A friend insists that I will discover great clarity of mind if I will only give Zen meditation a try. But I’m still trying to deal with the great clarity of mind that discovered me when I gave martinis the slip.

Cooking, for one thing. I am getting clear about cooking. I like to cook, but there are conditions that must be met. There are too many conditions to go into here, but I find that I can keep track of them easily enough. The one that Kathleen is having the hardest time with is, “No cooking past ten o’clock.” After ten, we order in. It is very easy to deal with this condition at seven or eight o’clock. It is not so easy at nine forty-five, when pots are bubbling on the stove, the table is set – and a recalcitrant printer is holding up Kathleen at the office.  That is not a fun situation. It is no help at all to be clear.

— Kathleen, I want to say, you are too old and too senior to be dealing with recalcitrant printers. Sometimes I do say it. All right: I always say it. But I say it. I shout less and less.

The following dish is very forgiving under such circumstances. Simply wait to stir in the peas until your companion arrives, and dinner will be ready in ten. That gives her plenty of time to powder her nose &c. And you to get a grip on your tremendous clarity.

¶ Braised Chicken.

Well, how do you like that? I go to the trouble to write up my latest recipe for risotto, and I have an amusing time doing so, but only to find that I wrote a page on pretty much the same subject last March. That’s research for you. Hey, I’m a convalescent!

Regular readers know that the title of this feature is ironic, in that my kitchen is too small to cook in, much less to accommodate a kitchen table. I was aching for one this weekend, though, because the kitchen was the only warm room in the apartment. The building’s heat hadn’t been turned on, so I kept the oven on at 250º. Now, however, we’re all quite agreeably toasty, and my kitchen has reverted to the chamber of horrors from which I can’t wait to escape – back to normal, in other words. Because of my delicate condition, we’re having our Sunday night special, a chicken pot pie from Eli’s. Eli’s pot pies are so good, so full of a pleasantly-sauced chicken and so sparing of vegetables, with a lovely pastry crust, that there is no point to making them oneself. At least forty percent of success in the kitchen depends on knowing what one had better buy in the store. After all, would you try to bake a batch of Triscuits? Of course not.

¶ Risotto alla Kemahnese.

While I wouldn’t claim to be the worst convalescent in the world, I’m certainly a very bad one. Instead of sitting quietly, reading away, doing nothing more strenuous than writing the occasional blog entry, I have been reorganizing my entire life. Stop drinking a gallon of martinis a day, and you’ll probably start reorganizing things, too. Most of the reorganization hasn’t required any heavy lifting, but…

I don’t want to think about that. My head is still erect and, if my shoulders hurt a little, they ought to. I took it much easier today than I did yesterday, which I took much easier than I did Friday – on which day I was idleness itself compared to Thursday. On Thursday, I learned how to do the podcast thingy, and that was so exciting that I had to move the Steinway grand from the blue room to the living room….

I exaggerate; there is no Steinway grand. But I did find an electronic keyboard tucked away behind some draperies. Two years ago, at least, I promised this unused article to some friends of friends who were thinking of buying one for their little boy, who is undoubtedly in law school by now. It was very embarrassing, not being able to find the keyboard where I thought I’d put it. I also found a portrait of me painted by an artist whom we used to know. It is a fiercely expressionistic work – my beard is a sort of creamy teal, while my face is painted the same red as my flannel shirt – but we find it a good likeness (a gallon of martinis per diem will do that to your flannel shirts). We really don’t have anywhere to hang the picture, and I don’t know what to do with it. But it’s not going back behind the draperies. One of my many new mottoes is: No Hidden Assets.

It was my intention to share a risotto recipe with you this evening, but what with one thing another… the day went so quickly. There were the weekend papers to read, and a novel to finish, and a long walk to take (Kathleen estimates it at two miles). Then there was dinner to make. My default, brain-dead menu: roast chicken, some sort of pasta with butter and parmesan, and a vegetable, in tonight’s case deliciously overcooked asparagus. For once, I said “to hell with the al dente school of asparagus,” and I let the tips steam for as long as the elbow macaroni took to boil, seven minutes. That’s much too long, according to current fashions, but it was just what we wanted. We got all the crunch anybody could ask for from the sinfully crispy chicken skin.

While I was in hospital, the beautiful bead chain that Kathleen made some time back for my reading glasses got caught in the neck brace and broke. The beads spilled everywhere, but we recovered most of them; some, I’m embarrassed to say, from the folds of my body. (I’d never have known they were there, but Fossil Darling was giving me an assist in the bathroom. This was shortly after he considered knifing me; see below.) I have become fatally dependent not only upon reading glasses but upon the chain from which they hang when I don’t need them, which is most of the time. For two days – I lost the store-bought backup at the movies on Friday; it was on its last legs, and I didn’t even miss it until I was on the IRT headed north from Union Square – I’ve been taking off the reading glasses and – dropping them on the floor! Not to mention looking all over the apartment for them.

Tomorrow, Columbus Day, is a local, New York holiday. Kathleen’s firm, headquartered in Chicago, does not recognize it, but she’s taking the day off anyway. Fossil Darling, who has the day off anyway – he works for a a well-known umbrella firm – will be junketing to the neighborhood for a haircut. We’re planning a penitential luncheon afterward, which should be very jolly for all the souls in Purgatory whom we’ll be speeding heaven-ward. Maybe someone will take pictures – if the crime scene is sufficiently gory. If she could read this (and who’s to say she can’t, FD’s sainted, late mother would be clucking, not for the first time in forty-four years, “Oh, you two!”

When we had a house on Candlewood Lake, we would steal down to the farmstand one morning in August and buy as many as fourteen dozen ears of corn. Back at home, we would spend the day shucking, parboiling, weighing and bagging the corn. We had a deep-freezer, you see. So we could enjoy fresh corn all winter long. My hands-down favorite way of cooking it was to sauté it. I later found that this method works wonders with the much less flavorful corn that we get in town (all the year round). That’s undoubtedly why Melissa Clark’s recipe for Roasted Fish Fillets With Brown Butter Corn Sauce caught my eye in Wednesday’s Times. Here’s my slightly different version:

¶ Salmon in Kernel Sauce.

As predicted on Tuesday, I made a chicken salad with the remains of that evening’s roast. We’re going to have it for dinner this evening.

I made it for last night’s dinner, but in the event, we went out. Shortly after I’d finished the salad, while I was reading quietly and resting up from the afternoon in Central Park, Miss G called, delighting and surprising me with the suggestion that, as she and Ryan were bound for Planet Yorkville on a shopping expedition, we might get together. I was only too happy to agree. We sipped wine for an hour at the apartment before heading over to the Panorama Café at nine, where we sat outside in the cool of the evening. If we were to see all the movies and read all the books that were recommended over the course of the evening, we’d be booked for a month.

And why was I in Central Park on a Saturday afternoon? For the same reason I was there the last time: to sit with the blogger bears and watch the skaters. Joe not only invited me but brought along an extra chair. Most of the guys stretched out on blankets, or sat Indian-style. Neither posture is available to me, unfortunately, so I’m either locked in the chair or slipping on the slope. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but I’m sure that people who don’t know me and whom I don’t get to meet think I’m very stiff-necked. I am stiff-necked, but it’s literal, not figurative.

In a most amusing development, Joe has hooked Father T on Ruth Draper’s Doctors and Diets. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Tonight or tomorrow night, I’ll be roasting a chicken. Kathleen and I will eat the legs and the wings at dinner. The breast will be stored for a few more days, to make Indian Melon Salad. I got the recipe from a lovely Irishwoman living in Chicago, and it has always represented for me a peculiarly Midwestern ingenuity: taking ordinary ingredients, adding a few unusual ones, and producing something that’s both comfortable and sophisticated. The earthiness of the dressed chicken contrasts delightfully with the crisp celery and water chestnuts and with the sweet fruit (the grapes pack their own crunchy punch). The one thing I don’t understand is why Kathleen invariably insists that “this time,” I’ve done something different that had made the salad even better.

¶ Kathleen Brady’s Indian Melon Salad.

Catching up with several days’ worth of Timeses, I only just read the news about critic James Wood’s move to The New Yorker. Hooray! I’ve missed him, having given up The New Republic because of its bellicose stance on the Iraqi misadventure. But Motoko Rich’s little piece in the Times is priceless, because of a wonderfully self-regarding quote from literary lion Leon Wieseltier.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said, “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.”

Jean Ruaud mentions the local station de vélib in his latest entry. I didn’t really know what he talking about, but of course it’s the new free bicycle service that Paris mayor Bernard Delanoë inaugurated last month. I found these snaps at Flickr.

Now, what can I point you to today? The calendar calls for something culinary. What looks good? Ah – yummy. But can there be a dish more out of favor than this:

¶ Culinarion>Eggs>Baked Alaska?

As I was rounding up pages for August, I decided that there were two that deserved to be re-presented every year. On the last day of the month, I’ll point to what is essentially the “About Me” page at Portico, just to be sure that everyone sees how handsome I used to be. And on the fifth, I will point to Fossil Darling’s signature contribution to the enterprise: his recipe for a ghastly stew that he aptly calls “Depresseganza.” The idea is that the mix of chili, corn, rice, and crushed tortilla chips is just the thing when you’re feeling low – the ultimate comfort food. To me, it sounds about as comfortable as the upholstery that lines a coffin.

¶ Culinarion>Extras>Depresseganza