When I was a teenager, my mother’s father, Alex, married a woman named Carmen and moved to his new wife’s hometown of Caracas, Venezuela. My family went to visit them, and Grandpa Alex, a Jewish New Yorker, had clearly found his niche. He took us all over the city on foot–in his late 70s, he was in much better shape than any of his descendants–and to all sorts of Venezuelan restaurants. This was before South American all-you-can-eat beef restaurants became ubiquitous in the US, and what I remember best were the *churrascarias*–and the *arepas.*

Arepas are Venezuela’s daily bread. We ate breakfast every day at a place called Doña Arepota, which loosely translates as “she of the big arepas.” (I find this just as funny now as when I was sixteen.) I’d order a dish called, in Spanish, something like “cowboy eggs”: fried eggs with spiced beef braised until falling apart, served with arepas. The puck-shaped corn cakes were pan-fried and then baked. Made from parcooked corn flour, they had a crusty exterior and moist, doughy interior. We each ate several arepas per day.

Not long after we returned from Venezuela, Grandpa Alex died. I’ve never been back to Caracas, and I figured arepas would have to stay a blurry memory. Then I picked up the new Cook’s Illustrated book, The Best International Recipe, and there they were. The corn flour (*masarepa*) was easy to find at a Latin grocery in downtown Seattle, and I decided to make arepas for Christmas lunch at my parents’ house. They have few ingredients (corn flour, salt, baking powder, water) and are simple to form. I made two fillings: diced chicken thighs with lime juice, cheese, scallions, and cilantro, and braised flank steak with tomatoes and onions, a simplified *ropa vieja.*

The arepas were a hit–crunchy and hot, with piquant fillings that helped to counteract the effects of too much Christmas candy. Iris wanted hers with chicken and lots of lime juice. My younger brothers (who were twelve when we went to Venezuela and are now, absurdly, twenty-seven) noted that my arepas were smaller than what we had in Caracas. I can explain that. I’m Don Arepita.

So, Matthew, how’s the book going?

Fine, thanks for asking. As you can probably tell, I don’t want to talk about it much until it’s done. I’d rather not wear out its welcome before it’s actually, y’know, published.

But I do have to mention this. My friends and former Seattleites Anita and Cameron over at Married with Dinner are testing some recipes for me. I sent them my recipe for beer-braised short ribs with wheat berries, and I’m glad I did, because they made it with 100 percent local (to the Bay Area) ingredients, they made it look much better than it ever looks at my house, and they called it an “unpublished masterpiece.” Check it out!

I’m not just horn-tooting, though. When I forwarded their post to Laurie, she said, “That’s nice, but when are you going to make the pot pie?” Chicken pot pie with cheddar biscuit crust did sound pretty terrific. So I made it for dinner tonight. It was great, and I can explain the reason for its greatness in one word: parsnips. I mean, I enjoyed the biscuit topping, made with leaf lard and two kinds of cheese, but the parsnips were a brilliant touch. Potatoes would have made for a really boring dish. And you can get top-quality parsnips this time of year; ours were from Willie Green’s.

The pie was so good, it’s practically a published masterpiece.

Does anyone else remember this from Saturday morning cartoons? What the hell were they talking about?

Iris and I were eating waffles when my second waffle popped out of the toaster.

**Me:** Excuse me a minute, I hear my waffle calling me from the kitchen.

**Iris**, in a squeaky voice: “Who’s toasting me?”

I went to the University District Farmers Market and came home with two choice porky specimens.

The first was bacon from Wooly Pigs, a local producer of extremely high-quality pork from strange-looking Mangalitsa hogs [edit: not yet; see the owner’s comment below]. They had free bacon samples cooking in an electric skillet, and the proprietor practically forced me and another customer to try dipping a crust of bread in the bacon fat, which was predictably fabulous. (I guess I didn’t require much forcing.) Wooly Pigs supplies pork to the French Laundry and a number of top Seattle restaurants. Their prices are about five times what you’d pay for supermarket pork, so today I just picked up a pound of bacon, but I will try a couple of chops next time they have them in stock.

Then I stopped at Pies by Jenny and bought a small pork pie. This was made with a chile verde filling–tomatillos, green chiles, chunks of pork, and hominy. The pie was frozen, unbaked, and it took about 75 minutes in the oven, but it was a great lunch–sturdy but flaky pastry, tart stew of a filling.

Pies by Jenny also has sweet pies, but I was shopping alone, and I could never choose a sweet pie over a pork pie.