.

If you end up with more pancakes than you can eat, simply cool them completely on a wire rack, and then stack them between sheets of wax paper, stick them in a bag, and freeze them. You can pop them in the toaster as you need them. They are way better than Eggos.

Picnics and bacon-wrapped garlic scapes.

All of a sudden, two layers of clothes are too many layers of clothes, and my toes are naked and touching the grass, and I’m drinking wine in parks and getting dirty looks from the other mothers for all my drinking wine in parks. Summer finally landed in Vancouver yesterday, so picnic season began in earnest this afternoon.

I have written about the joy of picnics here before but I am getting older and with age has come a tendency to repeat myself, and also to assume that what I say bears repeating. Take yourself on a picnic. Bring a friend, and a bottle of wine, and something to nibble on, and whittle away the afternoon, or just languorously pass your lunch hour (bottle of wine optional in that instance, unless you work from home). All you need is a patch of grass and a bit of bread and cheese.

And garlic scapes, if you can find them. Even better if you can grow them. Wrap them in bacon, and eat them outside.

Bacon-wrapped garlic scapes

• 24 garlic scapes
• 8 strips bacon
• Coarse salt
• Pepper

Preheat your oven to 425°F. Lightly grease a rimmed baking sheet.

Trim scapes at the bud, leaving eight to 10 inches of the stalk. (I left the buds on some of the shorter scapes, and the flowers inside were a little fluffy, but not unbearable if you’re used to finding cat hair in everything.) Bundle scapes in threes, wrapping each as tightly as possible with the bacon.

Sprinkle each bundle with a few flecks of coarse salt, then with freshly ground pepper.

Bake for 25 minutes, until the bacon is brown and looks crisp. Flip the bundles halfway through. Delicious served hot, but also pretty nice eaten cold, in the shade, on the grass.

 

 

A maple-scented pudding and a quiet moment alone.

It’s finally quiet, except for the squeak-bark of some cat-infuriating miniature dog or giant rodent on its leash and squatting beneath the wilted rhododendron bush beside the street. Nick is out for a nerdy night of board games with his friends. The baby is sleeping. I have sent out all the resumés I feel like sending out for today, and am no longer wearing pants (as is my preference). There are dried smears of yogurt and vegetable purée all over everything including the washable high chair I keep not washing, but I am not going to let that be my problem. That is why I have Nick.

We are spending a lot of time together now that neither of us is required at an office every day, and though the ratio of arms to babies is now 4:1, I’m still finding myself busy most of the time. There are cover letters to write and my resumé to tweak for each job application. Every time I click “submit” or “send” on some application I panic that I accidentally typed the bad words I’m always thinking, or that I used the wrong homonym, or that I spelled the word “editor” with two Ds.

There are meals to make: minimally spiced purées for the baby and interestingly spiced lunches and dinners for the diabetic, who answers “I’m not really excited about that” to most of what I suggest we eat. We keep producing dirty laundry. I spend a lot of time shaving my legs in case someone calls for a last-minute interview and there’s no time to find or buy pantyhose. I always have to go to the store.

But when there is no one around to bug me, I eat pudding.

The surest way to ensure that no one else touches my pudding is to make it with tapioca.

Stirring a sweet-smelling pot of goo can be relaxing, helping to erase the little panics and trifles that so often take up the days. The goo will burble softly, in a way that is wholly unlike something tedious like oatmeal or hot cereal (which splatters and plops and lacks euphony). You can make pudding for other people, and sometimes I do, but a small amount of pudding is the sort of easy indulgence that suits a night alone, in a room barely lit by a lamp in the corner that’s just bright enough to read a book beside.

The tapioca pudding recipe I like to use is at Simply Recipes, though once you make it the recipe will stick in your head forever (it’s that easy). I don’t know enough people who like tapioca pudding to have ever made a full batch, so I can tell you that a half-batch works quite nicely – it will make enough to fill four ramekins or two soup bowls (I always eat one serving warm, and then another much later after it’s been in the fridge for awhile).

I am not going to bother reprinting the recipe here as it’s all right there, but I will tell you that I make a few changes.

• Instead of white sugar, I use maple syrup, and rather than add it after the pot comes to a boil, I add it at the beginning. It’s less sweet this way, but more complex. If you don’t have maple syrup, use honey, or brown sugar.
• At the end, rather than add a drop of vanilla extract, I like a scrape of half of one vanilla bean.

When you are making something that is just for you, use good ingredients (tapioca costs so little anyway) – you will be more inclined to savour if you use the good stuff, and it will be the good kind of eating alone (there is a bad kind of eating alone, which I also enjoy, but for that just use the cheap stuff).

This is a good for-now recipe, for while we’re still not into the abundant-fruit season. Do you realize that in just a few short weeks and we’ll be having conversations like this one over lightly sugared local strawberries? And reading our books in patches of summer sunlight. I can’t wait.