Nobody gives up anything unless they have a problem with it. Three days ago, I started a 30-day sugar fast for two reasons. The first reason is that I have a problem with sugar. (The problem being that I like it, and sugar is a problem.) The second reason is that the same day, my friend, Jamie, went into a silent meditation retreat for 30 days, and I wanted to do something in solidarity. It wasn’t so much for her, but because I know myself, and I know that when Jamie calls me in 30 days with reports of a life-altering experience, I will want to have had one, too. When I thought of what life-altering thing I could do for 30 days, abstaining from sugar was the obvious choice. What was also extremely obvious was that there was no way I would be able to live 30 sugar-starved days with this Zzang! candy bar (the exclamation point is theirs; I try to abstain from those, too.)  in the cupboard, a candy bar that I pick up every time I am at the Heath Ceramics Store, which, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t nearly often enough. It’s a dark chocolate, gourmet version of a Snicker’s Bar, which, just to get this sugar problem across, I have been known to freeze and throw into my tennis bag for energy. Or I should say, “energy.” I eat my ZZang!s thinly sliced with the thinnest, sharpest knife I have. I did eat them thinly sliced anyway. Today, I’ll have a tangerine. And I’ll like it. No, really. I will…

The reasons I chose this particular book are first, that I love Mario’s food. His sweetbreads at Babbo rocked my world the first time I ate them nearly 15 years ago. (“It’s all about the duck prosciutto,” he said when I interviewed him for my book, Foods of the World: New York). And then there was the book’s subtitle, which contains both the words “simple,” and “home,” two words that should warm the heart of any home cook.

Which is why the first question I asked him in an email today, was whether it was even true…

1. Are these recipes really from your home?  ABSOLUTELY! THESE DISHES HAVE ALL BEEN PERSONALLY TESTED BY MY WIFE AND KIDS. thereby assuaging my first Fear of Cooking New Things, which is that I am working with recipes that don’t work.
2. Seriously though: do you cook at home? YES! I COOK BREAKFAST FOR MY BOYS EVERY DAY. I DO COOK DINNER A FEW TIMES A WEEK BUT MY KIDS’ BABYSITTER, LEO, IS AN AMAZING COOK AND I CAN’T MATCH HER MOLE – SO SHE COOKS ON THE DAYS I DO NOT. gotta love a man who loves mole, and who has a woman babysitter named Leo.
3. Would you ever cook dishes from The Babbo Cookook at home?  I WOULD, OF COURSE, BUT ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO JUST GO TO BABBO! Since I don’t plan on making duck prosciutto in this lifetime, I’ll take his suggestion. Now if he can please help me with a reservation…

Questions 4 and 5 were just the sort of stupid questions I’d have a wisecrack at a blogger for asking. Grazie, Mario, for sparing me by ignoring them.
6. What’s the best piece of advice you could give to me, the skilled home cook, cooking for friends at home? LEAVE IT ALONE! HOME COOKS ALWAYS WANT TO SHAKE, STIR AND RATTLE UNNECESSARILY. IF YOU LET YOUR COOKWARE DO ITS JOB IT SHOULD COME OUT WELL WITHOUT THE ADDED ENERGY. Or: why I love my All-Clad.

Number 7 was a question that I lifted directly from the handbook of Narcissists Anonymous. Mario did answer it, but I deleted it to save myself from my worst enemy: me.
8. And from the Dept. of It Really Is All About Me: What do you think of The Mozza Cookbook? No, really….  IT’S BRILLIANT – NANCY IS SO TALENTED AND YOU HELPED HER SHINE. COULDN’T BE HAPPIER WITH HOW IT TURNED OUT. ah, shucks…

Looking through Molto Batali, the first thing that struck me (other than how exciting it was to imagine cooking things I hadn’t already made hundreds of times!) was just how many words and terms I didn’t know in the table of contents alone. Bra tenere? Scafata? Farsumagru? This was exciting! I thought as one by one, I looked them up. The thrill of learning! Which brings me to the last reason I chose this book, and that is that for no one particular reason, I have long since decided that Mario Batali, born and raised in Washington and having lived most of his adult life in New York City, knows more about Italian cuisine than any other human being on the planet. Which is why, even though I have the book, I am going to Mario’s Los Angeles book signing on Friday afternoon. To play Stump the Chef, that is, and find out if there is anything about Italian food the man doesn’t know.  In the meantime, I’ll be drumming up a question… Any ideas?

Not having been there, one obvious difference between San Diego and LA, as I saw it, was that in San Diego, we don’t have movie stars. For another, we have the busiest international border in the world, which, being that our dad lived in Tijuana, we crossed an average of once a week. (LA-Tijuana, not same thing.) But most importantly, and back to the way this whole conversation started, in San Diego, we have avocados. San Diego is the biggest avocado growing region in the country. Maybe even the world. I grew up surrounded by streets with names such as Fuerte and Calavo (short for California-Avocado), and thirteen of our very own avocado trees in our very own backyard.

Occasionally, I used to harvest those avocados and sell them from a fold-up card table down the hill, at the same “intersection” where I caught the school bus. I use quotes around intersection to indicate the lack of traffic that passed through that little dirt quadrangle on any given day. And what nice people stopped to buy them, I wish I knew, since 13 was like the minimum number of trees you needed to live on that hill. Avocados, I’m trying to tell you, were just a part of life.

Often after school, my sister and I would walk down into the canyon that was our backyard, pick ourselves some avocados–ours were shiny and green–most likely Fuertes, Bacons, or Gwens. (The ones you see in the supermarkets these days are pretty much all Hass, with the occasional “Florida avocado” thrown in (whatever that is), but there are other great avocados out there, and all you lovers of the heirloom varieties should make it a point to try some someday.) Plucking those “avos” as my sister and I called them, in our cut-off denim shorts, or the denim shirts our mother embroidered with flowers and rainbows and astrological symbols, when she wasn’t making stained glass windows or macrame plant hangers, is where the farm-to-table fantasy ends and where the suburban 1970′s begin. With avocados in hand, we’d walk up the slate stairs that led us back to the house, perched on a cliff, on stilts. Upstairs in the kitchen (yes, the kitchen was upstairs), we’d cut the avocado in half with a knife whose tip was invariably missing due to my mother’s habit of using the closest thing she can find as a screwdriver. And, once the pit was removed, we’d pour, into the holes left by that pit, Wish-Bone Red Wine Italian or, in homage to our Tijuanese roots, Golden Caesar dressing.

When we were feeling particularly patient, we’d toast a piece of Orowheat Honey Wheatberry Bread, which my mom let us eat despite her pre-fad, bread-aversion, because of the seeds. Wee’d slather the toast with Best Foods mayo, smash an avocado on top, and sprinkle the avo with salt. It’s still, hands-down, one of the best afternoon snacks I know. The only thing I change when I make this snack today is the salt. I use Maldon. And I no longer eat my slices lying on my belly, on the shag carpet in the sunken living room of our glass house, in front of the Brady Bunch. But let it be known: I would if I could. Ahhh, to be ten again…

Three nights in April: one in a comfortable booth at the Dutch, Andrew Carmellini’s terrific pan-American clubhouse in SoHo, where I ate crabmeat dressed in bloody-mary sauce, a rib-eye steak and some apple pie; another at a sticky table at La Joya de Ceren on Rockaway Beach Boulevard in Queens, where a fried pork chop came flanked by pupusas, rice and garlicky beans; and a third at Masa, the sushi temple in the Time Warner Center.

I like Sam Sifton’s writing, pretty much, and he’s treated me kindly and with respect in all of the few interaction I’ve had with him but, I don’t know… Why does food writing so often have to get so… weird?

And then there is the brilliance of these last two graphs:

But the best meal I had on the job? It was in the garden of Frankies 457, on Court Street in Carroll Gardens, on a summer evening with my wife, my children and my brother. We had what everyone always has at Frankies: crostini and some romaine hearts, beets, cold rib-eye salad, cavatelli and sausage and brown butter, meatballs, braciola marinara. The kids hovered while the adults talked family over cold red wine, and a little breeze moved through the trees, and around us other people did the same.

There was bread as we needed it, water, more wine. The food was simple and elegant. The children behaved as they do when they are starving, and in love with what they are eating. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right. It would have been nice if it could have gone on forever.

In a sense, those two paragraphs beg the question: why do we review restaurants? Because a perfect meal isn’t about the perfect anything. It’s about good food, enjoyed with people you enjoy, and unless you’re traveling, ideally, close enough to home that you can comfortably go back— again and again. That’s a message I can get behind. The writing is still a little fancy but we’ll give Sam a break on fancy. He went to Harvard.

“Did you like the dessert?” I asked Howard.

“It was fine,” he said. He’s nicer than I am, at least when it comes to pudding. “But it’s not really my thing.”

“So what’s your thing?” I asked. “Apple pie?” I pride myself on being a little bit psychic or intuitive, or maybe just a good guesser, so I was proud when Howard said, “Yes. That’s exactly right.” And then he said something that is sure to keep me busy for the next several weeks, and that is: “I can’t find a good apple pie in Los Angeles.”

I worked a summer in the Hamptons as the pie baker at what may be the most expensive food store on the planet, Loaves & Fishes. I went in never having made a crust in my life (“We’ll teach you,” they said, with almost palpable desperation four days before the start of the summer season), and by the end of the summer, I got to where I could put out 60 pies a day, with the crusts made in small batches, and two hours to spare. I also worked selling fruit from what is probably the premier apple farmer selling at the Union Square Greenmarket, Locust Grove Fruit Farms. In addition to a whole bunch of wonderful summer fruits, we sold 26 types of antique apples, and were the only farm then that sold quince, a fuzzy, aromatic fruit that some scholars believe was the variety that fell from the tree of knowledge, the original forbidden fruit. I earned seven dollars and hour, paid in cash, plus fruit, paid in fruit, so I took advantage of these unforbidden fruits to try to get me up around nine dollars an hour. In the fall, when berries and stone fruit were no more, I made apple bread, apple spice cake, apple sauce, baked apples, apple crisp, and of course, apple pie. I became, for a few seasons, such a guru of the apple (okay, so maybe I exaggerate) that customers would come on Saturdays to ask me what type to buy for what they were making, and other times they would bring in the fruits of their fruit labors for me to try. So when Howard made that comment about the apple pie, of course I took it as a challenge. “I’m going to make you an apple pie that will make you happy,” I said.

“Many people have walked before you,” Margaret warned me. “I think Nancy even walked before you,” she added, referring to Nancy Silverton whose baked goods do have their fans.

I’ve started my research. I emailed my friend Bob Blumer who won third place in a Vermont apple pie baking contest a couple years back for his TV show, Glutton for Punishment. (He gave me his recipe, which includes bacon fat in the pie crust!) I asked Nancy what she does to elevate this humble American dessert: apple cider vinegar jelly and creme fraîche stirred into the apples. Both of which deviations beg the questions: Are we getting too fancy here? Have we lost our way?

Margaret tells me there are things Howard likes about the Costco apple pie, which I am willing to wager, without ever having seen or tasted one, contains neither apple cider vinegar jelly nor bacon fat. Margaret says I also need to try the slice they serve at Pasquale’s, the famous shoe repair place on San Vicente. A baking challenge that includes bacon fat, takes me to a shoe repair shop that specializes in Christian Louboutins, and that could also involve a road trip to the apple growing orchards of Tehachapi? This is why I do what I do—because as much as I’d like to be able to tell you otherwise, it certainly isn’t for the thousand dollar shoes.

“Anyone can say anything!”

“The only qualification as far as I can see is the ability to type.”

“And besides, who cares what you ate for dinner last night.”

And then, on August 11, as if my only qualification were the ability to type, I went and issued this tweet. Umami Burger’s “burger crack” = MSG. No, thank you. Why do we need chemically good? What’s wrong with just “delicious.”

It was a nice thought from the Department of Grumpy, but the truth is, I had no idea what I was talking about. This is no excuse but by way of explanation, I saw the word “crack” and “Japanese” in the same sentence and  immediately blinded by visions of MSG. I have major issues with MSG–bigger issues than I have with food bloggers even. And I fired off that tweet, as if it were okay to just to go around, you know… saying anything.

I started to feel pretty bad pretty quick when a friend emailed me:

Hi Carolynn [He even spelled my name correctly!]
[I'd always heard] that the “umami” means naturally occurring msg- not fake chemicals- and that’s what’s in [Umami's] food- all natural.
Not true?

The fact that my friend ended the email with a question mark was the part that made me feel really bad. Because it implied that he thought I knew what I was talking about. And generally I do, or at least I do my best to not just blow smoke.

I told him I’d shot the tweet off in haste and would do some research. And six weeks later [eons in blog time], I did. I read up on the subjects of umami and MSG, and learned what I can digest here as: First, this is too complicated for me to understand without more research than I actually want to do on the subject, at least here in a blog (e.g., for no pay). And second, If I was not wrong when I accused burger crack of being MSG, then that is sheer coincidence.

So this is essentially an apology, to anyone out there who might have read what I said and, in any fiber of their being, believed it. And now, onto lighter, brighter things. Wanna know what I had for dinner last night?

Complain as I might, the truth is, I put as much care into writing these books as I would if they were my very own, and the other truth is that I’ve fallen in love with almost every person I’ve written a cookbook for, in part because I’ve been lucky to work with the people I have, and in part because my job is to draw the best out of them, and when it comes right down to it, people, when you’re paying attention, are pretty great. The other thing that makes the labor all worth while is seeing the book in its final, hardcover, copy-edited, graphically-designed, photograph-enhanced, glossy-paged, for sale version. I’ve been through this before, but I’ve never been as excited as when I saw The Mozza Cookbook, which I did for the first time, oddly enough, at the media party that our publisher, Knopf, hosted for the book last Wednesday. (A party hilariously chronicled in this Food Republic story by the intrepid former NY Times Style section reporter, Allen Salkin, whose eye for story never ceases to amaze me.)

The book isn't really this big, but it is big. Not that size matters. (Photo: Tom Caltabiano.)

While I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by such superficial things, what struck me as I held the 350-page testament to two years of my life in my lamb-chop-greasy fingers, was how fat it is. And how heavy. It feels like an important book. Even the paper feels good. Of course how a book feels isn’t really what matters, but since I am intimately acquainted with every last word, and since I tested every last recipe (with help, of course), I feel like I’m allowed to be superficial and say: the book is pretty.

As pretty as it is, my secret favorite thing about it, which is the case with all the books I’ve written for Knopf, is that the book lies flat when you open it.

See?

This has to do with how the book is bound, a process, more expensive I’m sure, that means, for the home cook, that you don’t have to stick a bottle of wine on the book to keep it from bouncing to some random page while you’re checking the olive oil cakes for doneness. This is good news for those who plan to do something other than feel the paper, because this is a book that’s meant to be cooked from. I can tell you that for sure.

A review like the one in today’s LA Weekly Blog almost makes all that labor worth it, but only because it is by now but a vague and delicious memory.

During the time I got the pleasure of knowing Sara, by writing two of her cookbooks, she introduced me to a lot of things, including pimento cheese (“pimenna cheese”), Ole Miss and Oxford, Mississippi, tailgating the way only southerners can, Lake Placid, and a kind of generosity that–other than the Chino family, who are famous for theirs–I have never known before or since. All you can do with people like that is try to give back, but for better or worse, you’re pretty much assigned to a life of generosity debt with them. Still, I try.

“Anything,” I said.

“Can you look at what Sam Sifton wrote about the book and tell me if it’s good or bad.”

Sara was talking about her new book, Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen, which came out this summer and which I didn’t write. Sam is, or was until something like yesterday, the New York Times restaurant critic, had done a round-up of summer cookbooks for the Times Book Review that week, which I had yet to read. “I can tell you right now that he liked it,” I told her. “Because it’s a round-up of book’s  he’s recommending, not a review.” Nevertheless, I read the write-up and I could see how she could be confused. He seems to like it when he writes that it’s, “Lavishly illustrated and… very likely destined for kitchen shelves in coastal weekend homes and rentals from Montauk to Hilton Head.” But then he goes on to say that the recipes are, “neither surprising nor problematic,” and, “not going to change your life.” So now, thanks to Sam, we know what the cookbook is not, and if Sam were not in the position he is, he would have an editor who insisted on a rewrite stating what the cookbook was. Before getting back to Sara, I emailed a friend who has one of the savviest minds I know in the book biz, and asked her what she thought of Sam’s write-up. She’s also a woman of few words. “Inscrutable.” was the one that came back.

Yesterday, just to add to my debt, Sara sent me a case of Fresh Everyday, which was recently reprinted–with a much livelier cover. Inside the same box was a bottle of Foster’s Market Seven Pepper Jelly, which I always have to have around in case of entertaining emergencies, and then there was a copy of her Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen.

Even though he gave it a weird review, I can see why Sam chose the book in his round-up: It’s one of the rare cookbooks—among them I would include Judy Rogers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook, Classic Home Desserts, by the late Richard Sax, and Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, by Lidia Bastianich—that feels like a life’s work. The life’s work of a cook who is in his or her own way significant in the landscape of American cookery. Plus the food in this book looks and sounds delicious, and I know that Sara’s recipes are tested within an inch of their lives. Whether or not you have a house in Montauk, Hilton, or Lake Havasu, this is definitely a cookbook you want to have on your short shelf. I only wish I could say that I wrote it.