Anita of [Married with Dinner](http://www.marriedwithdinner.com/) fame has selected me to share my list of Five Things to Eat Before You Die. I urge you to take this list seriously. If you do not eat these five things, I can’t be responsible for the consequences.

1. Lasagna Bolognese. You have to make the pasta yourself. You have to make both sauces (ragu and bechamel) yourself. I’m not sure what threshing is, but I’m sure it would help if you threshed the wheat yourself. By the time it’s done, you may be too exhausted to eat, but whoever is still awake will be rewarded with the most savory of all foods.

2. Nueske’s bacon.

3. Deluxe Tan Tan Noodles, Szechuan Chongqing Restaurant, Vancouver BC. I’ve been going here regularly since I was 12, and these noodles, served hot with ground pork and a spicy, peanutty sauce, have never changed. Don’t wear your best shirt.

4. Fluffy catfish salad (*yam pla doog foo*), Thailand. This dish sums up everything I love about Thai food: sourness, spiciness, fresh fish, and mastery of the deep fryer. The catfish is basically unrecognizable as fish, because it’s been flaked into small pieces before frying.

5. Montgomery Cheddar. The other farmhouse cheddars of note (Keen’s and Isle of Mull) are more acidic than this one. Montgomery has the perfect crumbly balance. It’s expensive, but I could probably afford to eat it every day if I sold Iris on eBay.

The October issue of Parents has a great baby food feature. Not only does it have many great ideas for finger foods, but it’s artfully presented.

If I have one quibble, it’s that there aren’t enough high-fat items on the list. Not only do babies require a high-fat diet, they find fatty foods easier to chew and swallow. That’s why you should keep them away from the lard sculptures.

Laurie and I spent Christmas 2000 in Paris. Ever since then I’ve been doing something dumb: lamenting the things we didn’t do, even though almost everything we ate was fantastic. Now my friend Emily, who is currently in Paris, has given me another thing to pine over.

While in Paris, I noticed an unusual type of store, one specializing in frozen food. I never actually went into one, but the name, *surgelés* (as in “under ice”), stuck with me. So when Emily mentioned that she’d been buying frozen food, I said, “You mean at a surgelés store?” Yep, she said, one called [Picard](http://www.picard.fr/).

If you love French food, don’t click that link or you’re going to blow your whole day. Right now they’re having a 15 percent off sale on *cuisine evasion,* which means foreign food, not food you flee from. *2 soupes au raviolis à la chinoise.* *Boudins créoles.* *Paella au poulet et aux fruits de mer.* You can also buy frozen sauces like bordelaise.

Here in the States we’ve got Budget Gourmet!

So if you keep an apartment in Paris, (a) I hate you, and (b) look for the blue snowflake.

Now, I’m not a political blogger, but this seems like important news.

(Thanks, [neild](http://fieldofschemes.com/).)

Yeah, I should be making stock. And sometimes I do. Chicken, mostly, and occasionally duck. Sometimes I buy a whole chicken when it’s on sale, and sometimes I buy chicken backs and necks.

But when I check the freezer and find no little Ziplocs of stock, I used canned. Canned stock is expensive and a pain to use, and it’s not as good as homemade.

Now, however, I’ve got something better. And when I say better, I mean “cheaper and more convenient,” not actually better. Probably I’m going down the road of the frog who got slowly boiled (thereby making frog stock), but if I’m going to be using canned stock anyway, I’d rather have…

Better Than Bouillon. Silly name, great product. It’s a paste that comes in a jar that keeps for months in the fridge. One jar is $5 and makes 38 cups of stock (1 teaspoon reconstitutes to 1 cup). It’s also organic and contains no weird ingredients. I got it at Madison Market.

For recipes like Ants on a Tree, where I need half a cup of liquid with a little salt and protein in it, BTB is perfect. It does taste a little more like bouillon than canned stock, so it’s probably not best for soup, but that’s where the stock police come after you for not using homemade, right?

And when I say “the stock police,” I mean the SEC.