Holy hush puppies!

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Ok, seriously, these are riDICulously good. Growing up, I always loved my mom's fresh hush puppies and even now, when I go home to visit, I often ask her to make them for me. This week's contest on Food52 is Your Best Pub Food. The Rube Goldberg machinations of my mind this morning (have been awakened at 5a by the loons) made the following connections: pubs remind me of England, England reminds me of London, London makes me think of Wimbledon and the Olympics, and both of those events make me think of the way my entire family became utterly sloth-like during them. We would set up "nests" of blankets and pillows on the floor and couches in our TV room and, since it was summertime (hence no school), literally move in for the duration of whatever we were watching.

It was such great bonding, such lazy time together, and incredibly, as the London Olympics get underway, we will all be in Lake Charles together again: my sister from Italy, the boys and I from DC, and my parents. We are all super excited.

In any case, during these marathon sessions, we didn't take many breaks, but those we did were critically important ones like trips to the kitchen for sustenance. Mom often made hush puppies for breakfast, and all of these memories swirling in my mind earlier today got me thinking that hush puppies would make a great snack at a pub.

I wanted them to be both sweet and savory and also lighter than air so you didn't feel like a schlump after eating a few. So I started with my mom's basic cornmeal-based recipe and added slightly sweetened diced rhubarb and fresh corn, some ground mustard seed and a beaten egg white rather than a whole egg. The first batch (too much baking powder, whole egg vs my later move to egg white) wasn't quite right, so I tossed them and started again. The second was a home run. These are spectacular! I will definitely share this recipe with you. Make some for breakfast soon, and you'll see what I mean!

Paccheri with slave-free tomatoes

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If you read Em-i-lis during our trip to Italy in March, you might recall that I wrote about my love of and experiences there with paccheri, this wonderful, fat, tubular pasta.

The first time I had it this past visit was the night we moved to Florence from Venice. I bought some paccheri at a local market along with some eggplant and other pretty produce and while cooking up a beautiful dinner, felt myself grow sicker and sicker: the vomitous ailment that had plagued the boys in Venice had jumped to me, and I spent the next three days upchucking. Due to negative association, I looked askance at paccheri for the remainder of our trip until our penultimate night in Italy. Tom, my father and I went to Fabbio Picchi's Teatro del Sale, a truly marvelous "dinner theater" (that phrase does not even begin to do justice to the evening we had). One of the seemingly innumerable courses we enjoyed that evening was paccheri in the MOST incredibly creamy, unctuous, fresh tomato sauce. It slurped and sucked as your fork overcame the noodles' cling to one another, and really, I feel that's always a good and authentic sound. I have no idea how that sauce came to be, but it was truly a nectar of the gods and rendered me speechless for quite some time.

I made the tomato sauce this morning in honor of that wonderfully fun night at Picchi's place and so served it over some lovely paccheri. Mine doesn't even touch the magnificence of his complexly simple sugo di pomodoro at Teatro del Sale, but it was fun to muse about the larger-than-life Picchi - Attenzione! Attenzione!!- and a special night. As always and especially today, these tomatoes are slave-free. If you haven't yet signed this letter to supermarket CEOs urging them to sign on in support of the Fair Food Program, please tTake 30 seconds right now to raise your voice: sign your name to help ensure that supermarket tomatoes are slave-free!