Last Saturday, the family and half the tiny town threw – flung, perhaps – a surprise party for my niece Lois’s seventeenth birthday. Pete turned out beautiful, sculptural platters laden with bright fruit, cheeses and crisp vegetables and an abundant variety of dips, breads and crackers. My sister Daria arranged the tables. She told me later, “Pete put down a platter and I said, ‘Nice. But not there.'” My cousin Sandy contributed an elegant display of striking cupcakes in the party’s black and white theme. We’ve developed the confidence to throw – fling, really – a party anytime, anywhere.

It’s also at these moments I remember our parents have always been batty.

Do not adjust your monitor.

Somewhere in 1950s America, Mom learned that significant teen occasions must include layered or rolled pink and green sandwiches with a creamy olive filling made by professional bakers. Psychiatrists refer to this as an idée fixe. Every time a member of the increasingly large family reaches a milestone, out come these completely tasty and mildly psychedelic sandwiches. Then those of us not thriving on diets of Frankenberry and Count Chocula detox for months.

Seriously: the ingredients are cream cheese, olives, bread and two vats of food coloring at truly dubious points on the color wheel. I’m sorry I’m not eating one of these sandwiches right now.

In an unrelated and equally inexplicable development, I seem to be able to try stuff and generally succeed at it again. Last week, I decided I could make the pierogies I wanted to eat. With Pete’s help and Siobhan’s favorite dough recipe, it worked! I was flabbergasted, and I mean completely flabbergasted when not only did the dough come together in my hands after chilling overnight, but the filling was brilliant: sweet potato, a bit of andouille sausage, vitamin greens and homemade yogurt, drained and herbed. The pierogies served with more yogurt and homemade apple butter were so good we could barely summon words to describe our joy. The next day, I made the desperate decision to make tamales. Somehow. Because I really, really, really want to eat those. Really.

While we all know better than to shake babies, science has yet to deliver a verdict on how many forehead slapping moments a brain can stand. For quite a while now, I’ve been looking for banana leaves in the produce aisle of the Asian market I love. Sunday morning, Rick Bayless was talking tamales on Mexico One Plate At A Time and he held up a bag of frozen banana leaves, saying they’re everywhere these days. I slapped my forehead and probably lost five I.Q. points I might need someday. Banana leaves, with their rich, verdant aroma reminiscent of my grandmother’s artichokes, have been in my grocer’s freezer all along.

Yesterday, I awoke from my nap anxious to make tamales. All I had to do was decide I could, and then I could! I moved fast but everything I wanted to do as prep took about an hour longer than I planned for. Result: with better planning, not only can I make tamales on week nights –

– but we can eat them as well. Poor banana leaves! Without their scrumptious corn, chicken and achiote filling, they look so sad! And yet, I am so happy!

Tomorrow, between jobs, we will have the pierogies we made with yogurt we made and apple butter we made and green beans someone with a tractor made. I love this idea so much I want to buy a small tractor. Tonka makes them. I’m almost sure.

I swear to sweet baby Jeebus: this morning, I found a bag of masa flour selling on EBay for $9.98 – used.

In other news: today, we will acquire banana leaves or I shall have to reconsider my opinion of my zip code. Reconsidering is thinking. That’s hard work, my pet.

This is a picture of a sudden ensmartening. Yes, I made up word. Shut up!

Siobhan and I had lunch like lunching ladies, and Siobhan was squawking about dumb stuff it doesn’t take much thinking to see through. Naturally, I squawked a harmony part.

Siobhan: That’s like my favorite cooking instruction Remove from heat. No one follows that!
Tata: Omigod, so a few months ago, I was listening to a woman in my office talk about making yogurt and how the way she does it sounds like a lot less work than I put into it, when suddenly I realized that not only should I shut off the heat and remove the pot from the burner, but if I remove the milk from the pot, the temperature will drop sharply.

Siobhan slapped her forehead.

Tata: I KNOW!

If I had a plastic bowl, I’d feel even smarter.

Sometimes a meal is notable not just for its flavors or presentation, but also for what it is and means. This is our Christmas breakfast. Pete and I have worked like a dog team for a couple of months; we’ve really looked forward to today and planned every morsel. Last summer, we jarred blueberries and, in the fall, apple butter. A few weeks ago, I made and froze whole wheat crepes with fresh nutmeg and basil I’d dried. Every week, I make full fat yogurt. To make this breakfast, I thawed the crepes in the fridge and heated them in a glass pie plate. Then I opened a jar of blueberries into a saucepan, added a handful of Craisins and simmered for about five minutes. A 4 oz. jar of apple butter whirred in the microwave for 20 seconds, then another 20. Into a bowl, I added a pinches of basil, allspice, cinnamon, brown sugar and about a teaspoon of a honey-ginger mixture we found at the Asian market.

For the next two months, we will sometimes eat what we preserved and experiment with the fruits and vegetables we dehydrated. Miss Sasha is ready to begin working with a nice selection of dried items – for SCIENCE! It is a little odd to suddenly know: this is the time we worked and waited for, and now we can relax a bit. And so: breakfast, simple and important. Happy day to you, my darlings, whatever you celebrate.

Siobhan: Last night, I roasted a 9 lb. chicken in an hour. The skin was crispy and delicious.
Tata: Liar! At 20 minutes per chicken pound, you should still be roasting.
Siobhan: I butterflied it so it roasted flat and I swear it was an hour.
Tata: You get home from work at quarter to bedtime and still you get a roasted chicken for dinner? I am so buying a chicken and trying your method.
Siobhan: Look at these amazing pictures!
Tata: Jesus Christ! Your one-hour roast walks like an Egyptian!

I am a middle-aged Italian woman. If I cannot roast a decent chicken, half my family would end up down at St. Peter’s making a novena, but first, you gotta buy a chicken because in New Jersey people have stopped paying each other in chickens. I know. That might be a reason to move to Delaware. Anyway, Pete and I love the Sunday ritual of grocery shopping for everything we need and new stuff we’ve never seen before. Today’s find was lingonberries next to canned mandarin oranges, and the only other place I’ve seen those in New Jersey was IKEA. In other news, we bought a chicken and I began cackling and leaving hairpins floating in mid-air from wherever I scrammed. Yes, we had a snow storm and I spent a lot of time with a broom. What?

While we were at the grocery store, we disposed of a heel of stale bread in an ecologically sensitive manner by starting a seagull riot.

If there is anything you can count on in this life it is that seagulls in coastal parking lots are interested in whatever flies out of car windows. Suffice it to say we will be shredding stale bread at home before the next time we stage a similar antic.

Dad told me that when he lived in Europe, he went to an audition or an entrance exam for a cooking school, probably in Belgium, but I’m not 100% sure. What I am sure of is the test was boning a chicken without breaking the skin. Dad put his knife down. The school took him anyway, saying, “What the hell. It’ll improve American cuisine.” I’m not saying I can do that; I can barely operate the can opener. So what me think I could sculpt this chicken? Simple: I am not very bright and have a proclivity for violence.

Note: that’s why you love me.

I did that Martin Yan trick where you hold the chicken by its legs and swing it like a contented toddler, then swing it again by its wings. The muscles relax, making it much easier to cut the flesh around the thigh and pop the joint. If you’ve done this procedure on both sides of a chicken, you know it takes a matter of seconds. If you haven’t, take my word for it: a matter of seconds. I put down my knife and picked up the kitchen shears. I cut up the side, through the ribs and behind the wings. It’s kind of hard to tell from this picture, which looks like I am giving Uncle Fester a piercing no one will mention at the family reunions.

As I cut up the second side, there was a very satisfying SNAP! behind the wings that told me not only that I was done, but that I had done it right. Years ago, I had a boyfriend who nearly fainted as I quartered a chicken.
In my heart, I know he slept with one eye open after dinner that night. At least the chicken was tasty. Pete took these pictures and when I turned the top and bottom over and pressed down, there was another satisfying SNAP! along the breastbone. Yes, dinner will be tasty.

This is the picture of sound effects made by uncooked chicken. Like POW! and BLAM! Batman-style, this is what SNAP! looks like.
Ta da! In related news, I’d rehydrated parsnips, sugar plums and a mixture of leeks, carrots, celery and fennel and tossed them into a roasting pan to form a bed. I like fruit and unusual veggies in my roasting mix; they make for unique, complex gravies. This is one of those views of an uncooked chicken that reminds people that chickens were once alive, and good. Appreciate that this was recently a living thing and waste nothing. Toss the giblets into that pan, huh?

So Ta, you ask, did you have any trouble with this technique? You bet your ass, I did. Knives are usually honed to have a straight edge and a diagonal side. They intersect, forming a sharp point. This is an advantage for right handed people, but I am left handed. Knives mostly work if they’re truly sharp, but when your pressure is on the wrong side, you’re working against your tools. Similarly, I have three sets of kitchen shears and here you can see what a struggle it was to use them with my right hand. If I get the correct tools, I might be a real menace to Poultrykind.

Into a bowl, I spooned, poured or pinched a whole mess o’ my favorite herbs and spices, then added enough olive oil to make a paste. Chicken skin separates easily from the flesh if you pull gently, and if you smear some of that mixture on the flesh, you will be rewarded with fragrant, moist chicken. I also smeared a bit on the outside and around the edges that tend to burn, then sprinkled some achiote powder. Siobhan said she’d set her oven at 350 degrees and set her chicken on a silicone mat. Pete panicked when I brought out the ancestral Silpat, so we resorted to the contemporary roasting pan.

Within ten minutes of putting the pan into a heated oven, we could smell the chicken. An hour later, we let it rest. Siobhan was completely right: this method works. I don’t know why, but it does. And you should try it.

It’s Saturday night, the Saturday night before Christmas. After a month of long hours, fatigue and re-reheated dinners, Pete and I have just a few days to go before we both finally get two days off in a row, which we have not since the summer. You know what this means, don’t you? Exactly: the bread machine’s running and I want to talk about food.

What’s normal and ordinary culinarily for each of us will be different, depending on factors like where we live, where we travel, what kinds of people live around us, our ethnic backgrounds, our economic status and how adventurous we are. Here, all kinds of people from all over the world move and open restaurants. You can eat your way around the globe and never leave the county. But to really learn about one ingredient, you have to stay home and roll up your sleeves. I don’t recommend you go to this site unless you don’t mind sites that shout commercials at you, so here’s my current obsession: achiote paste.

A traditional Mexican sauce or marinade of Mayan origin, that is made by grinding annato seeds with spices, chiles, and added to other ingredients such as fruit to create a mild red paste used to flavor foods. Pork is often seasoned with Achiote by rubbing the pork and wrapping it in a cornhusk or banana leaf before steam cooking the meat. The sauce is also used on fish and poultry. Achiote may be referred to as annatto seed paste or recado rojo.

When we had the chance, we’ve smeared it on fish, pork, chicken and tofu, all of which turned out great and interesting. Achiote comes in several forms, which we haven’t found in the grocery stores. We’re going to search the bodegas in my old neighborhood for better ingredients. Those days off can’t come soon enough, because I have a new experiment to make all science-y, and I can’t wait to taste the results.

Tostones de panapen!

In the big struggle to get over myself, which is quite a climb, I could use a set of cleats. The fruit thingy has a hard, waxy rind. Even my sharpest knife had trouble slicing through it. The center is dense, and I don’t know if it’s edible, so I cut that out and made a mental note to look that up. Further: the panapen previously putting in a cameo appearance developed a delicate but inescapable aroma very quickly and went mushy within days; the pictured panapen is a worthy understudy, but it too was making plans to become One with the compost pile. Fortunately, once the skin came off, the seeds came out and I’d cut it into similar size chunks, the panapen merged with hot oil and magically transformed into tostones instead.

To make tostones, you take chunks of platanos or panapen, fry them lightly in hot oil, mash them flat and fry them to golden brown. Drain, sprinkle with sea salt. Nom, nom, nom. Tostones de panapen have a crisp outer shell, a soft, sweet center and a nice crunch. Eat while still warm for maximum happiness. You want that, right?

Note that this is a stock photo. It says STOCK PHOTO. Perhaps there are picture takerers named Stock. I bet they’re confused.

Feeling intimidated in the produce aisle can drain all the fun out of picturing yourself well-nourished and bantering wittily with someone sensational about the bloom in your cheeks. Go ahead. Picture that tantalizing tableau. Now picture yourself staring at a verdant mountain of greens at the grocery store. Are those your hands?

There are a few vegetables I haven’t prepared myself but have enjoyed when other cooks swung the spatula. Some are more exotic by virtue of their not growing in the temperate zone where my house currently maintains a daytime temperature of 62 degrees. Recall my joy when I stumbled on the panapen. That was exciting. The poor thing is shivering on my kitchen table and if a fruit can be said to look nervous, this one does. Other vegetables are rumored to be so difficult to cook properly that the inexperienced home cook may be discouraged from the start. Thus, it was only last week that I bought two bunches of collard greens. By gum, they’re greens and I own several methods of steaming those.

Last week, I was working at home and the Food Network kept me company. I know. The Food Network is a gossiping bitch who sometimes borrows my sweaters without asking, but she’s okay if I want someone to ignore. So I looked up and found the Neelys making dirty rice stuffed collards and I thought, ‘Greens, no three-hour boiling, dirty rice. Win/win.’ I didn’t follow the recipe – I’m almost incapable of following a recipe – but used their basic idea, substituting ground turkey for pork because I had ground turkey, and a can of diced tomatoes for the sauce. It was so simple I couldn’t believe it and much easier than working with cabbage.

About every five years, I buy a jar of grape leaves and never get around to stuffing them. The next decade looks very promising.

I’m not sure I’m learning anything but –

– I know if I tried that I’d be missing some fingers.

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick! Look what we found in Stop & Shop:

Panapen! That’s breadfruit, and it was sitting next to a basket of sugar cane. Panapen! I almost didn’t believe my eyes. I stood, rooted to the ground, trying to wrest Pete’s attention from a display of organic carrots, though shouting his name didn’t actually work. I may need a Nerf Pistol. Anyway, I picked a breadfruit by absolutely no criteria whatever since I’d never seen one before and dreaded the usual encounter at checkout. Last week offered a fine example.

Teenage Cashier: What’re these?
Tata: Tomatillos.
TC: What?
Tata: Tomatillos.
TC: Tomatoes?
Tata: No. These are not tomatoes.
TC: They’re not on my list. How much were they?
Tata: They didn’t say. I’ll go check again, but there was no sign.

[Musical Interlude]

Tata: Nope. Not a single sign.
TC: That’s okay. We just made up a price.
Tata: How did I get so lucky?

Fortunately, our cashier was a middle aged Latina just as overjoyed to find panapen as I was, but:

Very Nice Lady: How much were they?
Tata: I didn’t see a sign.
VNL: That’s okay. We’ll make it up.
Tata: I should buy a lottery ticket.

Daisy makes tostones de panapen. I can’t wait to try it.