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By Root 1088 0

There were a lot of things that needed to be cooked just before serving. We’d planned to make a dessert and had nearly forgotten about it in the midst of preparing the other courses. We had our guests join in and help pipe the ladyfinger batter into neat ovals on a cookie sheet. I found myself stationed at the deep fryer for a while, carefully frying up batches of chickpeas and shaking them in a bowl with cumin, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon once they were cooked. I was sweating in the late-summer, cramped-kitchen heat, and collecting tiny splatters of hot fryer oil as I worked. A guest came up to me and offered to help. I demonstrated a batch for him, showing him how to slowly lower the basket of chickpeas into the oil and lift it out when they were done. A little later I’d be dipping prawns into a black-squid-ink-dyed batter and carefully dropping them into that fryer, too. It was tricky work, since we’d de-headed the prawns to extract the flavorful “juice” from them for another course, a seafood étouffée, and the prawn heads had to be fitted back together with their bodies and carefully dipped into the batter, then lowered into the deep fryer.

I took a brief rest in the backyard before dinner was served. I put my beer to my forehead. For some reason, every time I cooked at these dinners it ended up being one of the hottest nights of the summer.

The next morning, I slept in. I’d biked home late the night before in the heat, on a full belly, and was completely exhausted by the time I got home. I was glad to have the day off from the office. I usually worked three days a week, and this week I was off Monday and Tuesday. I put a pot of rolled oats on the stove and stepped into the shower while it simmered over a low flame. After an oatmeal breakfast and writing a blog entry, I packed a towel, some fruit, and a thawed Jamaican veggie patty that I’d made a few weeks before and headed down to the beach.

Tuesday was another warm, sunny day. But I had a cooking project to take care of. I’d been invited to a “cupcake meet-up” happy hour hosted by the writers of the food blog “Cupcakes Take the Cake.” Earlier that week, I’d made a spur-of-the-moment batch of homemade cookies as a midnight snack. Spooning up the remaining slicks of dough from the mixing bowl while they baked, I’d wondered whether raw cookie dough wouldn’t make a great alternative to cake frosting. I wanted to recapture this binge and make a batch of cupcakes to bring to the event with chocolate-chip cookie dough on top, and no frosting. I’d never seen it done before, but how hard could it be? That afternoon, I beat together a basic vanilla cake batter and filled lined muffin tins with it. While they baked, I made the same chocolate-chip cookie dough I’d made a few nights before, using chunks of dark chocolate from a bar instead of chips. Once the cakes were baked and cooled, I took a spatula and tried smearing some cookie dough on top. The cake crumbled. That wouldn’t work; the dough was much stiffer than frosting. I took a small scoop of cookie dough and formed it into a ball with my hands. I smushed it into a round disc about the size of a chocolate-chip cookie and pressed it on top of the cupcake. Perfect! I carefully packed my finished cupcakes away in a container and stored them in the fridge for the next night.

I’d signed up for a pig butchering class at the Brooklyn Kitchen that Tuesday night. The popular classes were taught by Tom Mylan, the local butcher and one of the judges from the last Chili Takedown. His butchering classes had become a big hit among curious foodies in Brooklyn, eager to zero in on what was for most a previously unexplored side of cooking: butchering. They tended to sell out fast, and I had grabbed the last seat at this class.

I arrived at the Brooklyn Kitchen a few minutes late for class. Tom was talking about the heritage Berkshire pig breed to a group of about twelve pupils standing before a large side of the specimen. The next two hours of class were filled with fascinating facts. Aside from learning about the parts