Food mysteries of the South Coast of Massachusetts

Delectable Portuguese custard tarts surrounded by barely edible cookies

Interesting and mysterious to me, the juxtaposition of grimy ethnic mill towns and beautiful WASP beach communities you find in this part of Massachusetts. Interesting and somewhat less mysterious, at least if you've read Cheerful Money, that the best food is found in the grimy ethnic mill towns.

I volunteered to cook another summer house dinner the other night and my brother-in-law Chris took me to New Bedford (grimy) to stock up at Sid Wainer, the great specialty market he discovered when he was living in the area. This dark and cavernous place carries all manner of spices, breads, anchovies, exotic fresh vegetables, jellies, chutneys, and imported cheese, but is situated in the most depressing of strip malls. And, I'm telling you, the South Coast of Massachusetts boasts some depressing strip malls. We went to Fall River the other day, and the words Fall River now make my skin crawl -- and not just because Lizzie Borden lived there.

At Sid Wainer, I bought cheeses -- from Spain, Italy, Wisconsin and upstate New York -- as well as an incredible pomegranate-lime jelly to serve with them. You can't buy cheeses and condiments like this at the Wareham Shaw's, where vacationers usually shop. Why not? So strange.

Mostly gone within 20 minutes

After visiting Sid Wainer, we went to a fish market and bought bluefish for $3.69 per pound.  I almost didn't want to buy such scarily cheap fish, but did. At a nearby Portuguese grocery, I acquired the gorgeous cookies and custard tarts posted at top. Lots of enticing Portuguese restaurants, bakeries, and butchers in this area. I want to explore.

An odd grilling technique, but it works.

Back in the beautiful WASP beach community with groceries from the grimy ethnic mill town, I repeated the bluefish dish I made in Cape Cod last week: cover the filets in mustard, lemon and breadcrumbs, grill for 40 minutes. It wasn't as delicious this time, but it wasn't bad, and I served it with my version of creamed corn. (Spicy creamed corn: Scrape corn from cob, soften chopped shallots in butter, add corn and fry, stir in Thai red curry paste and coconut milk, cook until bubbly, add lime juice and cilantro, salt to taste.) There was a moment when I thought the meal was going to be a disaster, but it turned out okay. Maybe too many strong flavors on one plate, but not a disaster.

The Portuguese custard tarts: huge hit! Very similar to the Chinese custard tarts you get in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bakery, but denser, sweeter, less eggy. Soggier crust, better filling.

But once the tarts were gone we were left with a mountain of awful, chalky, stale cookies. Later, I found a gang of children playing blackjack with a plate of the Portuguese cookies in the middle of the table. The loser had to eat them.

Subset of the kid mafia playing cards

I have to read The Big House

Kyocera ceramic knife -- you need one.

With no wireless, I can't keep up with this vacation blogging! There's only so much Dunkin' Donuts coffee a woman can drink.

Alright, deep breath.

My husband's family has owned and loved the same Massachusetts beach property for several generations, property that has been divided and now comprises four summer houses for various branches of the family and a fifth that is the year-round residence of a cousin. The property is lovely, heavily wooded and threaded with trails. It has its own stretch of rocky beach. There are outdoor showers, a swing set, screened-in porches, hummingbirds, and many mosquitos. The kids get here and run off in a pack of cousins and aren't heard from until someone idly mentions she might be willing to take the boys to see Captain America at which point suddenly I am thronged and regretful.

Cooking is done for a crowd and people volunteer for meals. The other day I produced a modest dinner: potato chips with onion soup dip, burgers, cole slaw, and s'mores bars (baked by Isabel.) My in laws are not really into elaborate food and I try not to overinvest. I succeeded, perhaps too well. I wasn't exactly bursting with pride at that dinner. As always, everyone loved the s'mores bars.

Friday, Isabel and I drove out to the Cape Cod summer home of her good friend Juliet, whose mother is my good friend Lisa.  We swam in the sea, swam in a pond, shopped in shops, and then Lisa and I cooked for her extended family. As the menu took shape, it became clear that Lisa's family is very into elaborate food. We made negronis and served grilled bluefish with mustard and lime, scalloped oysters, salad, corn roasted with agave and soy sauce, and there was a lasagna for the kids. Dinner was late, loud, drunken, and delicious.  As usual, my photograph doesn't do the food, people, or anything else, justice.

It was fun, really! 

I'd never cooked or eaten bluefish before, and was very pleased with the recipe, taken from a Cape Cod cookbook on Lisa's shelf. You put the fillets in a foil pan, smother in mustard and lemon juice, then cover in bread crumbs, and grill for 40 minutes. I liked it so much I'm making it tonight for my in laws.

For dessert: another batch of s'mores bars.

Thank-you, Anne Thornton.

Sunday, Isabel and I drove to Boston to make a pilgrimage to Flour, the bakery owned by Joanne Chang, the author of Flour, a newish cookbook we like a lot.

Good bakery in desolate-on-Sunday neighborhood

We got there 8 minutes before it closed. I didn't even have to ask her -- Isabel jumped out of the car while I parked to be sure we got an order in. My girl.

Hazelnut cookie was best.

She bought a hazelnut cookie, an oreo, and a raspberry crumb bar. The hazelnut cookie was unbelievably good, the oreo tasted just like the ones we've made from the cookbook (amazing), and the raspberry crumb bar was tasty. Like Baked, Flour is a homestyle bakery -- a place you go to buy high quality treats you could conceivably and easily make at home, especially when the owners publish an excellent cookbook.

Coincidentally, Flour is just around the corner from Sportello, a Barbara Lynch restaurant. Lynch wrote a wonderful book I cooked through last year -- Stir -- and since Sportello was just about to open for dinner, we went.

And such small portions

I'm hesitant to say anything negative because I'm having a very happy vacation and we loved Stir, but, okay, twist my arm. We were the first ones in Sportello and there were paper towels all over the bathroom floor, the trash basket was overflowing, and everything on the menu was a little too expensive. Maybe a lot too expensive. Isabel's flat pasta with bolognese sauce cost $24. My porcini ravioli cost $25. The salad was, if I remember correctly, $14. All good, not great. Maybe that's what it costs to keep a restaurant afloat, and maybe this was an off night. I don't know.

Anyway, I still recommend the cookbook.

Sportello is very handsome and very white.

Travels, part 1

Pilgrimage

The photo is of Di Fara Pizzeria in Brooklyn, New York, but this wireless connection is brought to you by the Dunkin' Donuts in Marion, Massachusetts. That's how far I've traveled and fallen behind.

 I don't know exactly when or why the idea was first planted in my head, but I have wanted to go to Di Fara for years. (And years.) On Saturday I collected Isabel from camp in NYC and she agreed to make an expedition to Di Fara. It took us an hour on the subway and when we got there at about 1 in the afternoon, the place was packed.  I ordered two cheese slices to go and assumed it would take 20 minutes. We waited an hour and a half.  An elderly man was making all the pizzas himself, very methodically, and people were taking pictures of him. I felt shy about doing that, but I did photograph his handiwork.  

I wouldn't wait 90 minutes for it again, but it was outstanding pizza. Thin crust. Lots of basil flavor. Oily. Delicious.

After our late lunch, Isabel wanted to go to Baked, the owners of which wrote two of her favorite cookbooks (Baked and Baked Explorations.) The bakery is also in Brooklyn, but very far away from Di Fara and there was no subway line in operation so we rode several crowded buses to get there. This ended up taking another hour and a half.

Baked

I'm so glad she's my daughter and enjoys riding public transportation in sweltering heat for many hours to visit farflung eating spots. I can't imagine a better vacation day or a better companion.

Sweet and salty is their thing.

At Baked, we ordered, clockwise from left, a peanut butter crunch bar, a sweet and salty brownie, and a sweet and salty cupcake. All was tasty, but we liked the peanut butter crunch bar best. In the end, we agreed that we wouldn't ride the bus for these treats again. Baked is a good neighborhood bakery, but you can bake like this at home, especially if you have the Baked cookbook.

On the other hand. . .

Midtown location

Sunday, we went to Momofuku Milk Bar and you can't really bake like this at home, unless you are a demented genius. Milk Bar was a 5 minute walk from where we were staying and there was no line, no wait, no bus ride. But I would ride buses and wait in line 1 1/2 hours to get treats from Milk Bar.

Cereal milk soft-serve

This stuff was not just delicious, it was crazy. We got crack pie, candy bar pie, cereal milk soft-serve, and a compost cookie which contained crushed potato chips and coffee grounds, among other weird ingredients, and was diabolical in its deliciousness. I wanted to go back the next morning and buy a black sesame croissant, but didn't have time.

Pizza people should go to Di Fara, lovers of the Baked cookbook should go to Baked, but everyone should go to Milk Bar.

On Monday morning, we rode the train to New England and are now staying at the beach house of my in laws, which is lovely and peaceful.

It's wicked humid here, but the views are pretty.

This morning my mother-in-law's sister, Meg, made johnnycake with special stone-ground white cornmeal. It's just this very wonderful cornmeal plus liquid, stirred into a paste and fried in butter. When she described it to me, I thought, okay, whatever, doesn't sound that great.

For the terrible picture hall of fame

But it is the best thing I've eaten since the compost cookie. Next week I'm going to the mill to buy some of this magic cornmeal and learn to make johnnycake myself.

On another subject, I have a story in Slate on the subject of food TV shows.

Amateur hour photo shoot

Composed, professional, maybe a little mean.

Today my sister came over and shot possible author photos for my forthcoming book. The photos are due tomorrow and I put them off until the last possible minute in the hopes that I would lose all twenty-two of my cookbook-writing/mother-grieving pounds. I lost seven. Of the sixty or so pictures Justine shot, I disliked fifty-seven. But I liked these three pictures a lot. If you disagree, don't say anything.

She looks nice. I'd have an Aviation with her.

Rad cookbook collection

I've been neglecting the blog. For the last few weeks my kids have both been gone and I've been finishing up with the emptying of my mother's house (I turned over my keys to the real estate agent yesterday), correcting proofs of the book, turning in assignments, milking a goat, yelling at a goat, debating selling a goat, and preparing to leave at 4:30 a.m. on Friday on a big trip with many stops and packing requirements. When I spring clear of this quicksand and actually get out the door, I plan to visit with long-lost friends and family, take walks, read books, look at lions, and write blog posts. Friday can not come soon enough.

Books, books, books

Grown-up furniture in my very own house.

My childhood home is almost empty. On Thursday, all my mother's furniture came across the Golden Gate Bridge to my sister's house and mine in a truck. Finding places for serious brown antiques in houses that previously contained no serious brown antiques has been a challenge for both of us, one we take seriously. Our mother loved her things. During chemo sessions she liked to talk about who should get what and where everything should go in our houses. It made her happy and peaceful.

In addition to a lot of brown furniture, my mother had thousands and thousands of books. Books in practically every room of her house. There were strict systems for where books went. She relegated tacky-looking paperbacks to the shelves along the staircase to the basement and, of course, that was always the best place to find something you actually wanted to read. Something by Toni Morrison or Len Deighton or Herman Wouk or Judith Krantz. These were mostly books my sister or I brought home as teenagers.

Boring, handsome, old books -- noble books that her father gave her -- went in the living room. When I was a child, I remember one of my mother's friends ribbing her about the pretension of keeping pompous books you didn't read in the living room. I thought he had a point, but I also remember thinking he was being pompous in his own way. I took the boring, handsome books from my mother's living room and put them in my living room. It's not pretentious. This is just how I grew up thinking a living room should look. And it looks great.

Although. . .

What are the sources of the Japanese tradition?

Meanwhile juicy paperbacks and contemporary books are in the room where we watch TV. These are mostly books that were already in my house.

I love that The L Word  is about an inch away from The Fabrication of Farmstead Goat Cheese. I keep intending to put these books in some kind of order, but maybe I won't.

The cookbooks, of course, are absolutely in order. I could not stand to have a disorderly cookbook  collection!

When we put in this shelf eight years ago I swore I would cull before I let the cookbooks overflow.

But I didn't.

The books have overflowed to the jam shelf and a new shelf we lodged in the skinny space between the stairs and a wall and they are starting to pile up on the floor. The pile is only getting higher because 

there were about thirty cookbooks to be taken from my mother's house and I couldn't resist any of them. 

Treasure!

I finally found this, which I had been hunting for madly a few months ago. It contains the recipe for the first cheesecake I ever made when I was about twelve. I did not remember that the cheesecake contained dry milk, which sounds dismal to me now, but I swear it was the best cheesecake ever. I am going to bake it again soon.

And then there were cookbooks I wasn't looking for, but which I can't let go of.

I could never cast aside a cookbook that contains such gorgeous pictures:

See, I am helpless. Being a hoarder of cookbooks helps me empathize with people who are hoarders of everything, which, by a miracle of fate, I am not.

Happy 4th of July, everyone.

I take it all back about the Aviation

A perfect ashy-purple drink.

It's not technically an Aviation, but the Violetta at the Ashland Springs Hotel in Ashland, Oregon is very close. When I saw it on the menu I could barely contain my excitement given that, per the comments on my recent post, I clearly hadn't experienced a proper Aviation.

Right you all were. The Violetta contains Aviation gin (made in Portland), Deviation dessert wine (in place of maraschino liqueur), creme de violette, and lemon juice. The bartender drops in a tiny viola and though the color is less lavender than sooty, it's exquisitely beautiful. It is also delicious -- delicate and aromatic. The Violetta/Aviation makes a Negroni, my favorite cocktail of recent months, taste coarse and brassy. I think it's a good sign that I no longer like Manhattans (at all!) and that I may now be transitioning from Negronis to something daintier. Soon, I'll be a white wine spritzer drinker, and, after that, maybe just spritzer. A girl can dream.

All hotel lobbies should look like this.

Today we see plays. Isabel loves plays and while I do not love plays, I do love Isabel.

Even lucky boys have bad days

Gargantuan "Irish" cheesecake

Today Owen boarded a plane to Boston and he will not be back until midway through August. During the time he is gone, he will visit Ireland with his grandfather, spend time on the beach in New England with his cousins, and go to Africa with his mother. He has no idea how lucky he is.

pepperoni lasagna

Day before yesterday he and I got our shots and pills for Africa, then Owen chose his farewell meal from Guy Fieri's cookbook. He chose pepperoni lasagna and Irish cheesecake -- "because it's Irish and I'm going to Ireland!"

I could not imagine a more ridiculous meal. I kept my mouth shut.

Yesterday I cooked the meal and while I was cooking he came down with a blazing fever from the shots. He lay on the couch whimpering while the rest of us ate his lasagna and Irish cheesecake. He left this morning without tasting a morsel.

How was the lasagna? Big, rude, unwieldy. I would not make it again.

How was the cheesecake? It contained Bailey's, melted semisweet chocolate, sugar, cream, eggs, and two pounds of cream cheese. It was grotesque, absurd, and delicious. But my husband remarked, and I agree, that you can't beat a plain cheesecake with a graham cracker crust and some cherry pie filling on top. These super-sweet, chocolatey cheesecakes lack tang. Tang plus richness is what makes cheesecake great, not just richness.

An inadvertently artful shot

On another subject, this is a bean pie I made the other day using a lovely book called Southern Pies by Nancie McDermott. I wrote a story about oddball regional pies and felt I had to try baking the oddest recipe I could find. According to McDermott, the bean pie was developed in the 1930s "as part of the nutritional teachings of the Nation of Islam." To make it, you mash some navy beans and stir them up with eggs, sugar, melted butter and spices then bake the fragrant custard in a pie crust. I thought no one would touch this funky pie, but everyone in the family liked it. I think they may have liked it more than they liked the Irish cheesecake.

It does a body good

Where to put the chaise lounge?

My husband built a milking stand and we've begun regularly milking Natalie. Some first impressions:

-Milking is enjoyable and satisfying when the goat cooperates.
-Milking is maddening and messy when the goat doesn't.
-Milking forces you to confront earthy realities about food which is currently very voguish but also, I think, basically a good thing.

While I've known that milk comes from live animals since I was 3, until a week ago I had only ever acquired it from a carton at the supermarket. It has been disorienting, therefore, to suddenly start squeezing milk from the body of a bony, noisy, inquisitive mammal who tries to eat the buttons on my shirt and never, ever, bathes. Then to take the white fluid up to the kitchen and put it in my coffee? How weird.

But, of course, it's not weird at all. What's weird is that I would ever think it was.

Deborah Solomon stopped by last night

Q: Wow. That is one gorgeous drink. What is it?

A: Isn't it lovely? It's called an Aviation and it contains gin, maraschino liqueur, lemon juice and something called creme de violette that renders it lavender. Steve Martin describes this cocktail in his novel Object of Beauty and I've been obsessed with trying it for the last week.

Q: Is it as good as it looks?

A: I don't know! Wait just a second. . . . Hmm. Okay. No. It is perfumey. I don't love this.

Q: Who cares, so festive.

A: I am sitting on the sofa beside my son who is watching Phineas and Ferb and it feels not very festive. Today I had to replace my falling-apart jeans and that required much self-scrutiny in the harshly-lit mirrors of Macy's, Sundance, and J. Crew. So, I decided to skip evening spin class, buy a bottle of creme de violette, and try a new cocktail.

Q: How's that approach to dieting and discouragement working out for you?

A: I don't think that's a nice question.

Q: Yeesh. Sensitive. Fair enough. You've been working through Food Network star Guy Fieri's new cookbook. How's that going?

A: I've been moving slowly and doubt I 'll get very far. I do like Guy, but his recipes are mostly gimmicky and only moderately delicious. The other night I made his version of beer can chicken. You heavily season the chicken, impale it on an open beer can, and pop it in the oven. The beer supposedly evaporates and keeps the bird moist, while the outside crisps up. Fieri's twist is to drape bacon over the skin.

Q: And that wasn't awesome?

A: It was fine, but I would not go so far as "awesome." Plus, I had to buy a whole 6-pack of Bud. Our supermarket doesn't sell singles.

Q: Quite a change of pace from Heidi Swanson.

A: I know. I miss Super Natural Every Day. Not a lot of vegetables in Fieri's book. I was very hopeful about the Bomb Bakers (recipe is here) but they were not a hit.

You brine the potatoes for 8 hours, roll them in oil and Lawry's seasoned salt, then roast them for an hour. I was very curious about brined potatoes, except to me they just tasted like baked potatoes with inedible, salty skin.

On the other hand, I loved Guy's pork blade steak piccata. Recipe is here.

Q: What's on the table tonight?

A: Bloody Mary flank steak. It's been marinating in V-8, vodka and a lot of other stuff for the last 24 hours.

Q: On another subject entirely, how's the little goat?

A: Wild and impish and she charges at the chickens. We're petting her lots, but pretty soon we're going to need a lasso.

Q: Are you liking the Aviation better now that you're getting to the bottom of the glass?

A: It is vile. I like it so little that, to my shock and disappointment, I'm going to stop at one.

All about bedrooms and a little about brisket

8th grader no more

"Bedroom community" strikes me as the wrong term for a suburb, at least the suburb in which I live. This feels more like a factory town where the product is children. I'm not talking about babies, which, yes, are traditionally made in bedrooms. But in fact, they're often made in urban bedrooms and eventually (some) parents bring the babies out to the suburbs for finishing. I grew up in a city. That was fun. But this seems fun, too.

June is a big month, as product starts coming off the assembly line. Day before yesterday, Owen graduated from elementary school. He and his cohort have mastered their math facts and can sing Congolese folk songs. They are of middling height and physically awkward. According to the inspirational quotes they recited, they believe in striving, friendship, and the value of being true to one's self. Admirable! At the graduation, there were a lot of dresses with "bubble skirts" like this. While the ceremony was sweet, it did not feel momentous and I went straight from the graduation to buy goat ration and fly traps.

 Goof

A few hours later, Isabel graduated from middle school. That ceremony was not sweet and it did feel momentous. There were a lot of dresses like this. At one point during the distribution of diplomas the principal called the name of a girl named Ella C. who spent the night at our house several times circa 2006. I said to my husband, "Well, they screwed up. That's not Ella." He said, "That's Ella." I squinted my feeble old eyes. I still couldn't see that this was Ella.

But later I confirmed: it was Ella.

This happened again and again and again. Everywhere wandered radiant young people I've known since they were five, almost all of them taller than me with vaguely familiar faces and very long legs. It was poignant and unsettling.

Isabel went to a graduation dance in the evening where the dresses got shorter and tighter, the heels higher. I had bad dreams all night. One involved raising a baby albino alligator that I was feeding with an eye dropper until the baby alligator ate the eye dropper and swam away. In another dream, I excised a very tiny kid goat from inside of a Bartlett pear. And in the worst nightmare of all, I overheard a friend say that my bedroom looked "like a pig pen." I did not, in the dream, deny that my bedroom looked like a pig pen, merely chastised this friend for gossiping about the way I keep house. If you know how to analyze dreams, please, please don't.

Back to our scheduled programming: The other night I made Guy Fieri's Bring It On Beef Brisket.  About half of his dishes have gimmicky names like that, which doesn't bother me when the recipes work. This one didn't, not for me. It was the most disappointing kind of bad meal, because I was so looking forward to it. The photograph in Fieri's book shows the brisket is falling to shreds, collapsing under a blanket of what appears to be glossy barbecue sauce. I thought about that brisket all day and it cooked for what seemed like all day. But the the meat never softened, remaining an implacable raft of stiff gray cow flesh. The sauce lacked zest.

Three possibilities:

1. the recipe is wrong
2. the piece of brisket I got was wrong
3. I did something wrong

Last night, I made Fieri's ginger carrot soup. My husband thought this was great, but I could not eat it. I've grown accustomed to vegetable soups made with only vegetables, and the homemade chicken stock was overpowering, too chickeny, and I couldn't taste the ginger.

None for me, thanks

Tonight: Fieri's pork blade steak piccata. The grill is heating as I type.

On another subject, we've begun milking Natalie. Last night, Owen helped milk and then I went upstairs and made him hot chocolate with the fresh milk. He couldn't get over how awesome the whole experience was. I don't think I could persist in our onerous and messy animal project without him. I appreciate not just the work he contributes to keeping them, but his sheer joy at having them.

At least it wasn't Twinkle

Owen named her Sparkle. I tried to point him in another direction, any other direction, but he is adamant: She is Sparkle. And she is perfect.

The other night, I cooked Guy Fieri's lamb chops with mint pesto, my maiden voyage into Guy Fieri Food. They were excellent. I wish Guy didn't try so hard, what with the tats and the slang and the Phyllis Diller hair, because I think he has good ideas and sound recipes and all that shtick just makes him seem insecure. But I guess shtick is required these days to become a Food Network star.

It seems tasteless to post a photograph of lamb chops adjacent to a photograph of a baby goat, so I'll skip right to Fieri's chicken-under-a-brick, which I served last night.

To make this, you spatchcock a chicken and season it well, then heat oil in a skillet, splay the chicken out in the hot fat, and top with another skillet weighted down with four foil-wrapped bricks.

Roughly thirty minutes later, the chicken looks disturbing, but tastes wonderful. Serve with green sauce.

I know. 

Does anyone watch much food TV? Favorite shows? The other day, Owen and I watched Anne Thornton make s'mores bars on a program called Dessert First. It's sort of stunning that shows are devoted to recipes this remedial, but still, we watched. When it was over, Owen said, "Mom you HAVE to make those."

 I did.

And they were insanely good. One of those desserts -- buttery, a bit salty, crumbly, chocolatey but not overwhelmingly so, crunchy, gooey -- that you can not stop eating. You just want more, more, more. I have a problem with this kind of dessert as there's no built-in stopping point. Satisfaction is impossible. But I would be derelict in my blogging duty if I didn't tell you that the recipe is absolutely phenomenal. (I omitted the chipotle powder, as Thornton does on the show. Come to think of it, chipotle powder might make these easier to stop eating.)

It's a doeling!

Twenty minutes old.

Natalie gave birth to a beautiful baby girl today.

The labor was fast and agonizing in the agonizing way of all labors in my limited experience. Finally, I gave a gentle tug on the tiny hooves that were emerging from Natalie's body, as I have seen done in YouTube goat birth videos, and to my complete wonderment and shock, about one second later there was a slippery, squirming miniature goat in my hands. I'd read that you needed to wipe the baby down with towels and clear its throat and nostrils, but Natalie was instantly all over that kid, licking and nuzzling and possessive. All that was "needed" from Owen and me was to dip the newborn's navel in iodine and step away.

Isabel and her friend Juliet were up in Isabel's room. As Juliet said, "The goat was screaming, but Owen was screaming louder."

That's it for our summer 2011 kidding season. Short and sweet. Peppermint never caught.

Not that this would make Peppermint feel any better -- probably, it would gross her out -- but the new baby is her very own half-sister.

From focus and momentum to mild confusion and indolence

Monday, I used 6 inches of red pencil in 5 hours. 

Wind me up, set me off in a direction and there I go. Put me on the sofa, and there I sit. Shifting course is what's hardest for me. Maybe everyone?

The last 10 days were intense. I would admire my own work ethic except it felt less like an ethic than brute momentum.  I did nothing but pore over the manuscript of my book to the point of neglecting to brush my hair, sort the mail, or attend zumba class, and I would have done so for the rest of my life had a deadline not forced a change of course.

Day before yesterday arrived that deadline. I reluctantly carried the proofs to the UPS store and overnighted them (old school!) back to the editor in New York and then, hair still uncombed, wearing jogging shoes and least attractive jeans I have ever owned, drove straight to the Century Regency on Smith Ranch Road to see Midnight in Paris.* The ship has been forcibly turned and I am back to my usual, semi-indolent ways.  It will take a new deadline to get me to change again.

By the way, if there is any place on the planet you can confidently go with uncombed hair and wearing unflattering jeans, it is the Regency midday on a Tuesday. As usual, it was just the field trippers from the retirement home and me. I was very happy to be back.

Last night, I was going to try one of Guy Fieri's chicken recipes -- the one with the brick, or the one with the beer can -- but I ended up driving a young trombonist and a young pianist/dancer all over Marin County from 1:50 p.m. until 7 p.m. Not an exaggeration, a time sheet, as mothers of children in their middle years need not be told. So we had sushi. I felt tired and sorry for myself. I went to bed. I read 40 pages of Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov, which is extremely enjoyable and comprehensible even if you have never read Chekhov, which I have not. But should. I studied Malcolm's inscrutable half-smile in the jacket photo. What will my jacket photo look like? I woke up and checked on Natalie, who is still pregnant. Am I balking at starting Guy Fieri's book because he is so irritating? Or because I really don't want to eat a dish called Guy-talian Nachos? Except, who am I kidding. Of course I want to eat Guy-talian Nachos. There is no time to cook one of Fieri's chickens tonight, as I am returning to zumba class, but maybe his linguine with clams.

But then I'll look puffy in my jacket photo!

Can't wait for Tree of Life.

*Should you see it? Rachel McAdams negates her prettiness with convincing portrayal of crass shrew. Owen Wilson makes a more appealing Woody Allen than Woody Allen. Michael Sheen is wasted behind that beard. Plot: mildly amusing. Actor who plays Hemingway very cute. Altogether, Bridesmaids was better. Albeit, of course, filthy.