A couple of years ago, I posted about the impending demise of “artisanal” as a descriptor with any valid meaning. I figured that once Quizno’s started selling sandwiches on something they call “artisanal flatbread,” it probably wasn’t long before the folks at Dunkin’ Donuts who heat up the breakfast sandwiches in those turbo-charged convection ovens would start to consider themselves artisans.

Today, I realized that “multigrain”’s days are numbered.

(It’s sort of surprising it took me so long to reach this conclusion.)

One of my colleagues brought in snacksfor her students to celebrate their last class meeting. The menu included Multigrain Pringles. In Cheesy Cheddar flavor. No, seriously, these exist.

And if the very idea of Cheesy Cheddar flavor Multigrain Pringles isn’t enough to make your brain explode, you should know that they’re covered in that lurid orange cheese cheesy powder. (I can’t bring myself use the word cheese here.)

Before we know it a product will be allowed to be labeled “multigrain if it’s made of chlorine bleached, chemically enriched wheat flour plus a few parts per million of floor sweepings from an oatmeal processing factory.

Note: Acorn, delicata, or other winter squash or pumpkin varieties can substitute for butternut squash. For a vegan version, use margarine for butter and omit cheese.

• 3 quarts (6 cups/3 liters) vegetable stock
• 3 tablespoons butter or margarine
• 1 large onion, finely diced
• 1 1⁄2 cups risotto rice (such as arborio or carnaroli)
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage
• 1⁄2 cup (125 ml) white wine
• 1 medium sized butternut squash (about 1 pound/500 g), peeled, deseeded and cubed
• 4 oz (125 g) parmesan or romano cheese grated (optional)
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. Bring the stock to boil in a medium saucepan. Reduce heat to low to keep warm for use in the recipe.
2. In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium high heat. Add the onions and sauté until tender and translucent.
3. Add the rice and the sage. Sauté, stirring constantly, until the grains of rice look pearly.
4. Pour in the wine and simmer until nearly absorbed by the rice.
5. Add squash cubes to the rice and stir to mix.
6. Reduce heat to medium low and add a cup or of the stock. Let simmer, stirring periodically until the liquid is nearly absorbed by the rice.
7. Continue adding and simmering stock, one cup at a time until the rice is al dente (tender with just a hint of firmness at the core).
8. Stir in cheese if desired. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
9. Ladle rice into warm bowls and serve immediately.

Prep Time : 15 minutes
Cook Time : 45 minutes
Serves: 6 to 8

• 1 cup very warm water (105-115°F)
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 package active dry yeast or 1 cake yeast
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 cup strained butternut (or other winter) squash purée
• 1/2 cup non-fat dry milk solids
• 5 cups all-purpose flour

1. Combine water and sugar in a large bowl. Sprinkle dry yeast or crumble compressed yeast into mixture.
2. Let stand for 5 minutes, then stir to dissolve
3. Add 3 tablespoons of the oil, salt, squash and dry milk. Beat well with electric mixer at low speed.
4. Gradually beat in 2 cups of the flour
5. Scrape beaters and add remaining flour by hand, mixing well.
6. Knead on floured surface for approximately 10 minutes.
7. Cover and let stand in a warm place until doubled in bulk.
8. Knead gently (about five minutes) on a floured surface.
9. Roll out dough to one  thick. Cut rolls with floured 2 1/2-inch biscuit or cookie cutter.
10. Roll edges lightly with melted butter so that the baked rolls will separate easily.
11. Put in a greased 13 x 9 2-inch baking pan. Let rise until doubled in size.
12. Preheat oven to 400°F.
13. Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Yields: 15 rolls

Note: If you care about things like authenticity, the traditional way to purée potage is to use a food mill or Chinese hat strainer. I also think food mills give the most satisfying and consistent results. The risk with food processors and blenders is that the soup will either be too smooth (or even gluey) if you over-blend it or too chunky if you under-blend. Soup that’s been passed through a food mill has a uniform texture with tiny bits of the vegetables throughout.

• 2 tablespoons butter or margarine
• 1 large yellow onion, peeled and chopped
• 3 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 1 stick of celery, chopped
• 4 large potatoes peeled and chopped
• 1 large butternut or other winter squash (about 3 lb./1.5 kg), peeled, de-seeded and chopped
• 2 cups water
• 1⁄2 gallon (2 l) milk
• 1 1⁄4 cup (300 ml) heavy cream
• Salt and pepper to taste
• A pinch of nutmeg (optional)
• Finely chopped fresh chives or parsley for garnish (optional)

1. In a large soup pot or kettle, heat the butter over medium high heat. Sauté the onions, carrots and celery until the onions are tender and translucent.
2. Add the potatoes and the squash and stir to mix. Add the water and bring to a boil.
3. Add the milk, reduce heat and simmer, covered for 20 minutes or until squash and potatoes are fork tender.
4. Remove from heat and let cool 15 minutes.
5. Purée soup in blender, food processor or food mill. Depending on the size of your appliance, you can purée batches of 2 cups (500 ml) or so at a time and then mix all the batches together and reheat if necessary.
6. Season to taste and stir in nutmeg if desired.
7. Whisk in cream just before serving. Garnish each bowl with parsley or chives if desired.

Prep Time : 20 minutes
Cook Time : 40 minutes
Serves: 6 to 8

One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care.

I’ve started about eight letters in response, but have been too furious to finish them. That’s furious as in “wake up in the middle of the night and sit at the computer in an angry fog trying to come up with a statement that encapsulates my rage and disappointment.”

There was the calmly reasonable version in which I tried to rebut his mistaken statistics about the monetary cost of obesity and to point out how puzzling I found it that someone who’s otherwise so astute about unraveling the hidden connections between the food industry, the government, and “food science” can’t see that the obesity-industrial complex is part of that same unholy collaboration.

After a few more abortive drafts, I was leaning toward something short and sweet like:

To: pollan {@} berkeley.edu, inquiries {@} michaelpollan.com
Subject: WTF??!!

Dear Fatphobic Blowhard:

Kiss my fat ass!

The Pickyeater

I even considered attaching a picture of my butt for good measure.

Finally after another 4:00 am session of tossing, turning, and fuming, I hit on the following message, which I just emailed to Pollan with the included picture:

To: pollan {@} berkeley.edu, inquiries {@} michaelpollan.com
CC: oped {@} nytimes.com
Subject: food justice should not require fat-baiting

Dear Mr. Pollan,

Re: your September 10, 2009 New York Times op-ed piece

If you can’t foment your revolution without scapegoating and stigmatizing fat people, then I don’t want to be part of it.

Your former fan,

The Pickyeater

I wish I looked more stern, but the best I could manage was smirky. I was a little too giddy, since several of my co-workers were waiting just out of frame to have their own pictures taken so they could join in my impromptu protest.

If you’d like to join in our mini-action, you can download a PDF version of my sign or make your own. Take your photo and email it off to Pollan to express your frustration with his ZOMG!!!OBESITY!!11! hysteria.

Fellow elephants are, of course, welcome to past copies of your own missives in the comments here. Or, if you post your email on your own blog / Facebook / Twitter / whatever, please leave a link in the comments here, so your co-conspirators can bask in the glory of rad  fattie anger.

Oh, and just in case it needs to be said, I’m thrilled for elephants of all sizes to join in.

Despite my love for their aroma and flavor, my cooking ambitions almost foundered on onions. Chopping them can be drudgery if you’re not diligent about honing and sharpening your knives. Dicing and mincing them requires finesse. When I first started cooking, I thought that any attempt to cut onions into uniformly sized pieces was nothing more than an affectation for wannabe chefs. It only took a few less-than-successful meals for me to learn that, with onions, size matters. When there’s too large a difference between the largest pieces and the smallest, you’re likely to end up with some bits charred around the edges and others still half-raw in the middle.

And then there are the tears.

Slice through an onion’s delicate cell walls and you’re activating one of nature’s most effective chemical weapons systems. The sulfur compounds in one membranous compartment mix with an enzyme in another to form a volatile vapor. These fumes fly into your eyes where they break down into a number of noxious chemicals, including sulfuric acid.

A photo taken by a friend early in my career as a home cook, show’s me standing at the counter, chef’s knife in hand, wearing swim goggles to prepare the onions for our dinner. These days, I’m more likely to follow the advice of Harold McGee, the guru of culinary science, who suggests chilling onions in ice water for a half an hour or so before you start cutting. The cold disarms the onion’s natural tear gas by slowing down the enzymes that kick off the chemical reactions. I still keep a pair of goggles squirreled away in my kitchen, though, just in case there’s a call for some last-minute mise en place.

One of my most indelible memories from cooking school was the afternoon our chef instructor made soup with nothing more than onions, butter, salt, pepper, a pinch of sugar, and several liters of water. Some of my classmates thought the absence of beef stock was a measure of the school’s stinginess. I was astonished that the application of heat and care could transform such lowly ingredients into a soup so sublime that I didn’t even miss the stock. Long slow cooking brought out the onions’ gentler side and added a meaty depth to their flavor. Caramelization, followed by gentle simmering, turned the water from clear to woodsy brown.

In the end, I think it’s just these sorts of transformations that make onions so invaluable. Whether they play a supporting or a starring role in a dish, onions supply the magic that steals the show.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate your efforts to save me from myself, but it occurs to me that all your proposed fat taxes might not be as wildly successful as you’d hoped.

I drink maybe two or three sodas a year — usually something exotic like the pink grapefruit-flavored Schweppe’s Agrume I can only get in Paris or the lurid, green tarragon soda they sell at the Armenian grocery stores in Watertown. So I can’t imagine that taxing soda will have that much of an impact on my lifestyle.

And, as for fast food, once you’ve counted the organic pork burritos at Chipotle or the whole-grain egg white flatbread sandwiches I buy at Dunkin’ Donuts or my yearly Lenten fish fillet sandwich at Wendy’s, it’s hard for me foresee fast food taxes causing more than a slight downward blip in my bottom line.

Given the rarity of these sorts of purchases in my life, it’s less likely that raising the price will dissuade me from junk food consumption and more likely I’ll start to think of these already sporadic treats as luxurious splurges, like the occasional glass of wine or box of fresh organic strawberries.

More than that, though, I know that your fat taxes won’t work because I’ve been paying even bigger levies than these for the last twenty years.

Every time I paid more for the larger version of an item of clothing from JJill, that was a fat tax of a sort. Every time I had to pay shipping and handling on a new pair of jeans from Old Navy because they refuse to carry plus sizes in their brick-and-mortar stores, fat tax. Every time I had to pay full price for a dress that my smaller-size friends could find deeply discounted on sale or at a thrift shop, you guessed it, fat tax.

And these are just the frivolous examples.

I’m sure there have been times when I’ve earned less money than my skinny co-workers who do the same job. That’s right, fat tax.

I know it’s a privilege to be able to pay for therapy to deal with the mental and emotional toll living as a fat person in the twenty-first century inflicts, but that’s yet another fat tax.

And I have to count my blessings that I’ve always had health insurance from my employer. Lots of my fellow fatties have to pay higher premiums or are denied coverage altogether.

I’ve already been taxed and taxed out my big, fat wazoo, and you know what, I’m still fat. So, before you go spouting off about how us fatties just need the right financial incentives to stop stuffing ourselves or start exercising or whatever your policy proposal du jour is, you might want to rethink your strategies.

Respectfully yours,

the pickyeater

What I came up with wasn’t half bad. I did a variation on toasted, herbed bread crumbs that I often use as a topping for cauliflower — a sort of Italianized  (or is that Italicized) version of Chou-Fleur à la Polonaise.

This is one of those dishes that should be tinkered with depending on your likes and dislikes, not to mention what’s sitting on your shelves, so consider this recipe a template.

• One portion of pasta
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 pinch dried chili flakes
• 1 large garlic clove, pressed (I was out of fresh garlic so I used some Vietnamese pre-fried garlic slices I had in the pantry.)
• 1 teaspoon – 1 tablespoon capers according to preference, drained
• 1/4 cup panko or other non-seasoned bread crumbs
• 3 ounce canned tuna, drained and flaked (I had a can of that Italian chunk light in olive oil. Yum!)
• 1 – 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh herbs (I used some parsley, sage and rosemary — one herb short of a song — I had leftover from thanksgiving.)

1. While pasta is cooking, heat some olive oil in a medium skillet. Add pinch of dried chili pepper flakes and one pressed garlic clove and sauté until garlic is golden and fragrant.
2. Add capers and stand back. They usually spatter. Sauté for about 30 seconds — until the sizzling dies down — and then add the bread crumbs. Stir to mix with capers, garlic an pepper flakes. Turn down heat to medium-low and cook crumbs until golden.
3. When crumbs lightly golden. Add tuna and fresh herbs. Stir to mix. Let cook for about 1 minute then serve over drained pasta.

Serves: 1

Vosges Chocolate has introduced Mo’s Bacon Bar — deep milk chocolate with applewood-smoked bacon and alder-smoked salt. They’d already sold me on the glories of chocolate, salt and smoke with their Barcelona Bar (deep milk chocolate, sea salt, hickory-smoked almonds), so there’s no question that I’ll have to try the new addition to their line.

A local gourmet shop sells Vosges products, so guess where I’m going after work tomorrow.