This morning I am contemplating whether or not it is feasible to throw a cup of grated carrots into the batter next time I make banana bread, because A.) we always have lots of bananas in various states of ripeness, which need to be dealt with and B.) I have chosen this year to tread into the thrilling waters of recipe development, a subject that has long intimidated me. (Note: having a properly functioning oven surely contributed to this endeavor.)

Last week I was looking up banana bread recipes and found one that sounded good, but it called for applesauce to replace part of the oil. I had no applesauce, though I could have easily just used the equivalent in oil. That didn’t sound appetizing, though. It sounded like a lot of oil. But I dimly made a connection in the way-back part of my head that reminded me that the applesauce was used to replace oil, and oil is fat, and what’s fatty? Sour Cream! And I did have reduced fat sour cream in my fridge. “It’s just banana bread,” I thought. So I made it, and lo and behold, it was delicious.

In fact, it went over so well that I decided to make another batch later in the week and double it, to have an extra for the freezer. This is where I went all Ina-Garten on the base recipe, penciling in my additions and notes, and afterward correcting my projections about the extra spices, etc and their amounts. It was fun. I was extremely pleased with myself.

A turkey meatloaf followed, with the goal of making turkey taste like beef. For this one, I read a number of highly rated recipes, then I spliced them together. The meatloaf was almost perfect; I learned that I’ll need to cut down on the breadcrumbs and increase the dry onion soup mix. But overall, it was good. The Husband ate it, and he’s not a big meatloaf person. What came from cherry-picking several recipes, and making allowances for our preferences, is a personal recipe of my own that includes a tangy sauce and lots of roasted peppers and onions for the Husband.

This is what I’ve learned so far about recipe development, with lessons from Ina Garten and Rachael Ray – the Divine Ina makes mistakes. She walks into her kitchen with a pencil and a notepad and works and scribbles and tastes and makes things over and over again. And Ray-Ray points out that creating new recipes is, basically, considering what flavors work well together and deconstructing a meal you are served in a restaurant into base components and flavors. Like sketching – it’s not a head, it’s a ball. It’s not a tree, it’s a long rectangle with smaller rectangles and lines flowing from it.

If you grew up cooking with your family and watching an adult throw things into the pot and add a pinch of this or that with a sure hand, you will wonder what the big whoop is all about. But for a self-taught cook, it’s a highly satisfying step.

It’s January, but as always the old year laps over us until Russian Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on January 6 – 7. Last year I made the traditional “sorta-almost” Russian meal, or as close I can approximate, in my continuing and lengthy effort to present as authentic a Christmas as the Husband remembers from his youth. But alas, the Greeks fled the old calendar long ago (splitters!) and no longer celebrate Christmas with the rest of the Orthodox, and the little Russian Orthodox church in town closed a couple of years ago. It’s just us and the food.

In the beginning, I researched RO Christmas Eve meals and tried to make real recipes. This was problematic for two reasons; first, Russian cuisine is crazy-regional, and so sometimes I would put things on the table that nobody had ever heard of. And second, Russian food is highly labor intensive, and I am only one woman. So I dialed it back and now we pretty much eat what we like, as long as it dovetails with things Russians eat anyway, like salmon.

Which is what I made this year: roasted salmon, steamed fresh asparagus, basmati rice (yes I know, but paired so well!) and a green salad with homemade honey Dijon vinaigrette. And of course bread, and cheesecake for dessert. It was a good call not to go all out, or like last year make a beautiful Rus-influenced cake that did not actually taste good (to me.) My m-i-l felt ill and decided she could not come, plans were hastily remade, and by the time it was all sorted out it was late, we were starving, and the Husband and I ate in front of the TV.

I will have to make it up to him on Valentine’s Day, which I hope is coming if 2010 ever properly starts.

If this year’s Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve meal is any indication, then I am well on my way to simplifying the new year; not by slacking off, but by slacking smarter.

For instance, last year I learned: Extreme Couponing is not for me. Despite my best efforts, we are not a good fit. Successful couponers have lots of excellent strategies but the foundation of them all is: figure out who has the cheapest price or runs consistent sales on what you buy routinely, and then be ready to slap a coupon on top of that. Thusly I compiled a database, which was an eye-opening effort, and cut and saved every coupon I could get my hands on. I filed them in a big binder and read all the sale flyers when they came out weekly, and planned accordingly.

High-achieving couponers make a schedule that gives them a set block of time to run out and hit every store they can find that has items they use and accepts coupons. I mean, every store. From Wal-Mart to Dollar General, to high end grocery chains with a couple of major inducements like cheap chicken breasts in the family pack, to the gas station or Walgreen’s where milk is on sale. There are also Excel spreadsheet templates devoted to Walgreen’s and CVS, stores that require a higher level of commitment than I can stir up, not being competitive by nature or turned on enough by taking on cashiers and ill-informed store managers and winning. These gold-medalists of the coupon game will stand their ground and have the corporate customer service telephone numbers programmed into their cell phones, and will righteously hold up a checkout line if they have to, to receive the promised benefit and value of coupons when they’ve carefully – and with no small investment of time — calculated what purchases to make at that store, on that day, with that coupon. They are amazing.

But the bottom line is, if you do not buy the right type of things or find the whole exercise to be personally satisfying, Coupon Queen is not in your future. Instead, I was really intrigued with knowing the lowest prices on items I use routinely, at the grocery stores most easily accessible to me during the average week when I am juggling my other responsibilities. The aforementioned chicken that is supposed to be on sale at a big chain may still be a dollar more a pound than the regular price at Wal-Mart. And while I am no fan of Wal-Mart, my careful survey found them to be the lowest regular price overall, consistently. Damn it.

So it is extremely good to know, as I assemble my shopping list, where my base shopping will be done (Wal-Mart) and if I am going to hit any other grocery stores for very specific purchases, and if any of these items are in the category of foods we need weekly (Yoplait, butter, pet food) or things used in mass quantity, mostly without brand loyalty (toothpaste, soap) so I can use a coupon if I have it. This basic knowledge saves a lot of money when I stay on top of it and don’t get harried or distracted.

The rest of it – the bounty of coupons aimed at young families for diapers, little kid food, prepackaged snacks and sweets, convenience foods – I rarely use, and with admiration, I leave it to the experts.

Walmart’s the more reasonably priced but it does not light me up the way Publix does. First off, Walmart is just so damn big. And while there is a very nice new Walmart way down the road, the one closest to us has some permanent veneer of grime and dinginess that makes me feel like I’m spelunking for dry goods, chilly-squooshy packs of ground meat and seedless grapes.

If I get a long register tape at Walmart that reads $187.32 for my hugely laden buggy of groceries, my only thought while I struggle out to the parking lot is, “How did that happen?” But at Publix, with the paper looped and serpentined around my neck like a souvenir scarf from Paris, I think, “I can’t believe they had almond butter! And organic pears from West Virginia and Madagascar bourbon vanilla with the seeds in it and Kerry Gold butter and grocery store sushi for lunch today!” And there might be some skipping, if I have successfully managed to fend off the bag boy.

At Walmart, I just want to kill everybody in sight by the time I leave, and I rarely tolerate the trip long enough to get everything I need – which is how I sometimes end up at Publix the very next day.

But back to the oven. The deal was sealed on Hallowe’en by the Husband while I strung up fake spider webs and Styrofoam tombstones in the front yard for the kiddies, after much delay and contemplation of this major expense. That he did not do it with undiluted pleasure is evidenced by the inclusion, for the first time in our whole life together, of an extended warranty. The Husband does not believe in buying extended warranties but he made an exception in light of the fact that we have spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars over the last four years in an effort to make the JENN-AIR work tolerably.

I have hurled so much abuse at that JENN-AIR that it’s a miracle it didn’t get up one night and slip away without leaving so much as a note.

What a happy day that would have been!

After the truly horrible and worthless JENN-AIR has been replaced by the new oven, I plan to cook until I fall down. Have you ever dreamed that you were in your house, or in some house familiar to you, and you strolled through, discovering new rooms or items or even entire wings you did not know were there? That’s how I felt in Publix on Monday. Everywhere I looked, something to be buttered or oiled and rolled in herbs and thrown on a sheet pan, or sauced in a deep casserole dish, or baked until the edges get crisp.

Lasagna with white sauce! Everybody really loves that!  Chicken cannelloni. Slow roasted beef. Blueberry muffins. From scratch all the way chicken parmesan. Brownies. Oven roasted potatoes with rosemary and garlic. Oven roasted butternut squash. Roasted salmon. Cookies (half butter, half shortening combo makes the best texture for chocolate chip cookies, imo.) Garlicky pork roast. Duck with pears and white wine. The Husband wants a lengthily braised beef bourguignon, just like Julia’s.

Bread. Bread, dear God, bread!

I wafted out of Publix on a cloud of homemade possibility, register tape whipping fetchingly in the autumn breeze.

The incredibly horrible JENN-AIR had to come out first, a procedure that involved a well-deserved and almost complete dismemberment. For the last time I heard the big door screech open, and then the guy did things to its hinges and yanked it off entirely. I hope it hurt. He pulled the grates off, the plates under them; he took everything he could take off including the knobs, and ultimately he took the kitchen door off the hinges, too, to get that phantasmagorically bad JENN-AIR oven out of the house. He stacked the pieces on the driveway behind the van and dumped the carcass on the grass.  It was incredibly heavy (like my heart, everytime I used it.)

Of course, while he was wrestling the completely worthless JENN-AIR oven to the van, I swept and mopped the floor underneath and retrieved, from the dustpan, the following items: 1 slip of paper with Roxanne’s address and phone number on it, 1 matchbox car left by the previous owner’s child, 2 roach traps, 1 whole nutmeg, numerous fluttering balls of cat hair/dust composition, and 17 small cat toys. All in all, much less than I expected to find. But the new oven sits on seven inch tall legs, so if I were my cats, I’d be thinking, “jackpot!”

A brief moment of panic when the installer judged the new oven to be seven inches shorter than my countertop. He did not know about the abovementioned legs.

Because the store determined that this guy could tote entire ranges by himself, he had to handle the whole job alone so it took considerable time to jockey the impervious to all attempts to be repaired or operate properly JENN-AIR oven out and get the new oven in, and hooked up. I tried to stay out of the way but I couldn’t stand it – I had to keep stealing into the kitchen to peep at it. We chose the oven from research at local kitchen stores and on the internet, but the stores did not have the line in stock at the time I was looking; and sort of like an arranged marriage, I did not meet the oven in person until the installer uncrated it.

It’s much more beautiful than its picture on the website.

The new oven slid into place like it was born to be there, and the installer hooked it up, checked it, set the clock and pronounced it ready to use. I stared at it from the door while he went out to load up the most execrable JENN-AIR brand oven in history. First he stowed the discarded parts and then moved the van closer to the gaping, empty, cold shell and reader, he accidentally backed into it. It was wonderful.

All afternoon I’ve been getting emails from friends and family, asking if I’ve fired up the new oven and what I’m going to cook. The answer is, I haven’t and I don’t know. The oven wasn’t supposed to arrive until Monday and I was planning a trip to Publix (natch) on Sunday with a carefully thought out list*. I have some Stauffer’s french bread pizzas in the freezer, and more appropriately a nice pork tenderloin in the meat drawer; but the thought of putting something fatly spattery in that shiny, gleaming oven seems too intimate and forward on our very brief acquaintance. All I can bring myself to do is stare at it in its shimmering perfection and perfectly clear oven window glass.

I’ve wanted it for so long that I can’t quite believe it is here.

*This would have been a first.

But it does have one flaw. It messily slops tea out the tiny spigot and around the lid. This is probably my fault for trying to pour it too quickly but on a particularly clumsy morning recently it made me think of my grandfather. He would make a cup of coffee (instant, I am sure) and pour a good slug of it into a saucer, which he would then slurp while waiting for the coffee in the cup to cool. This was not behavior I saw in my own home, so it was positively barbaric and foreign. Foreign also was the whitest white bread available, which they kept on the kitchen table. It was a long bag of Sunbeam bread illustrated with a angelic blonde tot with curls piled on top of her head. This bread made perfect, golden toast that was then scraped with pure margarine – completely different than my mother’s recipe for toast, which involved margarining the smaller, less flamboyant, more Methodist brand white bread slices she bought and then running them under the broiler on a cookie sheet.

This produced inferior toast. It was definitely untoasted on one side, and wet on the melted margarine side. But at my grandparents’ house, the Sunbeam planks went into the thrilling pop-up toaster and came out uniformly crisp and dry. And my grandparents were glad to let me sit in the kitchen and make toast all afternoon if it kept me occupied. They also let me take condiments out of the fridge and mix them up into a mess on a paper plate in imaginative, if limited, recipe development. In my house, paper plates were reserved for car trips when you might stop at a roadside park and eat a sandwich on a filthy picnic table. But my grandparents made good use of them and had a stack in the kitchen, close at hand. It was so, you know, country style.

My grandfather much preferred his own company to that of anyone else, sometimes doing a little reading when he wasn’t mending fishing nets or hauling shrimp out of my uncle’s boat. My grandmother liked to talk if she could do it from a seated position by the telephone and if you did not interrupt her with comments or worse, funny remarks. She also read, devotedly, every supermarket tabloid available and did not throw them out, which was fantastic for a precocious reader like me who could count on enjoying them when I was shuttled out and left at their house on Saturday afternoons. I did not realize until I was an adult that my grandmother carefully threaded a big needle with fish net mending string and sewed a spine, with a few big running stitches, into each copy to keep the pages together for easier reading. I thought they came that way. It certainly increased my enjoyment of horoscopes, celebrity confessions, lurid tales of crime, heroic animals, articles by Lady Sybil Leek, psychic predictions and *jackpot!* true haunted house stories if I could read them without the pages slipping around.

She probably did this because the periodicals were all so similar it would have taken hours to sort them had any of the pages blown out and gotten intermingled. And this could have easily happened, because they lived in a frame house that stuck out over the water and was held up by huge poles underneath. They did not have central air, and used fans or window units; heat in the winter was from gas space heaters. It also, in the back part where the shrimp boat pulled up, had drain holes in the concrete floor so shrimp guts and filth could be hosed back into the water. It was extremely entertaining to poke Sunbeam bread through the holes, then lay on your stomach and press your face to the opening and watch the gar swim underneath and eat it.

You can’t eat gar, because it is too bony and probably tastes awful, but you could chip ice out of the burial-vault size chest freezer and eat that, and my grandmother also kept cheap Eskimo-pie style ice cream bars of uncertain vintage. Once or twice she sent me home with some fudge-in-a-box she picked up a the grocery store. Every Christmas Eve she would fry a chicken and then dump all the chicken into a pressure cooker and cook it until it fell apart and made gravy. This was a nod to my grandfather, who kept all of his teeth in a mug by the kitchen sink. She served it with rice and white bread and maybe some dressing. Other than toast, and bags of cheap orange “peanut” candies, I am not sure what they ate the rest of the year except for when my grandmother was on a diet, which she tried every so often. At one time it must have been a high protein regime, because she cut up some lean beef very thin and fried up the strips with a little salt and pepper. God, it was ambrosial. My mother did not make meat that was not soaked in gravy, unless it was little grey steaks with a strip of bacon wrapped around them, which she broiled. So the caramelized, quickly seared meat made quite an impression on me. Not on my grandmother, though, who lost interest in the whole thing in short order.

Neither of my grandmothers cared very much for cooking by the time I came along, having spent a lifetime churning out good meals. I hope I won’t share that same fate but you can’t imagine what any stage of life will be like until you get there. My oven has been broken for weeks – no loss, that – and we decided not to pour any more good money after bad on further successive repairs (Jenn Air, by the way.) Thus ensued a lengthy process of picking out a new oven and finding the best price, a purchase to be consummated this weekend. Then I’ll be back in business. Without my oven, I have been strangely removed from any interest in cooking, thinking of it as something I used to do and once enjoyed. Cooking on only the stovetop, with its malfunctioning, madly clicking gas igniters is no fun if you have no alternative and the crockpot doesn’t replace a warm oven. The engine of my kitchen is dead, and I can’t wait to get it revived. Unlike my grandmothers, I really miss it.

I like cookies more than cake because you can eat them with your bare hands, which of course makes them easier to hide than a plate of cake; and they come in infinite variety. Unless it is of the “cheese” or “snack” variety, cake is mostly a platform to stack icing on. Then you do stuff with the icing, which is fun, but only if you have a certain skill level. My personal skill level is limited to making fairly good icing, then – if I must embellish – adding fruit. You know, you throw some raspberries across a white icing, and that looks pretty good, friends. A gleaming pile of strawberries in the hollow of a chocolate bundt cake? Mmmmm. So pretty.

But cookies – what fun! You can sandwich them with stuff in the middle, or slice them, or cut them out, or squish them out of a press, or just drop them on the baking sheet or take the really easy way out and spread them in a pan. Then when they come out of the oven, you can ice them or roll them in nice things. They can be wildly delicate and beautiful, or completely casual and approachable. If you screw up a cookie, you have a few dozen more to get right. If you screw up a cake, boy, are you in trouble.

If I graphed out my personal cookie categories, it would look like the periodic table of elements I glanced at once in high school. For instance, I do not think a chocolate chip cookie (or its delicious cousin, the oatmeal chocolate chip) is really a cookie. It is a thing complete in itself; it is a meal. It offers three consumption options: raw dough, warm from the oven, and cold. A chocolate chip cookie does not cool so much as it sets up. Then you have to soften it with milk or coffee or something for optimal enjoyment. See? It’s complicated. And further, there is a saturation point whether you are eating raw dough or baked chocolate chip cookies past which even I can’t eat another one. I’m full. Thus their ability to stand alone in an attempt to end hunger means chocolate chip cookies and other “loaded” type cookies should be given their own food group. This deviates from my assumption that cookies were created as the human version of a hush puppy, meant for short-term pacification.

My favorite true cookie is the snickerdoodle. It’s much more akin to its origin as a type of “little cake” with its tender middle and lightly crunchy outside, fragrant with warm cinnamon. My battered, Scholastic Book Club cookbook that features exactly 12 recipes (one for each month of the year) falls open on its own to the page on Snickerdoodles. I am sure this is because I desperately wanted to make chocolate chip cookies but of course there were no chocolate chips in the house, because a certain person in my household did not consider them to be a staple. So I must have frantically flipped the pages until I found a recipe that was easy and did not require a special trip to the store. (We did have an old can of cream of tartar, which to this day still resides in my mother’s pantry.)

Raw snickerdoodle dough is not much to write home about, and honestly they are not as good warm as they are when they cool off and get crisp. They smell like heaven while they are baking, but there is a mellowing of the vanilla-cinnamon combo that elevates them when they have had a few hours out of the oven to relax. Crunchy when you first bite it, snickerdoodles are soft in the middle and melt in your mouth. Just like an M&M. They are also good with cold milk or hot tea. Ditto.

Also on the chart, way on the other side, is the pastry-like cookie. Think rugelach with its cream cheese pastry layers, or baklava. This is much more acceptable to the Husband, who grew up on his grandmother’s delicate sweets. Unlike his own mother, the Husband’s grandmother remembered life in Tsarist Kiev that included food, endless dinner parties, and course after course washed down with wine, vodka, tea and balalaika music. Babushka made the complicated Russian savory dishes and light delicacies, and whether or not the Napoleons he rhapsodizes about from his youth were produced in Babushka’s tiny Boston apartment, or were retrieved by his mother on her daily trips to the bakery, matters not. His idea of proper sweets is so stratospherically beyond my beloved dump cake, it might as well come from another planet.

The Husband likes fruitcake more than layer cake, candy more than cookies, cream pies more than fruit pies, and goes so far as to disavow any real interest in sweets unless they present themselves with a fanned tail and a coy glance. The Son likes things that involve chocolate but not fruit. The Daughter, aka The Good Eater, likes everything – but is completely happy with a few bites.

A confession. I rarely make cookies, because they are simply too dangerous to have around. I study them, I collect recipes and rip out pages from magazines. I love to think about them. Just like jewelry – so beautiful, so desirable, but honestly where would I wear it?

Cookies, of course, I would wear on my hips.

I’m glad she enjoyed it, because I did not. Often the chefs were gurgling nonstop hymns of praise or sort of phoning in their “inside baseball” offhanded cooking. The great Julia graciously pretended not to notice, and in all cases gently steered the chefs back to the food and the techniques as best she could.

I was not born when her original series started, and it was most certainly not something my mother would have turned on while I toddled around feeding dirt and leaves to Mrs. Beasley. By the time we got cable, Julia had finished that show and was on to other things, and I was getting PBS provided cooking lessons from shows like ZOOM (ZOOM! Z Double O M, Box 3-5-0, Boston Mass, 02134!) where I saw an actual child give a breathtaking display of Christmas sugar cookies with cut out stained glass windows made from crushed Lifesavers.

Of course, I have seen snippets of the original show and almost every food writer mentions the revolutionary way the great Julia (TGJ) made fancy cooking approachable for the home cook, as well as providing fodder for Dan Ackroyd, which made her kind of a mythic character with a funny voice. But today I flipped on the television and there she was, making omelets. And I learned more in the first ten minutes of her show than I have in much dedicated reading on the subject, including Martha’s obsession with same. Unlike Martha’s no doubt perfect specimens, TGJ just beat up a couple of eggs, threw them in a skillet, and swirled the skillet around until the eggs rolled up into a cylinder and allowed her to tip them out of the skillet onto a plate. “It’s more fun to do it this way, I think,” she said. “And you can use your hands to neaten it up if you want to.”

Reader, would Martha ever use her hands to neaten up a slightly raggedy omelet? Mais non!

Good heavens, how much more quickly my own efforts to learn how to cook would have come along if I’d known about Julia’s original series, particularly considering that all I know about cooking, I learned from TV. And what a surprise for the Husband when I corner him at the stove next weekend to confess that everything I’ve ever told him about omelets has been a lie. I will show him TGJ’s method and he will, of course, say, “That’s how I always made them until you made me do it your way” and that is a damn lie. (But it makes him happy to say outrageous, self-aggrandizing things, like when he once tried to convince me that Peter the Great had written “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary” when he was touring Europe.)

The Husband has good-naturedly volunteered to go see the forthcoming movie about TGJ because he figures Meryl Streep is usually a good bet, and he secretly has a little thing for Amy Adams, I suspect. I can’t wait to see it.

The movie will no doubt be followed by a trip to Barnes and Noble to buy a Starbucks for himself and a copy of the book for me. No, I don’t have one! No, I have never even borrowed it from the library! I was just too intimidated. But if the book is like the omelet episode I just watched, I don’t think I have anything to worry about. Merci, Julia! Merci beaucoup.

Two examples: when I finally read Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, I was astonished to discover that Almanzo’s mother made her own doughnuts. You want more? Okay! She made them on her baking day and put them in a crock after frying them in a huge kettle. Doughnuts are fried? I had no idea. I knew only that doughnuts came from Krispy Kreme (rarely) the grocery’s bakery department (never) or sometimes came in a box from the freezer case (ditto). I think it was Swanson that had the genius idea to simply freeze regular, yeast raised doughnuts and offer them for sale, to be thawed and warmed in the oven. These were almost perfect, but the glaze stayed annoyingly sticky. They also made tasty little cinnamon sugar cake doughnuts but let’s be serious for a moment; a cake doughnut is not a doughnut. It is a muffin with a whole in it.

This part of Almanzo’s story made me cry more than the scene where the baked potato explodes and nearly blinds him, because you can heal from a baked potato scalding, but doughnuts for a big farm family means an empty crock by about ten o’clock the next morning. Oh, Almanzo! Did you ever get to eat more than the one or two you stuffed in your coat pockets on the way to the barn? I could just imagine him, barely able to reach the crock, plunging his little arm way in there to the bottom and finding…nothing. Just like that empty, sticky cookie sheet where the frozen Swanson doughnuts parsimoniously doled out a half dozen at a time used to be.

When I was in fifth grade, I met a girl named Maureen. Her mother was Irish and scared the bejeebers out of me, but she served long skinny baguettes with dinner every night. I was flabbergasted. Such luxury!

So it was the great, empty genetic cooking hole inside me that provided the only interest I ever had in religion: Vacation Bible School and the industrial kitchen in the church basement.

My mother, who sincerely likes people and tooling around in the car, volunteered at church to drive Meals-on-Wheels once a week for years. When I was out of school in the summer, I could not be left home alone and often went with her. Off we’d go to the kitchen, where a fabulous assembly line of authoritative old ladies generously dipped up fantastic smelling food into Styrofoam trays and passed them down the line to be packed up in a big brown paper sack along with a sandwich and a piece of fruit. Because, my mother explained to me in the most sorrowful of tones, some people don’t get any food at all and rely on that sandwich and fruit for their dinner. “That’s so sad,” I thought. “They are so hungry, they have to eat fruit.”

Then the volunteers would scoop up their assigned lunches, load them into the back of the car, and drive around delivering them to poor and elderly. Very talkative elderly people, so this could take a while. My mother thought all of this was extremely pitiful, that these old people had no family to care for them, and never failed to press this home by telling me the history and associated misfortunes of each regular on her route every. Single. Time.

But I thought they had a real sweet deal going, getting that amazing, church-cooked southern food everyday. I wished I was tall enough to reach the steam trays and help the ladies whip it all up.

I don’t remember a time during my forced attendance at church that there weren’t ladies in the kitchen, banging pots around, laughing, and fixing something good to eat. That was absolutely the place to be. I just wasn’t old enough to be allowed in there.

One place I could go, and did frequently because it was better than sitting home alone all summer, was Vacation Bible School. Every summer religious publishers spend a good deal of creativity and effort putting together colorful programs devoted to some Biblical principal for the grade school aged kiddies to absorb over the course of a week. I liked to read – I loved to read – but Bible stories, as they were presented to me, fell completely flat. So I went for the crafts and the cookies. Every year I thought I would finally excel with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks. Then reality would hit the first morning and I’d pray that the snack would make up for the disastrous small scale model of Noah’s Ark, covered in gobs of white glue and liberally doused with glitter, but then some teenager would show up with a big cookie sheet covered in small plastic cups and a big pitcher of lukewarm Fruit Punch. And the cookies never, ever came from the church kitchen. The cookies usually came out of the stupid sugar cookie assortment your grandmother buys, the super-cheap kind in a tin. The kind that are nothing in your mouth, even the ones flaked with specks of what are purported to be chocolate chips.

The only Bible story I found sincerely intriguing was, of course, when Jesus threw together lunch for a crowd. Nowhere did it state that He actually cooked anything, but it was still a miracle of event planning and immensely impressive. The thought of that crowd swelling, the fretful and panicky disciples; I really felt for them. But the lesson of God’s providence escaped me entirely, consumed as I was with the menu. What kind of loaf? Was there some butter or something? A loaf like a standard loaf of bread, or more like a bun? Or was it like a pita bread? Did it have sand in it? And what about the fish? A basket of fish does not sound good to me. Was it cooked? Smoked? Dried? Was it raw and the people made little fires and skewered the fish on green sticks to cook it? Did they share? Did Jesus eat anything? The Bible was silent on what I saw to be important details.

Like church, it failed to hold my interest when I got shut out of the food.

Until recently I’ve never been much of a fruit person, and it always makes me snort with derisive laughter to read helpful nutrition tips for kids that advise giving them a delicious, juicy peach for dessert in their lunch boxes. Ditto the advice to keep fruit washed and ready to grab in a handy bowl in the fridge, kept at eye level. The only thing stupider than that is the related advice to keep celery sticks and carrot sticks alongside for handy pre-dinner snacking. This only works if you have no Doritos in the house, no cookies, no ice cream, no Snack Packs, no cold cereal – nothing, in fact, that is crunchy, sweet, salty, chewy or just generally fuller in flavor and texture than a big wet carrot stick. People who follow this advice also give out little boxes of raisins for Hallowe’en.

Do you know what happens if you strip the house of everything delicious and set a bowl of plums on the counter? That’s right. A week later you get a house of hostile, sunken eyed residents and big bowl of untouched rotten plums.

But the first time I toddled into the kitchen one weekend morning to the astonishing, astonishing sight of a baking sheet full of warm blueberry turnovers from the whack-can, I understood immediately that good things happen to fruit with the application of heat, and especially blueberries.

Since my mother considered the occasional batch of Bisquick pancakes (served with Karo syrup) an exhaustive culinary effort, these particular blueberry turnovers could not have been better crafted to insinuate themselves in my brain as something highly desirable, and thusly, cooking was similarly desirable as that was the only way to get them. First, they were rare and exotic. Second, the ratio of filling to flaky pastry was completely unbalanced in favor of the latter. Third, they came with a little squeeze packet of icing.

Blueberries are particularly appealing in the summer, unlike other fruit, like apples or peaches. Apples and peaches are universally year-round and a peach dumpling at Thanksgiving is just as desirable as peach pie eaten at a July barbecue. Blueberries from your own bushes, especially if you’ve won a hard-fought battle against the voraciously hungry mockingbirds, are sublime. But if you don’t have your own source, blueberries are dependably affordable at the store for a couple of months.

By coincidence, I had two really good blueberry recipes sitting in my recipe file folder the last time the Husband decided to return to his “please don’t cook good food” mantra and deprived me of, not just special occasion/Sunday lunch cooking, but ordinary weekday dinners. (It was my own fault for having pretty much perfected oven roasted beef.) As compensation, he allowed as how I might cook for my fellow staffers at the office. So last week I unleashed my full blueberry passion on the unsuspecting coworkers and made boxed lunches for everybody on Friday.

Everybody received: 1 large classic club sandwich with thick-cut peppered bacon; one spinach salad with blue cheese, toasted pecans, and blueberries; fresh green and purple grapes nestled in a lettuce cup, and a blueberry crumble bar. Oh, and a bag of nice chips. I couldn’t squash the chips into the individual boxes, but I did lay out the rest of it in a tidy way and added a purple napkin. It was really pretty.

Blueberries were the starting point – well, rather the spinach salad was the starting point, because the photo of it in a magazine was so jaw-droppingly pretty and I’d been dying to make it for a month. So it followed that I should relate something else blueberry, since the rest of the lunch was pretty basic: sandwich, chips. And I really only threw the grapes in last minute in case somebody wanted to eat them instead of the dessert, or would like something to put back to snack on midafternoon, and mostly because they were gorgeous. It also covered most zen-eating elements; crunchy, soft, sweet, savory, sour, fresh.

Everybody seemed to like it, and I really liked planning, strategizing, chopping, preparing and even cleaning up, done as it was in a blissed-out cooking trance. The Husband got one, too, naturally; but as it was lunchtime, he allowed as how it was alright because the rest of the pan of blueberry bars was not on the premises.

They were lying in wait at home. Muw-wah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

Slow Roasted Beef

4 lb. beef roast (Rump or Bottom Round)

Olive Oil

Salt, pepper, thyme, powdered garlic

*Or use the seasoning you prefer

Take the roast out of the fridge and let it sit for 30 to 45 minutes so it won’t be ice cold. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Rub the roast with olive oil and then sprinkle generously with the seasonings. Place in a roasting pan. Shove the roast in the oven for 5 minutes per pound; turn off the oven and leave for 2 hours. Do not open the oven door. Slice thinly to serve. If you wish to have vegetables with this, you can; cut up potatoes, carrots and onions and steam or cook them until tender first.  Add them to the roasting pan when you put the roast in. Note: I have never had a problem with the roast being properly cooked enough to kill bacteria, but if you have any qualms about this whatsoever, please use another recipe.

Spinach Salad with Blueberries

1 package (10 oz) fresh spinach, torn

4 ounces crumbled blue cheese

1 cup fresh blueberries, washed and dried

½ cup toasted pecans

Dressing:

½ cup vegetable oil

¼ cup raspberry vinegar

2 tsp. Dijon mustard

1 tsp. sugar

½ tsp. salt

Mix the dressing up in a jar with a tight lid. Throw it all in and shake it up. Toss the salad ingredients together in a big bowl and add dressing; toss lightly. Serves six. Note: don’t skip toasting the pecans in a skillet over medium heat, watching carefully, stirring frequently, until they smell good. Note 2: this salad is much prettier if you take the time to put the spinach in first, then sprinkle the other ingredients on top. It’s delicious. Source: Best You magazine, Summer 2009.

Blueberry Picnic Bars

1 ½ cups quick oats

½ cup flour

½ cup light brown sugar, packed

¼ tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

6 Tblsp. butter or margarine, melted

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8” square baking pan with foil, leaving foil hanging over the edges. In a large bowl, mix up the above ingredients. It will be crumbly. Reserve ½ cup to use as the topping. Press the rest of the mixture evenly into the foil lined pan. Bake 12 minutes to set the crust.

Filling:

1 ½ cups blueberries, rinsed and drained

3 Tblsp. sugar

2 tsp. cornstarch

1 tsp. fresh lemon juice

Stir together the filling ingredients in a saucepan over medium heat until simmering. Simmer and stir occasionally about 2 minutes, until the juices are thick and no longer cloudy. Spoon the filling over crust; crumble the reserved topping mixture over the blueberries. Bake 30 minutes; cool completely in the pan. Use the foil “handles” to lift out the bars; cut into 2” squares. Serves 16. Note: Serves 16! Hilarious! These are nice and rich so I guess, theoretically, it could serve 16. I doubled the recipe. Be sure to cook this until the middle is firm; you do not want undercooked goo in the middle. Source: www.recipezaar.com Recipe # 1600, submitted by Barefoot Beachcomber.