The week of Halloween, I tried to make caramel sauce and failed twice. Part of the problem is that I don't have a candy thermometer because I am a combination of lazy and stubborn, so I kept burning the sugar. Also, I think that my stove is old and ghetto and the heat is not consistent. Regardless, I am a little cocky and not particularly accustomed to such utter failure in the kitchen, especially not twice in a row. It was quite demoralizing. I had a couple Halloween parties to go to last weekend, and my brilliant plan was to bring sliced apples and homemade caramel sauce and be a hero. I went out and bought something ridiculous like 5 pounds of golden delicious apples for this plan and then stunk up my apartment with two nasty batches of unsuccessful caramel sauce. I rallied and brought Greek cheese plates to my party instead, but had a huge bag of apples to deal with and dispose of. Solution? Applesauce.

Amazing homemade applesauce starts with five or six apples, peeled, cored, and chopped up into pieces about the size of pencil erasers. Dump all your chopped apples into a big saucepan and put about a cup of water into the pan. Cover, turn the stove heat to medium, and let the apples sweat for about 15 minutes. Remove the lid and add between 1 and 3 tablespoons of of cinnamon, sugar and vanilla extract. Simmer the apples until the water is evaporated and the apples are soft and saucy. Mash some of the residual chunks against the side of the pan, and you could puree with an immersion blender, but I don't own crap like that and even if I did, I wouldn't want to wash it.

Applesauce is delicious hot or cold, plain or garnished with nonfat yogurt, mixed into oatmeal or shared with your friends and coworkers. Also, as an extra bonus, it smells like Christmas which is three quarters of what I'm looking for this time of year.

I started reading Laurie Colwin this summer because of an article I read on Jezebel about marketing fiction written by women. The article talked about how, in the current literary climate, a novel written by someone with breasts will likely be encased in a pink dustjacket and placed on a table of chick-lit even if its subject matter does not fundamentally concern underwear shopping, boyfriend analyzing, social climbing, strategic bed-hopping and all the other topics that made nasty Candace Bushnell a brazillionaire. While I think this would give most well-read girls pause, upon reflection, I'm not vehemently opposed to idea. I am happy if this strategy enables talented women to make a living at writing, and I like to imagine people looking for the next adventure of a shopaholic being tricked into reading something that potentially has intellectual merit. Laurie Colwin was offered up as an example of an authoress who wrote "serious" books that happened to be about women and also happened to periodically employ humor.

That was enough of an endorsement to send me to the library to borrow Happy All the Time and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object. Colwin was quite prolific, and with almost ten novels to her credit, it was difficult to know where to start, but those two seemed to be the most frequently acclaimed. I blew through both stories in about 48 hours apiece. Both hovered around the 200 page range and were not particularly taxing to traverse. I had a hard time with Happy All the Time, because I didn't like any of the female characters. They were all such difficult women. One of them was a stay-at-home wife who would frequently disappear for months long chunks of time to "be alone in the quiet" or whatever with nary a substantial explanation to her beleaguered husband. The other main female character was always either being nasty, suspicious and snide to her husband or crying about how she was worried he didn't love her. Both of these women turned their noses up at a peripheral lady character who had the nerve to passionate about organic food. I suppose the point of this was to show that women do not have to fit into a traditional mold of femininity and domesticity, waiting at home with hot meatloaf on the stove. Meanwhile, the husbands were the sweetest, most jovial dopes I'd ever encountered. How did they find their way to these women? The entire time I was reading, I couldn't understand whether Colwin was trying to teach me a lesson embodying ideals I believed in in two very unlikable women, or whether she really thought she was creating Bohemian, modern paradigms for us all to which we should all aspire.

The second book, Shine On Bright and Dangerous Object, was about a slightly more likable woman my age who has just lost her husband in a sailing accident. Within the first ten pages of this novel, it was clear that she and her dead husband's brother are in love, that they are inherently more compatible than she was with her dead husband, and that the two of them are going to end up together. No, seriously, we had to wait through 175 pages of them pretending to not be in love while she grieved and built her new life on her own terms and blah blah blah until she finally got drunk and made out with her dead husband's brother. And then, in the last couple chapters, after she finally permits herself to be happy with the dead husband's brother, she goes away to a musical summer camp for grownups where she starts an affair with a married pediatrician from Tennessee. I had been on board with the whole stupid storyline until she boned the doctor from Nashville. That just made me mad. The character justified it by saying that her relationship with the doctor was something completely independent and special from her dead-husbands-brother-boyfriend at home, assumedly to prove the point that her love for her dead husband is something unique and unconnected to her love for his alive brother. I knew from the beginning she was going to get together with the brother, and I was rooting for it, but I guess I'm too rigid and monogamous to allow the logic to follow so far that one relationship pairing has literally no bearing on another one.

Not surprisingly, the book I liked even better than either of these was Colwin's non-fiction-memoir-cookbook, Home Cooking. Several hundred pages of anecdotes, advice and opinions about the kitchen, this book was all my favorite things. This afternoon I picked up the sequel, More Home Cooking, from the library and three chapters in, it is quickly winning me over. The introduction was all about how all her favorite books have vivid descriptions of menus and food, and as illustration of this point, she mentioned what a infuriatingly underrated author Jane Austen is. "Everybody thinks she's just darling, but she is not just darling, she's really tough." And that sentence helps me to understand Colwin's intentions with her women a little bit better; just as Austen wrote women that expanded conceptions of the abilities and interior lives of Regency women, Colwin wants to create women who challenge our ideas of the everyday pedestrian heroine.

That doesn't mean I have to like them, though, because, man, they sound annoying.

Deviled Eggs - (I just found out that another name for Deviled Eggs is Eggs Mimosa. I wish I would have been aware of that fact earlier so I could have been calling them that all along.)

If you would like to make your friends love you, I recommend bringing these to a barbecue, party or gathering of any sort. Peoples' responses will help you differentiate between the awesome people you like and the dogmatic vegan types. Just kidding. Sort of.

Boil six (or more!) eggs. My procedure for this is to place the eggs in the bottom of a pot, cover them with cold water, and heat the water on high until it boils. Once the water is boiling, wait 6-8 minutes, remove from heat and stop the eggs from cooking further by putting them in cold water. What I usually do is pour as much of the boiling water as I can out into the sink and run cold water into the pot. Let the eggs cool as much as you can. Ideally, you'd let them rest for half hour or so, but the time will obviously be dictated by whether or not you've planned ahead and if you were supposed to be at your barbecue 45 minutes ago.

Once the eggs are cool (enough), shell them, slice in half lengthwise and dump the yolks into a mixing bowl. Mix the yolks with a few tablespoons of mayonnaise, some mustard, a teaspoon or two of white vinegar, salt, pepper, paprika, and about a tablespoon of sugar per six eggs. Dude, the sugar is the secret in the recipe, it makes these eggs magical. You want this mixture to have the consistency of toothpaste, so add the wetter ingredients slowly and sparingly until you figure out what you're dealing with. Taste and adjust seasoning.

At this point, you can spoon the filling into your egg white cups with a little spatula and a spoon. Or, if you are too much of an over-achiever for your own good, as I tend to be, you can transfer the mixture to a pastry bag fitted with a large star shaped tip. Pipe the filling into your egg cups in a circular motion, arrange prettily and give the whole plate a sprinkle of paprika. Practice smiling graciously for when people tell that they have determined that you that you are a wizard disguised as a regular person for crafting these eggs.

I generally don't worry about the cashiers in the checkout stand at grocery store judging me by my purchases, but that is probably because I usually buy sensible and non-remarkable assortments of groceries. Fruits and vegetables and 10 kinds of yogurt and sundry dry goods that do not become magical and fabulous until I take them home to my little cubby of a kitchen and squirrel them away in my pantry to eventually be turned into soups and casseroles and baked items. I'm getting to a cranky point in my 20s where I'm tired of most of the restaurants I used to love and nothing will please me like my own cooking does. I sometimes worry that that means I am slowing turning into my yiayia, which is obviously a terrifying concept.

So, the majority of the time my grocery basket looks like the shopping list of an old lady, albeit one who really likes seasonal beer, and I don't think that is anything to cause me considerable shame. However, last night, I must admit I was a little sheepish as I went through the checkout line with a little under a pound of asparagus, three tomatoes, a can of chocolate slim-fast powder and a box of red wine. I wanted to stop and reassure the cashier that I wasn't going to make a slim-fast shake for dinner to wash down my asparagus and wine, but of course that would have called even more attention to the combination. I guess all that means is that I am still firmly planted in my twenties and not in any danger of premature octogenarian status.

Close call, that one.

After at least a year of admiring it in bookstores, Cody purchased the America's Test Kitchen Cookbook a few weeks ago. I think it illustrates some important differences in us that Cody's idea of the perfect cookbook is one that provides scientifically tested "best of breed" recipes, whereas I am mostly seeking the cookbook that has the recipes that taste just like the food my mother and grandmothers cook. Nevertheless, Cody's purchase inspired him to resolve to cook one new meal every week. He got off to a great start this week by cooking delicious dinners two nights in a row. Which leads me to. . .

Meals my boyfriend cooked for me this week:

1. Parmesan Encrusted Chicken Breasts - America's Test Kitchen Cookbook
This recipe required Cody to pound chicken breasts to 1/2 thick and coat them in flour, egg whites and thickly grated Parmesan cheese before pan frying them briefly and finishing the baking in the oven. The chicken turned out moist and tender, with a crunchy savory coating. The reheated extra breast I ate for lunch the next day was less crispy, but equally delicious. In the future, I would reheat the chicken in the oven rather than the microwave, if given the option.

2. Boeuf Bourgondien - The Joy of Cooking
Cody swore he saw a recipe with photos of this dish in the America's Test Kitchen cookbook, but when it came time to find the recipe to write up his shopping list, it was definitely not in there. I wonder if he dreamed of it. Sometimes I make up recipes in my dreams, like last week when I dreamt of creating a lasagna with lots of spinach and shredded chicken. Luckily, The Joy of Cooking had a detailed and delicious looking Beef Burgundy recipe. We ate this over egg noodles, which was perfect. We both agreed that the next time we make this recipe we will use way more carrots and other vegetables.

Black Eyed Pea Salsa

2 15 oz cans Black Eyed Peas, drained and rinsed
1 15 oz can Black Beans, drained and rinsed
One half red bell pepper diced
One jalepeno pepper, seeds removed, diced
Small bunch green onions, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine ingredients in large bowl, stir and mash some of the beans coarsely with a fork. This recipe is especially good if you can make it in advance and let the mixture meld overnight. Serve with tortilla chips. Cody likes to make nachos with the leftovers.

Chunky Guacamole

5 large ripe avacados
3 roma tomatoes
1/2 small red onion
1 jalepeno pepper, seeds removed
1/2 large bell pepper, whatever color is on sale at the store
5 cloves garlic
1 lime
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Slice roma tomatoes in half, scoop out the seeds and discard. Coarsely chop tomatoes, onion, jalepeno and bell pepper into a large bowl. Add minced garlic. Squeeze juice of lime over ingredients, add avocado and mash with fork. Continue to mash / stir and add olive oil, salt and pepper. Serve with anything at all, because seriously, this guacamole is that good.

Soups I've made over the last several weeks, where I got the recipe, how much I have left and how good they were:

Minestrone - The Joy of Cooking (75th Anniversary Edition)

Super complex and delicious, especially considering how low-fat this recipe is. I love to make this recipe when I have a refridgerator full of random vegetables getting elderly, because everything tastes good simmered in chicken broth with beans and pasta and bacon. This soup is all eaten and gone.

Corn Chowder - The New Basics

Ross and Erin left this cookbook behind when they got married and moved to Hotlanta. I am physically incapable of not rescuing abandoned books, and cabbaging onto this one has yielded many more tangible benefits than that copy of stories about Buddhist women languishing on my bookshelf. This recipe was pretty good; it included bacon, red peppers and lots of onion with the corn and milk, but didn't really thicken properly. I have three small containers of this soup in the freezer.

Bean and Pasta Soup - The New Basics

Tomato based soup full of beans and orzo, I added chicken breast to this soup. This got very thick and on the second day I put almost a quart of broth in it to thin it out and make it more "soupy." I had a tupperware full of this soup from the freezer for lunch today, and it was even more delcious than I remembered. There are still two frozen containers of this waiting for future lunches.

Curried Sweet Potato Chowder - Better Homes and Gardens

Here's the thing, I love the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook; it contains the best sugar cookie recipe I have ever tried, excellent recipes for dips, a whole section on slow cooker recipes, undsoweiter. It is my second favorite cookbook after The Joy of Cooking because of its broad sweep
(TJOC is broader; it has instructions on how to skin and cook a squirrel!) and reliability; I've never made a bad recipe from this cookbook. But now the caveat, it took a couple interesting recipes for me to realize how "midwest" this cookbook is. For example, last spring when we had a Kentucky Derby party I prepared a rootbeer pulled pork selection for our guests, and for the rootbeer sauce, the recipe told me to use a cup of "chile sauce." Now, to me, the urban international food conusmer that I am, "chile sauce" means something like Siracha or Choloula, so I tried to prepare a serving sauce with an entire cup of that, and, not surprisingly, it was mouth scaldingly inedible. I had never before heard of this "chile sauce" that lives in a bottle next to the A-1 and isn't spicy at all. I had a similar experience when making this curried sweet potato chowder. I was expecting a soupy savory pot of something that tasted not exatly like the panang I can get from Thai Tom, but at least vaguely reminiscent. No. Not at all. This soup was tasty, but milky and sweet, not savory and substantial. Nevertheless, I ate it all, knowing that the tuppers frozen would probably never be defrosted for lack of enthusiasm.

If anyone genuinely wants the recipe Cody used to make Scotch Eggs last weekend, you probably are an eclectic enough cook to just go out and buy your own copy of The Joy of Cooking. If for some crazy reason you think that is not a good use of your money or resources (independent of your specific feelings about Scotch Eggs, which I am still skeptical of), then we probably won't be friends, but I'll give you the recipe anyway.

Also, we went to a party, and now our cooking is famous. (I made the guacamole, my lap is in the picture.)

Last month I took an extremely horrible cooking class for French Pastries with Julia and Anne. Technically, it wasn’t painful or intellectually insulting to be there, but I couldn’t help but feel cheated that I was paying a lot of money for two sessions of essentially watching a woman make mediocre desserts in the common room of a depressing apartment complex in Everett. I hate Everett so much. Looking at the class fee, I had mistakenly assumed that we were paying for an experience that involved a commercial kitchen with plenty of counter-space for everyone to try their hand at lemon custard and crème brulee, when in fact, the seven of us were huddled around an island taking notes on a flaky pastry recipe that, frankly, was vastly inferior to the recipe my grandmother passed along to me years ago. But the real rub was revealed ninety minutes into the first class period when the teacher decided she had done enough teaching for one day and that we would have a better time watching a Rick Steves video about Paris. She claimed she’d seen it and that it was a really good way to learn about French food, but she was clearly lying because aside from the video beginning when Mr. Steves emerges from a Parisian butcher shop, there was not a single mention of food or technique. Not to outdo herself in ineptitude, the following week she was done cooking again before the allotted two hours had elapsed, so we watched the video again. From the beginning. Again. The same video. And her crème brulee didn’t set up and her cream puffs tasted pasty. Thank god there was wine.

In the end, I’m walking away from that experience over $80 poorer, with no recipes I would reprise to impress my friends and family and having wasted 5 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.