I caught a squirrel climbing down my plum tree last week, munching a plum. I charged toward him, he dropped it, and bolted up a maple tree. I like to think he crapped in fear as he scurried up his tree. But that doesn’t get my plum back.

My suburban backyard is either dreadfully or delightfully full of creatures, take your pick. I found a baby box turtle meandering through last week — a baby box turtle! — and my neighbor claims to have seen deer sauntering through the lawns. These sitings expand the long list of residents, including birds, squirrels, possums, snakes, mice, moles and rabbits. Something is eating the chard. Cabbage loopers skeletonized a plant. 

And while a certain gray furry “natural predator” is taking a nap so profound it qualifies as a coma, the chipmunks are leaping through the air, performing flying high-fives on their way to my cucumbers. It looks like a scene from frakin’ Willard back there in the mornings.

So I hunted up the garden journal I kept back in my post-hippie, professional garden days to find the exact proportions for The Lethal Brew. It’s simple, but it used to work.

The Lethal Brew
Grate a couple of tablespoons of Ivory soap into 1 to 2 cups of water. Gotta be Ivory — the other bars on the market are detergent. Detergent harms plant foliage. Ivory is the last real soap, except for the handmade artisan types.

Throw in a couple of inches of a cheap cigar or a plug of chewing tobacco the size of a half-dollar

Add a hot pepper pod at least 2 inches long, or a spoonful of red pepper flakes

Let the brew soak for at l east 12 hours. Strain it and add enough water to give it a sprayable consistency. Spray it on plant leaves, tomatoes, apples every couple of days.

It still works — on some things. It stopped the cabbage worms and tarnished plant bugs (which suck the green out of bean leaves until the leaves look bronze).  It isn’t vile enough to keep the squirrels from eating the apples. Or rather, taking one bite of an unripe apple and then dropping it. And then doing the same thing the next day — how stupid are squirrels? And it doesn’t keep the rabbits (or some creature) from eating the chard. If you have a solution — besides a fence — I’m game to try anything.

    When I think of Spinach Salad with mushrooms and bacon, I think of the 1970s and patchwork granny skirts, and those really short tennis dresses women wore. I think of Harvey Wallbanger cake and fondue and Mark Spitz.

Spinach Salad with Hot Bacon Dressing was at every potluck or dinner gathering my family attended. Sometimes it had hard-boiled eggs in it, and sometimes not, but that’s about all the variation I remember. It always had a warm dressing made with bacon grease, sugar and ketchup and vinegar. If it was freshly made, the vinegary fumes would get in your nose, which was not entirely unpleasant.

In the early 1980s, I began noticing that people were using Russian dressing, and thereby depriving the salad of the very important temperature contrast between cold crisp greens and warm oily dressing, not to mention the whole bacon-sugar-vinegar combination.

I found myself with bacon, mushrooms, and spinach a few years back and was inspired to make it from an old Southern Living recipe using balsamic vinegar in place of white vinegar but retaining the ketchup. I gave it a topping of toasted sesame seeds. Divine. It was like tasting it all over again.

This time around I tried a few innovations. I wanted it to be a main dish, so I doubled the mushrooms and used really good center-cut bacon. I don’t love raw mushrooms, so they got a turn in the hot bacon grease with the lid on so they began cooking but retained some firmness. I caramelized shallots and red onions then added a little blueberry-pomegranate syrup, and a spoonful of sugar, then the vinegar. I topped it with two generous handfuls of deeply toasted almonds.
“Sometimes I think you should open a restaurant,” said Big Fella. “But then I think it’d be too risky.”

I’ll say. The salad only works if the onions are caramelized just right, the dressing cooked down to a syrup. That’s the kind of work that’s hard to replicate in big batches, in a busy kitchen. And even if you could find people to do it right, every time, breaking a wonderful dish into a process might somehow take the magic out of it. And when the magic is gone, the food falls flat.

Because the real joy of cooking is that extraordinary moment when you put that first bite in your mouth, and it’s even better than you expected and you aren’t sure why, but whatever you did must have worked.

Seventies Spinach Salad with Bacon Dressing

10 ounces good quality bacon
2 8-ounce packages fresh button mushrooms
1 red onion, sliced into rings
2 shallots, sliced into rings
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon ketchup, fruit syrup or jelly
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
4 to 8 ounces fresh spinach (depending on how many you’re feeding)
1 cup sliced almonds, toasted
Cook the bacon in a skillet until it reaches your preferred doneness. Drain and chop. Cook the mushrooms in the bacon grease, covered, until they release some liquid. Remove them with a slotted spoon.
Cook the onions in the mushroom liquid and about 2 tablespoons of the vegetable the oil until they are tender. Add the fruit syrup and sugar and cook, covered, until the onions and shallots are fully caramelized, tender all the way though, and a deep color. Add the vinegar and cook, stirring, until well blended. Add the remaining vegetable oil and mix well.
Pile the spinach in the bowl. Top with the almonds, then the mushrooms. Pour (or spoon — it may be too thick to pour) the dressing and onions over the salad. Toss and toss — it will eventually coat every leaf. Makes 3 to 6 big servings.

   These last 10 years, I’m tasting a lot of flavors in foods that weren’t there before.  I taste almond flavoring in some French vanilla coffee creamers. I taste caramel flavoring in cheap bourbons. Just minuscule amounts, you know, too little to be listed in the ingredients.

And I can taste — even smell — chicken broth in Uncle Ben’s rice once it has cooked. Am I crazy — don’t answer that. Is it just me, or can other people taste the faintest hint of chicken broth in Uncle Ben’s freakishly white, fluff, regular grains?

From December 7 to December 27, we spent just 4 nights at home. The rest of the time, we were either going to a party or throwing a party or cooking something to take to a party or sleeping off a party or washing clothes to attend another party. On the 20th nearly-consecutive night of parties, we attended a “festive casual supper” of 42 people, all relatives of ours, stretching to second cousins once removed and ex-step-aunt-in-laws.

One efficient party-giving gesture is cooking big pieces of meat. For one party, we semi-smoked a turkey (more on that below). For another, we made gumbo from the turkey. For another, we made our own homemade honey-baked ham. And finally, the beef roast, but that’s a story for another day.

Semi-smoked turkey was a huge success. We roasted a 12-pound turkey for about 3 hours, so it wasn’t yet done, but approaching it. We fired up the smoker and stoked it with mesquite, then put the turkey in a roasting pan and into the smoker for an hour. When it registered 150 degrees, we called it “done,” tented it in foil for a while, then  rushed it to the cutting board. It had  just the right amount of smoke flavor and was perfectly moist. And truly, I did not hing but oil and salt the skin, then put it in the oven, then transfer it to the smoker. People were arriving in minutes, so we didn’t shoot a photo.

You may be one of those people, like me, who love flavor pyrotechnics, so here’s one we conjured around the party table. A hunk of semi-smoked turkey, a swipe of wasabi mayo, a single zinfandel-simmered cranberry and a chunk of pickled watermelon rind. Searing hot, sweet, firm, chewy, tender. Da-yum. Took a photo of it, but accidentally deleted it.

(Just an aside on the smoker itself: my brother bought it from a guy who sells them from the empty lot near the 12th Avenue branch library in Nashville on Saturdays in good weather. The guy is a welder from Mt. Juliet. He converts discarded water heaters into smokers just the right size for civilian use.)

It’s not every day that someone tosses their best easy recipe your way.  The home-baked honey ham was one of these. My mother-in-law makes a refined-tasting ham for holiday breakfasts, and just rattled off the formula one afternoon. Buy a canned ham or a semi-boneless ham. It should say fully cooked, or ready to at, which you wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. Wipe off or rinse the ham, dry it a little so the honey will stick, then coat it with honey. Wrap it in two layers of foil and seal it well. Bake it in a roasting pan at about 300 degrees for 3 hours. Cool and slice. Two steps, great ham.

If I’d shot just three photos per party, that would have been 48 pictures. Besides the professionally shot photos of party number two, I only have two to offer. This is Spicy Nut Mix from recipezaar. Despite the name, it’s not especially spicy, and it’s a nice offering for the noneaters of sweets.

It was a good party season f0r homemade baked goods: this year I discovered some great cookies. This is our cookie tray from last night’s party.

Starting at the top and moving clockwise: lemon-butter wreaths from our cookie gun; Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Cracks; black walnut bars made with black walnuts from our yard; shortbread with a caramel-pecan top layer; lemon-glazed persimmon bars; jubilee wafers.

We learned a new way to “frost” the chocolate cracks, which by themselves aren’t so Christmasy, but they’re really chewy and fudgey, so you want to invite them to the party.  We add peppermint extract and frost them with Shirley Corriher’s technique: roll the dough balls in granulated sugar first, then in powdered sugar. The granulated sugar layer prevents the moisture in the cookie from wetting the powdered sugar, so the cookies stay frosty-looking.

I only make black walnut bars every couple of years. Black walnuts, they’re a lot of work. You have to gather them in either a basket (that you never want to use again for anything else) or a paper bag. Let them sit in the basement until the hulls soften and turn dark brown (and the bottom of the bag disintegrates). Pour  them onto the driveway in the tracks of the car tires. Run over them to remove the hulls. Wear gloves to pick them up and wipe them off, or even rinse them off. Back in the basket to dry. Crack with a heavy rock. Pick meticulously. One hour of picking will give you about 1 cup of nuts. Hardly anyone sells black walnuts — they’re a pain and they don’t keep well — so if you want them, you do them yourself. Their dark, almost fermented flavor is ideal for adding to a toffee cookie bar.

Lemon-glazed persimmon bars: I’ve looked for years for something to do with the persimmons that are abundant most years in the yard. In the past, I sometimes made persimmon pudding, which is a pudding in the English sense of something baked and of a soft, spoonable texture. The bars are easier to eat, to transport and to serve. They are nicely spiced, and dates add some extra chew. The recipe is from Epicurious and I love it so much I wish I could move to a persimmon island and eat them full-time.  A photo of persimmon puree.

Jubilee wafers came from the 1973 Joy of Cooking. I wanted a refrigerator dough that I could make in advance, then shape and decorate later. I’ve made every roll cookie in the Joy, I thought, but somehow I overlooked Jubilee wafers.  Jubilee wafers call for a lot of honey, a lot of spice, and half a cup of bourbon. Jubilee, I’ll say. They were also supposed to have nuts and fruit, but I left those out. It’s a chewy, spicy cookie with a little touch of jubilee. A keeper.

Not on the tray were Jennifer’s little miniature gingerbreads, made from a great Williams Sonoma Thanksgiving cookbook recipe. Good molasses flavor, lighter texture than most gingerbreads, with a little orange flavor. And Ashley’s layered stacks of sugar cookie alternating with jam. They looked like accordions, sort of, and I admired all the work that went into them, and how good they were.

I live on the same street where I grew up. Different house, other end of the street, and 30 years later, but same street.

It’s one of those epic streets: hidden in plain sight near two excellent schools, close enough to shopping but not close enough to be part of the gridlock at holidays, a great sledding hill, spectacular autumn foliage, older houses, nice but not flashy, not too distant from downtown. Some of the neighbors have been here  more than 30 years.

My three-doors-down neighbor here is … my backyard neighbor from back then. Andrew and his brothers were friends of my brothers. Our back yards adjoined and our doors were always open. They were great neighbors then, and they’re great neighbors now.

The lady of the house, Andrew’s mother, was from the Northeast US originally, and when I was visiting one day, she was baking blueberry buckle. This was the 1970s, and I was maybe 12 years old and had never eaten a fresh blueberry, so it seemed like the most exotic food ever. I went home and asked my mom to make a blueberry buckle. She called the neighbor and got the recipe.

A lot changed after that.  My parents’ marriage ended and my mom’s life went into a slow-mo trainwreck that scattered her possessions across several states. My neighbor married someone very nice, and after 20 years, moved into the house 3 doors down from mine. His wife and I have become close enough friends that we swap gifts often.

I recently found the original recipe card of the Blueberry Buckle recipe, written in my deceased mother’s hand. I’m giving her the card (or a really good copy of it — I can’t decide) for Christmas.

When I look at it, I think of a time when we were all happy. It isn’t just a piece of paper to me — it’s an artifact from a long, shared past. Besides the associations, there’s the intimacy of a handwritten recipe in this day of recipes printed from the Internet and torn from magazines.  And if none of that meant anythingto my friends, it’s still her mother-in-law’s recipe, and makes a really good Blueberry Buckle.

Our computer has been gutted and hosed out like a fish, flushed out like a spa client, and gotten a new brain like Frankenstein.  It’s never felt or behaved better, so thank you for your patience while the ole Mac had an E-enema.

Tupperware Avalanche’s “Name the Dish” game has a three-way tie! Cyclops on Toast by 1050 lb come one down! You’ve won a grill wok! One-Eyed Egyptian by Nicole, come on down and get your grill wok! And a laurel, and hearty handshake to Claudia for Moon Over Miami.

Thanks to everyone for your entries. Send me your contacts and I’ll get your grill wok to you. We will soon resume our normal programming schedule.

When I was little, my mom occasionally made this bread-and-egg breakfast for a special I-love-you treat. The butter and eggs were rich and filling, and the bread was crisp and toasty. Simple and comforting. It was also the first cooked dish I ever made.

Problem is, now that I want to make it for my own precious Sweet Cheeks, I don’t know what to call it. I’ve heard plenty of names: Funny Eggs, Egg-in-a-Frame, Popeye Eggs. I bet your family had one.

And that’s what this contest is about: submit your best name for this dish and win a grill wok from my supply (scroll down to see a few of them in the sink).

Be creative! Good luck, and tell a friend!

Tupperware Avalanche has become Kraft Garlic Cheese Roll Central against long odds. Despite lifelong Southern-ness, a love of cheese grits, and two previous posts on Kraft Garlic Cheese, I hadn’t ever purchased it. My mom used it, and millions of other Southern moms use it, but I just never had occasion.

(If you’re new to the Kraft Garlic Cheese Roll story, it was unceremoniously discontinued around the 2007 holidays by some sharp business minds at Kraft.)

A dear friend read one of the previous posts on the story, and sweetly bought a roll of it for me, which I hoarded in the fridge for four months. (Oh stop making the “ewww” face — as if processed cheese EVER goes bad. It probably would have been just fine in the cabinet for four months. Ewwww.)

When just the right occasion arrived, I made cheese grits. Mmmmm. Waaaaarm. Cheeeeezy. Griiiiitty. I had never used Kraft Garlic Cheese roll to make them before, and I admits, it’s seductively easy. Too late I discover this.

Just as a note, “Kraft Garlic Cheese” is the most logged search term on this blog. So it’s possible you reached this page looking for a substitute for the discontinued Kraft Garlic Cheese rolls.

If you reached this page looking for a substitute for Kraft Garlic Cheese roll, try this recipe I found on the Kraft chat boards. I modified it so the roll sizes match the Kraft 6-ounce roll.  

Garlic Cheese Rolls

1 1/2 pounds sharp cheddar cheese, grated

1/2 pound processed cheese product such as Velveeta

3 ounces cream cheese

1 teaspoon seasoned salt

Garlic powder to taste

Soften cheeses and mix all together well. Shape into six rolls and wrap securely in foil or plastic wrap.

To reach the Kraft kitchens and request they revive Kraft Garlic Cheese roll, call 1-800-847-1997 and follow the prompts.

Vacation with the 21 closest members of the immediate family in a mountain house called a “cottage” that holds all of us. Lots of white porches and dirty bare feet and sweaty kids. The moms take the opportunity to drink instead of eat, and the kids scarf junk all day and all night until they collapse in their tracks.

There’s a dining hall on the grounds, run by Nashville’s renowned Emily Frith, offering fresh, small-batch, handmade, knock-your-socks-off food each day.

It’s impossible to gather/convince all 21 people to go, but we make a point of eating at least one lunch, and it never disappoints. Every day there’s freshly handmade gazpacho, black beans and yellow rice, and a great salad bar. The hot entree for the day was beefy mac-n-cheese, and the grills were fired up for grilled chicken and burgers.

Sweet Cheeks ate vegetables without being asked, so she earned a Ghirardelli brownie. Every table was full, and since we eat slowly, the brownies were gone by the time we got there. Once we told Emily how disappointed we were, she herself brought us one from the back. She’s got the heart of a servant, and the whisk of Martha Stewart. If you loved her sesame vinaigrette from back in the day, or you’ve heard of its deliciosity, you can buy it at the Chevron at the corner of Page Road and Harding.