Butterfly napkins in the lovely summer issue of Country Living,
July/August, page 95

My love affair with pugs continues. Here’s a painting I did this week of a pug who got into trouble, The Pug Bandit.

Jillian Visser from Los Angeles mailed out these save-the-date napkins for her upcoming March wedding. I hadn’t thought of that but what a great idea! I worked with her designer Abbie Gong
at Passing Notes (http://www.passing-notes.com/). Abbie has such a lovely sense of style and appreciation for hand made; she was a total pleasure to work with.

PASSING THOUGHTS:
How do you feel about “grey” vs “gray”? Today I think grey is crisp and classy whereas gray is dull and lifeless. Then I found an old note to myself where I’d written “do you get a different feeling from the words gray and grey? I do. I prefer gray; it feels more 40’s. ”
It’s amazing how liquid our inner world can be, I guess that’s because we’re 60% water.

Mr Wendell spreads joy and poetry and joyful poetry on the corner of Bundy and San Vicente in Los Angeles.

Here’s his father’s day poem.

There are so many things to recommend about my eccentric hometown, mecca of food, music, drink, sex, and humidity that I’ll keep adding to this post. New Orleans is the fastest growing city in the USA according to the Census Bureau so it’s changing quickly. I suppose it’s because nature hates a vacuum, and Katrina certainly caused an evacuation (blight on George Bush and his administration). Especially in these trying economic times lots of young people are moving in sensing opportunity.

So, first things first..food. My favorite restaurant in the city is the much touted Cochon. You walk in and are drenched in the smell of bacon. This is a serious pig spot where the pigs are received whole and the parts turned into a symphony of variations. That’s fancy talk for whole lotta great pork dishes..and so much more.

I rarely get beyond the ham hock with lima beans or Louisiana cochon with turnips, cabbage & cracklins. But my mom got the beef brisket with horseradish potato salad and my cousin got the oyster & bacon sandwich and they were all wow. The only negative is the hard bench seating which never stops me from going there a couple of times per visit home. Chef Donald Link is much loved for being one of the early restauranteurs to make their way back to N.O. after the storm and help the stunned city believe it could get well again.

Sucre, A Sweet Boutique
I also had an amazing Lemon Curd Gelato  at Sucre, a confectionary shop for desserts, coffee, and ice cream on Magazine Street. Here, for your mouth watering pleasure are just a few of their many gelato and sorbet flavors: Brown Butter Pecan, Steen’s Cane Syrup, Milk Chocolate Cashew, Cinnamon Red Hot, Tequila Lime, and Nectar Cream. Here’s a picture of their gelato bar.

If you want to get a feel for the authentic New Orleans read John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer prize winning The Confederacy of Dunces. Here’s a picture of the Lucky Dog Cart that his outrageous but so true character Ignatius J. Reilly toted around the French Quarter.

And if you want a live taste listen to WWOZ, next best thing to being there. As they put it, “dedicated to bringing New Orleans music to the Universe”.

Great, wonderful, hot, hole in the wall BBQ at The Joint; don’t miss the baked beans filled with strands of smokey pork.

The United States Post Office has got a new game, it’s amazing, in a good way!

While trying to figure out shipping costs for my business I asked the lady at my local post office who said “Look at this line; I don’t have time for all these questions”. Typical, nice. But there was another lady behind the counter that day, observing. So I asked her and she said “I’ll have the small business specialist for your region call you.” RIGHT. No one called for 3 weeks but then I got a call from the incredibly nice Adriana Garcia who told me she’d have someone from my area call me. RIGHT. 5 minutes later I got a call from Thomas Dotson who said, “let’s make an appointment; I’ll come out to your office to assess your needs.” My first thought, he’s an ax murderer; the post office does not come out to assess your needs! But I took a chance and Thomas Dotson spent more than an hour working with me. I suppose it’s a reaction to all the revenue lost to UPS and FEDEX but for whatever reason, THEY ARE BACK, better, less expensive, offering terrific services. Thomas recommended Endicia which makes printing and shipping from my computer a breeze. I haven’t been back to the post office for months; one less cranky lady in my life. Amen.

Ellen Rose put this prose/poem (below) up in The Cook’s Library and a customer came in recently wanting to know where it was from. Somebody knew.

It’s called After Dinner, She Discusses Marriage with Her Friends by Debra Bruce and was published in The Massachusetts Review in 1987 ©.

It’s really really sexy so be prepared or be scared!

She mentions raspberries, apples,
and blueberries, so here is
my cousin Sandra’s
great and easy recipe for

VANISHING BLUEBERRY PIE.

FILLING:
1 Cup Sour Cream
2 Tbsp flour
3/4 Cup sugar (too sweet for me, I removed 1/8th cup second time I made it)
teas. vanilla
1/4 teas salt
1 egg
2 and 1/2 Cups blueberries, washed, drained, patted dry.

TOPPING:
3 Tbsp flour
2 Tbsp cold butter
A handful of chopped walnuts or pecans
Cut the butter into the flour.
Add the chopped nuts.
You can do this in advance and
refrigerate till needed.

9″ unbaked pie shell

Preheat oven to 400°

Pierce pie shell all over with a fork, put aluminum foil over the shell and fill halfway up with
beans or rice; (I’ve been using the same batch of beans
for about 10 years). Bake for 7 minutes; let cool for 5 minutes and remove beans and foil.

Mix sour cream, sugar, vanilla, flour, salt, and egg.
Fold in blueberries. Pour into pie shell.

Bake 25 minutes. Sprinkle on topping
and bake another 10 minutes.

Let it cool off then refrigerate.

P.S. There is also a divine recipefor Blueberry Streusel Bars
with Lemon-Cream Filling in the June/July 2008 issue of
Fine Cooking magazine.

After Dinner, She Discusses Marriage
with Her Friends

I’ll never forget the first time I slept
with him. He told me things I almost wept
to hear — how he’d slip out at dawn as a boy
to pick loamy mushrooms in a field. Joy
flowed through him as he simmered them in cream
while his parents slept. I thought I was dreaming
that next morning when I wobbled out of bed,
thinking he was gone, finding him, instead,
looking down at my skillet, my two white plates.
He watched frying eggs slowly undulate.

Corn bread was in the oven, peach preserves
in a dish. What had I done to deserve
a lover like this? Soon after breakfast
I phoned a justice of the peace. The rest
is history. Friends laugh when we tell them.
Then their smiles weaken and fade away. Then
their faces go blank and they look at us
as if we’re morons waving from a bus
at strangers. I know what they want to know.
They think there’s got to be more. Food can go
but so far to explain the mystery
of human intimacy. I agree.

But there’s always one more secret to share:
this same boy picked raspberries, hiding there,
the ripe and soft-lipped fruit pressed to his own
soft lips at dusk as his parents called him home.
I taste that memory and hunger more
for him. Our friends start glancing at the door,
the window, anything but us, confused,
as if they’d asked for coffee and been refused.

I hear him in the kitchen. Now he comes
with cups of apple compote soaked in rum.
Conversation resumes. Somebody asks
about monogamy. How can it last?
He pours my mocha java. How many times
I’ve sat on the porch alone while my mind
simmered with lust, watching our landlord’s son
clipping geraniums. Fresh cardamom
drifting from the kitchen couldn’t compete
with those gold shoulders, those naked, shapely feet.
I’ve straddled the railing, wanting, for hours,
to ride him bareback into the flowers,
letting myself fall slowly, slowly off
and spill beneath him, his voice as soft
as strokes of butter melting on warm bread.

Of course I’ve never done this, as I said.
But I’ve come close. One summer day I reached
for that boy’s black hair. Suddenly the screech
of the screen door — My husband! He’ll clobber
us both! But he’d brought blueberry cobbler
for me, and a tart whose fan of sliced pears
was draped in silky chocolate everywhere.
Tasting the tart from his finger, I learned
such depths of chocolate, a sweetness so stern
I couldn’t even moan. Now, not a word
is spoken. My friends stare as if they’d heard
me say I took a linzer torte to bed
or slept with upside-down cake at my head.
They shake their heads, my husband’s hand, and go.

It’s late but I’ll stay up, watch him make dough
for breakfast biscuits, grind up cinnamon,
melt down butter and knead the raisins in.
He’ll bake them in the morning, plump and sweet,
sugared together on a baking sheet.

Inside reads: Happy Holidays

If you had lived through a New Orleans summer (think of it as the flip side of a Chicago winter) you’d know how exciting it was when the acorns fell from the enormous Oak trees; we’d survived another one and could look forward to a beautiful, chilly winter.

So my thoughts turned to the Season today and I made a new Holiday card.

Hangtags just sit there with little more than Small/Medium/Large on them. Kind of lonely so I added recipes, illustrations, and poetry. Who knows what’s next..I hope you enjoy. The first recipe on my Maternity Hangtags is for my Polka Dot Cookies, One-Bite Chocolate Sandwich cookies with Cream Cheese filling. I’m working on a video to demonstrate rolling out the dough which can be a tiny bit tricky until you see it.

This is Claire wearing Love & Kisses which I’m sure she gets a lot of. Claire is half French, lovely.

A little sprite named Summer wearing How Love Grows Tee.

If you send me photos of you or your kids wearing Butterfly Tees this is where they will go. If you want to give me a first name and a city or state, funny story or factoid that would also be great but not necessary. I’d also love to put up interesting photos of your refrigerators..you know, with all the stuff held up by magnets.. and all that they say about you and your family!

I’m including a picture of my boy Nick who is now 19 and giving me a very hard time of course. You can see that not even a fat baby boy could stop me from cooking.

Here’s a picture of Sonia from N. Carolina. I love the way she mixed her plaid pajama bottoms with the Give Peas a Chance tee; very fashion forward! Love her cool bracelet too.