I’m fascinated by how various cultures ring in the New Year.

I’ve heard that in Colombia, if you have an urge to travel in the New Year (yes ma’am I do), you walk around the house with a suitcase at midnight on the 31st.

In Denmark, if you have a particular wish for the New Year, you make it while jumping off a chair. (If you’ve had too much aquavit or whatever it is Danes drink, this could get ugly.)

In Venezuela, you buy and wear new yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve for good luck in the upcoming year.

Perhaps my favorite ritual is in Japan, where there’s an Abusive Language Festival:  You climb a hill to an ancient temple, screaming profanities at whoever caused you trouble in the old year.  (When you get to the temple, you chill and get happy.)  I think if I had to pick someone to curse at, it could be my cable guy, who thinks that when he says he’ll be there between 9 and 11 it includes 5:30.

Not to be greedy, but wouldn’t one greatly increase one’s chances of overall happiness in the New Year by combining these rituals?  I was thinking I could put on yellow underpants and jump off a chair while holding my suitcase and cursing the cable guy.  The trouble is, of course, my family would commit me to a mental hospital, and I’d be unable to reap the benefits of my actions.  So instead, I think I’ll stick to the American way of ringing in the New Year with a good old mimosa.

(Serves 8-10, unless you want to drink it all yourself, in which case definitely don’t jump off a chair.)

1 cup of fresh orange juice

1 cup orange flavored vodka

ice cubes

1 bottle of champagne

Instructions: Combine the orange juice and vodka in a large pitcher, and add some ice.

Pour in the champagne, mix, and serve in champagne glasses.

I’m cooking on Thanksgiving, and my mom says she is bored with turkey as it is too often served in the dining room of the senior community where she lives. For her, it’s all about the sides. So I’m beside myself researching side dishes.

For starters, here are a couple of Crabby go-to cranberry sauces. These are especially good if you are going to a pot luck and are a lazy-ass cook looking for the easiest way to acquit yourself of your cooking responsibility.

These Brussels sprouts are so good, everyone will think you are Ina Garten. Or at least they will if they have had a Holiday Crantini or two before dinner.

Ok,  I’ll be back with more from my T-G menu when I figure out what the hell it’s gonna be.

There’s this pile on my desk which is composed of stuff I have to either a) deliver to its proper storage place or b) send out for treatment of some kind, as in dry cleaning or c) ponder its usefulness until I am certain it has none and then throw it away.

My general policy is to ignore this pile altogether until it threatens to swap my work station. This happened yesterday—I had to address the pile. Right on top was an oblong object that I had placed there a few days ago and proceeded to ignore.

The object, according to its label, is a Delicata squash. I bought it because every so often I resolve to cook something I have never cooked (or seen) before. Often this means some random vegetable, which sometimes actually ends up cooked and sometimes ends up rotting on the kitchen window sill.

Last night, since my husband (who is violently anti-squash) was out of town, I resolved to reduce my desk pile by one item and cook the damn thing.

I roasted it, just adding oil, salt and pepper, my theory being I’d get to know this Delicata in its purest form, rather than gussy it up. (Plus I was too lazy to gussy.) Result: Loved it.  I will buy it again. My husband will never eat it, or any other food that looks like it, but, hey, all the more for me.

My pile is diminished some. I think that entitles me to ignore it again.

Roasted Delcata Squash

Yield: two servings

1 Delicata squash

1 teaspoon olive oil

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 425º F. 

2. Cut the squash in half lengthwise and clean out the seeds with a spoon. Cut the squash crosswise into pieces about 1/2″ thick.  Rub the squash pieces with oil to coat all over. Sprinkle the squash with salt and pepper to taste.

3. Place the squash on a parchment-lined baking sheet, put it in the oven and roast until tender, about 30 minutes. Eat. 

If you should find yourself visiting a much-more-hip-than-you relative in the much-more-hip-than-where-you-live section of L.A. called Silver Lake, stop in at a wee restaurant called Sqirl. It’s worth the humiliation of being the least hip person in the neighborhood on a Friday afternoon.

Sqirl is famous for their jams (like Santa Rosa Plum and Flowering Thyme, or Shady Lady Tomato) but the menu rocks with lots of other treats, some vegan, some decidedly not, like the Famed Ricotta Toast, which was my pick. (I loaded it with Snow Queen Nectarine jam.)

I told my daughter I could eat it every day for breakfast. She pointed out that if I did so I would end up the size of a house.

So, no, I won’t be having this every day for breakfast. But I will have it again next time I cross the hipness border into Silver Lake.

P.S. You can also by Sqirl jams at The Cheese Store in Beverly Hills.

P.S.S. If you are more ambitious than I you can make this at home. After you have made your own brioche and made your own ricotta, toast a massive slice of the brioche, schemer it with your lovely homemade cheese and then with jam. Invite me over to share it with you or you will end up the size of a you-know-what.

My younger daughter recently outed herself as the culprit in the zucchini mystery of 2007.

One evening while poking around the linen closet I found a mummified slice of zucchini under a stack of beach towels. I believe the unusual disposal of an unwanted vegetable was originally blamed on my older daughter Elizabeth But last week, her younger sister owned up as the perpetrator. Apparently she found the poor zucchini unpalatable and was too young to have developed the more sophisticated system of flushing it down the toilet, so she hid it.

No disciplinary measures will be taken as I believe there is a statute of limitations on these things.

Now they are grown and live in apartments with lots of closet space in which to deposit unsatisfactory vegetables. But if they do drop by for dinner, I like to dress up the zucchini just a little to preempt further misdemeanors. This recipe is very easy and adds instant appeal to what some consider an otherwise boring vegetable.

If I ever find this amongst my linens I will be very surprised.

2 medium zucchini

¼ cup freshly grated Parmigian0-Reggiano, divided

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts

½ teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

½ cup panko bread crumbs

2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 425º F.

Trim the ends off the zucchini. Cut each in half lengthwise. Score the center pulp of the zucchini and then scoop it out with a teaspoon, leaving a shell about ¼ inch thick. Place the pulp in a bowl. Add half the cheese, a pinch of salt and a pinch of black pepper, the walnuts and thyme leaves and mix well.

Fill the cavities of the zucchini with the filling. Sprinkle each with an equal amount of read crumbs. Sprinkle again with a little salt and pepper and drizzle a half teaspoon of oil over each. Sprinkle each piece with some of the remaining cheese.

Place the zucchini pieces on a baking sheet and bake for twenty minutes, until the zucchini is tender and the topping is crispy.

Let cool briefly and serve.

After the flood of 2015, I had some serious kleening up to do. Unwilling to spend a week inhaling Lysol fumes, I knew I would have to consult with  the Great Counselor Of All Things for advice on a kleening product that would not kill me due to overdose of some noxious chemical.

The G. C. O. A. T. (okay, Google) pointed me in the direction of a recipe from Real Simple magazine for an all-purpose spray cleaner that you could almost drink (if you happened to have a taste for rubbing alcohol and vinegar.) It left my surfaces smelling like something much lovelier than backed up plumbing and clean as a whistle. (I have never understood that expression. Since when is a whistle clean? All those people blowing on it all the time? Please. P.S. Am I turning into Howard Hughes?)

Anyway, try this in your flooded or not-so-flooded living quarters and I guarantee you will be pleased with the result and will not keel over from chemical fumes. I actually would not drink it unless you are on a desert island and choices are limited.

Kleen Queen (Green) All-Purpose Cleaner

4 cups water

1/4 cup white vinegar

1/4 cup rubbing alcohol

10 drops peppermint essential oil

Combine the ingredients and pour into a spray bottle. Kleen everything, then drink a martini and take a load off.

After the Great Flood of ’15—well, it was considered Great in my house, when a veritable toilet tsunami decimated a sizeable area of my once gracious living quarters—I felt the need for comfort food. After some dreary exchanges with insurance types and remediation contactors, my thoughts turned to Dorie Greenspan’s EVO And Yogurt Cake. It seemed like a must.

Not only is it comforting in a way that only something densely vanilla can be, but it happens to be stunningly easy to make, which gives it singular appeal right at this moment when I feel I can only address small tasks, having addressed too many big ones already today.

Whether or not you ever have a Great Flood in your house—you can read more about mine here—keep this recipe on hand for other current or future comfort needs. It works.

You can find it here, but roughly, it goes like this:

DORIE GREENSPAN’S EVO AND YOGURT CAKE

Preheat the oven to 350º. Butter a loaf pan.

Combine 1 ½ cup flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and a pinch of salt.

In another bowl, place 1 cup sugar and the zest of one lime (although I used orange.) Rub the sugar and zest together with your fingers until the sugar is fragrant. Then mix in ½ cup plain whole ilk yogurt, 3 eggs and ¼ teaspoon of vanilla until smooth. Then fold in ½ cup EVOO (extra virgin olive oil).

Pour batter into the pan and bake for 50-55 minutes, until golden and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Eat your troubles away.

I am currently in a cooking rut.

This happens occasionally. I cook something new that accommodates the tastes of my diners, decide I like it very much, and then, too lazy to come up with a fresh idea that caters to everybody’s extreme pickiness, I repeat the recipe until I feel like I am in the movie, Groundhog day and change is essential. I just completed such a cycle with Sunday Hash. Read More

A few weeks ago I got an email from my bother-in-law Scott who was in a highly agitated state. He told me he had been the victim of fraud perpetrated by the Bird’s Eye Company. Read More

 When my siblings and I were growing up, my mother was a miraculous cook—every night she procured dinner for eight people. Among our favorite meals was what we called “stringy meat,” which was any kind of meat that was cooked long and slow until it was a fork-tender, pull-apart, deliciously stringy thing. Read More