Thanks to HabaneroSuz, who led me to Crate & Barrel and their inexpensive but amply proportioned Bistro Bowl. I stopped by C&B last night and bought one bowl to try out, but now that I’ve had it at home and cradled it lovingly in my arms, I know that this is the bowl for me, unless it turns out to chip easily. I’m kicking myself for not buying more.

Tonight I’m making stir-fried chicken with bok choy and serving it over some Chinese noodles. I will be eating mine from the big bowl while Laurie and Iris will have to make do with whatever cracked and battered china I can rustle up from the credenza.

Naturally I left off my favorite hack in that pizza hacks post.

How do you get your pizza from the peel onto the stone? Most people answer: Coat the peel liberally with flour, semolina, or cornmeal, give it a jerk, and pray. But there’s a much easier way. Put a piece of parchment paper on the peel, or, if you don’t have a peel or (as in my case) there isn’t room in your kitchen to use one, use a cookie sheet. Fling or stretch your dough (or roll it, I won’t tell) and place it right on the parchment. Top it, and use scissors to trim the parchment roughly around the edge. Then slide the pizza and parchment onto the stone.

The pizza will brown just as well, and this method cuts down 95 percent on the agonized wails of cheese burning on the oven floor.

Reynolds parchment, sold in many supermarkets, is fine, but if you use a lot of parchment, it’s worth buying a 100-pack of flat sheets from [King Arthur](http://www.kingarthurflour.com). (And if you *really* use a lot of parchment, it’s cheaper still to buy it from a restaurant supply store, but they typically sell full-sheet parchment in 500- or 1000-sheet packs.)

I realize it’s the height of narcissistic blog behavior to post about a dream you had, so I’ll make this a best-of, and I’ll keep them short.

I don’t remember my dreams very often, and when I do, they’re usually scary or dull. Every once in a while, though, I’ll wake up giggling and annoy Laurie because I’ve had a dream that seemed very serious at the time but was actually comic gold. Here are four of those, all at least vaguely food-related. I promise two things: (a) these are all actual, unembellished dreams, and (b) I won’t share any more dreams until I have several more of this quality, which should be around 2026.

* This afternoon, still trying to throw off my cold, I took a big nap and had a dream in which I was working as a consultant to the military of some Latin American country. I advised my men that if they wanted to be taken seriously as an army, they had to go around and fight the armies of neighboring countries. But that was too expensive, so instead we would go to the supermarket and fight people in the various sections of the market devoted to the foods of neighboring countries. We went to the supermarket and found a guy picking grapes. “GET HIM!” I shouted to my army guys. “That’s just a guy picking grapes,” said one guy. “But we’re in the Argentina section,” I said. “The army of Argentina is basically a guy picking grapes anyway. NOW GET HIM!” So my army guys started halfheartedly throwing punches at this supermarket employee.

* I was given an assignment by my editor to interview Noam Chomsky. “We know all about Noam Chomsky the linguist and the political writer,” she said. “But we never hear about Noam Chomsky the food writer.” So I met with Chomsky, and he said, “I wrote a rap about cheese. Do you want to hear it?” Absolutely, I said. Chomsky rapped, “I’m better than cheddar / I’m ruder than Gouda / I got more cheeses than a cheese computer.”

* I had entered myself in an MTV amateur rap competition, which was being held in a mobile home. As it got closer to my number, I was getting more and more nervous, because I hadn’t prepared anything and my rapping skills were subpar. Finally I was up, and I burst out onto the stage and dropped the following rhyme: “Them other guys be buggin’ / Girls come from far and wide to bring me muffins.”

* I was in a musical set in a McDonald’s in Nazi Germany. The title of the musical was _I’m Eating My McNuggets in the Land of McBigots_.

What is the most wicked section of the supermarket? It’s definitely the spices. Those little jars are full of the exotic scents of far-off lands, enticing the unwary shopper to all manner of intemperate, hot-blooded…er, actually, they’re just ludicrously overpriced.

The other day I was shopping at QFC, and I had mustard seeds and crystallized ginger on my shopping list. The mustard seeds were destined for Babbo Salmon, the ginger for a biscuit recipe from The Family Kitchen. A quarter-cup jar of mustard seeds (1.4 ounces) was selling for $4.69. A half-cup jar of crystallized ginger (2 ounces) was going for about $11.50.

In marketing parlance, I am a price-sensitive consumer, which means that I will freak out rather than pay $4.69 for mustard seeds, which are among the cheapest of all spices. [Penzeys](http://www.penzeys.com/) sells a pound of mustard seeds for $3.80, which means QFC is charging 14 times as much. Penzeys also charges $3.29 for 3 ounces of crystallized ginger.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to make a special order from Penzeys for two items, and I wanted the stuff now. So Laurie went to Madison Market, the local natural foods store, and got me 1/4 cup of mustard seeds from the bulk section, for less than 50 cents, and a half-pound bag of crystallized ginger for $3.

Jars of evil, I tell you.

Last week at the market, morels had suddenly come down in price. “They were scarce the first couple of weeks and then they just popped up all over,” lamented the woman at the mushroom stand. Her loss was my woodsy gain, although “down in price” means they had dropped from $34 to $18. I bought half a pound and dithered about what to do with them. Every time I see morels I want to put them on my fingers and pose as Morel-Man, a wild and musky superhero. That’s not what I did, though. I made little frittatas.

We currently have from the library a great new cookbook by Debra Ponzek called The Family Kitchen. The reason Ponzek’s book is so good, I think, is that she is a former top New York chef who retired to Connecticut over ten years ago to run a small chain of gourmet shops and raise some kids. So she’s neither a home economist nor a chef guessing at what real families eat. Her book is also refreshingly free of nutritional dogma; it presents a wide varieties of foods cooked with appropriate amounts of fat and salt, and it assumes you can tinker with the recipes if that’s your thing.

Reducing fat and salt isn’t my thing, but tinkering with recipes certainly is. One of the most appealing recipes in the book is for mini-frittatas with zucchini and cheddar. You can find the recipe in a recent post on the fun blog known as [But My Kids Won’t Eat It…](http://www.kymmco.com/).

Instead of zucchini, I minced the morels and sauteed them up with some shallots, in butter instead of olive oil, thereby making a morel duxelles. (This is the kind of wordplay that has won me countless freestyle battles. I have also declared my opponent’s rhymes so low in acidity that you just know he extra-virgin.) I spooned this into the muffin cups and poured the egg mixture on top. It was great. Iris ate two.

Morels are definitely my favorite of the wild mushrooms, at least until chanterelle season rolls around. And I ain’t playin’.