I realize that sounds kind of laughable. But then again, how is it that a man whose signature dish is, essentially, a salad can be regarded as one of the greatest chefs in the world?

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Martha Foose's Lemon Icebox Pie is that recipe for me.

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Man 1: "Well, how are we going to drive home the point that sustainable seafood is good? I think I should have, like, five to seven minutes to talk about it before we serve."

Man 2: "You're going to have to do all the talking while I cook. I have to focus on the food while I cook. Don't let people bother me."

Woman: "I think mussels. We have to do mussels. They're responsibly farmed, and they carry around their own sauce. They're perfect."

Man 1: "OK, but will we serve wine too? Or is just the lecture and the food enough?"

Aren't you sad you didn't get an invitation to the World's Most Sanctimonious Dinner Party? I am. I want to know what gets served for dessert at a soiree like this.

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So: If you look on the nutrition facts label of standard unsalted butter, you'll see that in one tablespoon (14 grams) of the stuff, there are 11 grams of fat. A little quick division, and you see that only about 73 percent of the butter is fat. (Actually, that's not correct either, since butter legally has to be 80 percent fat or more, but accepted rounding in the math lets the label show less fat, so as not to scare consumers.)

Anyway, the point is this: There's a lot in butter that's not butterfat. The vast majority of that is water, and then there are milk solids, which are mainly sugars and proteins. Normally, all those elements are emulsified together, but you see them break apart when you heat it -- ever notice how butter sizzles in a hot pan? That's the water boiling furiously out of it. That foaming? That's a mix of proteins trying to hold onto water that's desperately trying to escape. And then, of course, there's the browning.

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But cream-ofs rarely get people excited anymore. Maybe it's because they seem a little too Miss Daisy? Or because it's hard to come back into the fold once you've opened a red-labeled can of the stuff and watched it fall, in gloopy chunks, into your casserole dish? Or maybe because every cafeteria has a tub of some poor, misbegotten cream-of sitting somewhere, hot and gluey, tasting like milk and flour and sadness?

Well, imagine for a minute a better place, a happy place, where cream-ofs are lively and vibrant, where they have real flavor and a texture that's smooth and satisfying, not leaden and semisolid. That happy place is in your pot, and it's easier than you might realize. You don't really even need a recipe.

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I've long believed that whatever bourgeois conceit a sandwich maker may have, there is no grilled cheese better than one made with white bread, American cheese and butter. But lately two cheffy ideas have made the art of hot cheese sandwiches come alive in my kitchen, and I fear that my beliefs are being shaken.

The first of these ideas came to me from Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef of the brilliant, beautiful and peculiar restaurant Prune, where I had one of the greatest lunches of my life eating chicken hearts, lemony beans and an omelet stuffed with fried oysters and served with powdered sugar and Tabasco sauce. Prune has the magical charm of being just slightly odd, just outside of sense-making, but it feels utterly unaffected and the food is always filled with subtle surprise. One day, while watching Hamilton lead a cooking class for high school students (more on that another day), I looked twice when she had the kids "butter" the outsides of the sandwiches with ... mayonnaise.

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Fair enough! I'd trotted out the dish in question, by Grant Achatz of the restaurant Alinea, to highlight the level of excitement a vegetable dish can attain. But it's a 20-element composition involving tomatoes, making balloons of mozzarella cheese, spirals of molasses and saffron, and, well, 17 other things, and it's hardly the kind of thing most people would/could/should attempt. (Not that the intrepid blogger Carol Blymire hasn't tried.) And the thing with pointing toward creative geniuses is that it's dangerous -- one person's inspiration is another's totally oppressive, intimidating, why-should-I-bother wall.

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I get that kale can be a tough sell. It's been maligned for decades, in a nation not known for its love of vegetables, as a deeply unreconstructed vegetable. Scary-dark green, way tougher than lettuce and vaguely bitter, it was long relegated to being a frilly little decoration on fruit plates and supermarket fish counters. My best friend, in fact, grew up working a part-time job at a supermarket fish counter. He was 24 when he found out you can actually eat the stuff he used to tuck into the ice around the salmon steaks.

But kale lovers ... oh, we know. We know all about its superfood properties: 36 calories-worth of it contains five grams of fiber, 15 percent of the daily requirement of calcium and vitamin B6, 40 percent of magnesium, 180 percent of vitamin A, 200 percent of vitamin C and 1,020 percent of vitamin K. And that's before we get to the copper, potassium, iron, manganese and phosphorus.

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Because they are no joke when it comes to effort. You have to chop and squeeze and mix the filling, cooking off bits to taste for the correct seasoning until you get it right. You have to knead the dough and roll out dozens if not hundreds of skins. You have to stuff them, form them, pleat them and then, eventually, you get to cook and maybe even eat them. (This is why they are a distinguished weapon in the ever-full quivers of mothers who tend to smother with kindness.)

And I'm not even going to say that there is "nothing like eating a homemade dumpling," because eating one made by someone else can be a lot like eating a homemade one. (Granted, if you take your time and care, these are more delicate and tastier than most.)

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Anyway, when I admitted that I actually don't often make stock the proper way at home anymore -- I mean, when am I going to start simmering bones eight hours before dinner? -- I did withhold a little. I will make seafood and fish stocks fresh, because they can be in and out in under an hour -- under half an hour if you really want. And I'm never too worried about what I'm using them for. Obviously they would be great for seafood sauces or soups, but if I want to make, say, beef stew and have only shrimp stock? I'm going to make beef stew with shrimp stock, and it's going to taste great. Don't be afraid to mix and match. Most times, if the stock is good, it'll taste good in the end.

And while I'll give you the "proper" quantities of bones or shells below, you can get away with far fewer than prescribed, because these recipes call for a bit of cooking before you add the water, which gooses up the flavor like mad.

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Stock is the foundation of cooking, they will say. It is the base for all your soups and all your sauces; it's what you use to stew and braise, what you use to thin out liquids and purees that are too thick, or, reduced, it's what you add to them for more flavor. Used to poach delicate fish and meat, it makes those foods magnitudes more flavorful.

"Oui, Chef!" I said, standing up straight.

And so what that means, too, is that your stock must be perfect. It must embody all the flavor of the bones and the vegetables and the herbs, but be able to blend into the background. To do that, you must simmer it for hours – many, many hours.

"Oui, Chef!" I said, hurrying to clean the bones.

It must be skimmed meticulously so that it does not make for greasy sauces. It must be crystal clear, so that it doesn't cloud what you are cooking.

"Oui, Chef!" I said, skimming and straining and preparing to do this for the rest of my life.

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So it's a mystery even to me that I curled up in bed one night with Sandor Katz's wildly influential pickling how-to Wild Fermentation, aka The Guide to Living Comfortably with Memory Loss. And I woke up the next morning so excited to shred and salt turnips for an unusual sauerkraut that I was there, in my kitchen, doing it in my shorts. Pants would come later. That is probably not a good sign. But the results, I can say after a healthy munch this morning, are definitely worth it.

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But sour milk, baby, I ain't mad atcha. Because really, without you, we'd have no yogurt (or cheese, or any of the rest of our friends in the dairy aisle). Controlled spoilage is the name of this game. The idea is if you inculcate friendly bacteria into your milk, they will grow and spread and defend their turf from other, icky bacteria -- making it tangy and thick and tasty besides. Yeah. Come on home, baby, we can break up to make up.

And making yogurt is incredibly easy -- you heat milk to a bare simmer, stir in a spoonful of existing yogurt, keep it warm for a few hours, and just like that, you're Queen Isabella, your bacterial Columbus colonizing new lands. And the yogurt you make is cheaper and about 68 times tastier than most commercial product -- smoother, softer, clear-tasting, stabilizer and gunk-free, with a level of tang that you can control.

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I hope you're enjoying your presents this year; me, by the time you read this, I hope to be doing headstands on a new baking stone and watching my lady friend's niece read some adorable book I pilfered from Salon's review pile. But all the wish-lists and festively wrapped boxes and commercials for cars tied up with bows have me thinking about the small gifts, the little presents life presents you with, the inconsequential gestures that become the things you remember.

Once, when I was a kid, very young, I woke up hungry in the middle of the night. For some reason, I wobbled over to Dad's side of the bed and shook him instead of Mom, who even then I knew would have been the much better culinary bet. He had a hard time waking up, but he put on his robe and slippers, took my hand, and slowly shuffled over to the kitchen. He reached for my favorite cereal sitting on top of the fridge and poured me a bowl of Alpha Bits. I remember crawling up to the chair, my feet dangling, and eating happily; I remember the sweet, grainy flavor, how cold the milk was, how my father smiled at me as he started dozing back off to sleep at the table.

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Depending on the waters they're from, the rain, the tide and the ecology, oysters can sparkle with salt or lull you with sweetness, they can leave your mouth with the hinting flavors of mushrooms, melons, cucumbers. They can taste like cold cream or steely water, and they can make your mouth feel a way I can only describe as "ringing."

Oysters are a food you have to dive into. They sit in shells that look like rocks. Inside, they are beige or gray or a little blue and a little black, still but ready to quiver in a way that suggests they might slither. They are cold in the mouth, wet and mobile, slippery but splattery. They are sort of disgusting. And yet you jump, ignoring everything about them that makes you want to run away, because they can taste like so much, because once you bite into them, their flavor swallows you.

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I have this theory about the balance of global culinary power: It exists. It's not perfect -- I mean, sorry, but Turkmenistan is not as tasty a place as Thailand -- but all food superpowers have something keeping them from being the One Perfect Cuisine. The Indians are weak on noodles, Mexicans are weak on bread, the French ... well, who wants to give the French the satisfaction? And no one's ever gotten sick because they ate too many Chinese desserts.

But there is one dessert I saw on a recent trip to Hong Kong that I couldn't get enough of -- ginger milk pudding. Calling it a "pudding," though, isn't entirely accurate, since it's not thickened with eggs or starch or ... anything, really. In fact, the literal translation is "ginger juice steamed milk," and that is actually what it is: a bowl of beautiful white, its texture as much liquid as it is solid, sweet and round and pure with a warming glow of ginger. It's kind of magical, even if the magic lies in a decidedly unwitchy chemistry. An enzyme in the ginger causes the milk to firm up a little when heated, and it does so just enough to turn it smooth and slippery in your spoon, like you may have pulled a custard out of the oven a little early, but man, are you glad you did.

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I am a firm believer that Thanksgiving dinner should not be an exercise in discovering your panic attack trial time. And yet, year after year, food magazines and websites flash their neon disaster-porn nudie signs: DON'T JUMP! FINALLY, A STRESS-FREE THANKSGIVING. It's cynical culinary fear-mongering at its worst, and it doesn't mean we're entirely above it here at Salon Food. Because there are, sometimes, occasions to freak out. Like when you drop your pie on the way to the table. I hate to even bring it up, but as someone who 1) was That Guy who slipped on his way to getting a diploma at high school graduation and was also 2) That Guy who celebrated a friend's housewarming by tripping up the stairs and sending my lovingly made pot of homemade hot fudge flying all over the living room, I feel like it's important to have and to share emergency go-tos.

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In many precincts of the South, people show their deep, pot-licking love of hearty greens by cooking the bejeezus out of them in ham hock-y stock, forever and ever, until they nearly melt into the smoky broth. Greens and pot-likker, as the broth is called, are the kind of thing that you will never make as well as someone's momma, but if you're close enough, you might get yourself an engagement ring. (True story.)

As only an honorary Southerner, I have yet to truly master greens, but when I moved down to Biloxi, Miss., I had to get with the program right quick if I ever wanted any vegetable matter to enter my body. I'd walk home from the market with a mess of collard or turnip greens so massive I looked like Bill Murray behind plant camouflage in "Caddyshack." I stewed them with pig, and, cooking for non-pig-eating folks, with dried shrimp and shiitake mushrooms, Chinese ingredients I recognized at the local Vietnamese market. The reasons, at first, were practical -- without pork at my disposal, I turned to these ingredients for deep flavor and lingering finish.

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Holidays are all about rituals, and rituals are all about repetition and people around you showing you, teaching you, herding you along. When I was a child, I tried, ever so hard, to bring the ritual of a big, dry, sawdusty bird to our Thanksgiving table, but my immigrant Chinese parents, raised far from turkeys, never quite saw the point. "Why eat something dry just to be like other people, when you could eat something delicious and be happy?" they asked me.

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Anyway, I am that borderline-crazy person when it comes to omelets and scrambled eggs, but with French fries, I take a saner, middle-ground approach. I use the old-school technique, one that is a tiny bit more work than just tossing potatoes into hot oil and a lot less work than the fabulous nutjobs who shoot their ducks to render fat for the grease and triple-cook the potatoes after freeze-drying them or whatever. And I'm perfectly happy -- thrilled, really -- with the results I get: hot, crisp and salty, giving away to tender, fluffy insides and a mild, earthy sweetness.

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