The other day I was at Bavarian Meats (which features not only meats, but all things Bavarian) buying bacon and ham, and a new Ritter Sport flavor caught my eye. Ritter Sport are those square German chocolate bars available in many delectable varieties such as Knusperkeks, Alpenmilch, and Jogurt.

This new bar was chocolate mousse in dark chocolate. Of course, it wasn’t really mousse. It would be called a truffle bar in any American supermarket. Despite being the kind of chocolate snob most at home with a Valrhona 70 percent bar, I have never met a truffle bar I didn’t like. For that matter, it would be dangerous to leave me alone with a bowl of Lindor balls.

The Ritter mousse bar was pretty much like every other truffle bar I’ve ever tried. Only square. Recommended!

P.S.: Knusperkeks.

Yesterday I headed over to Bellevue to spend a gift certificate at [Porcella](http://www.porcellaurbanmarket.com/). Porcella is the highest of the high-end gourmet delis in the Seattle area, unless there’s another one in a penthouse that requires a golden key to enter. Porcella makes a full line of charcuterie, and they also serve lunch and dinner. I got the mixed salumi plate, with coppa, guanciale, soppressata, bresaola, and duck prosciutto. Everything was good, and it came with unlimited lengths of very good ficelle. For dessert I had a slice of chocolate pavé, a rich chocolate terrine, not too sweet, with perfectly smooth texture. While I ate I read the new magazine 425, a glossy about the Eastside. I think there is a rule in journalism that any jurisdiction wealthy enough to put out its own glossy magazine is too boring for anyone to give a shit.

This left me with a bit of gift certificate left, although not enough for more than a sliver of Porcella’s cured foie gras ($70/lb). Instead I got half a pound of pancetta (it’s great) and two pieces of duck confit.

Duck confit sounds like the sort of thing that should only be written about in a magazine like 425. It’s got duck, it’s got a French word, it just sounds expensive. But it’s not. Duck confit is thrifty. A confit duck leg typically sells for about $5. They’re plenty rich, so one of them makes a satisfying supper. Think of how much you’d spend on a good steak. You can’t screw up reheating the confit, either: just stick it in a 400°F oven for half an hour. You can also use one leg to feed two or three people by making hash.

Or, if you’re really hungry, you can do as we did last night and make the ultimate winter supper. Duck confit, of course. Potatoes roasted in duck fat–the recipe is from Nigella Lawson’s Feast, and it’s also in her earlier book How to Eat. The trick is to parboil the potatoes and then sprinkle them with semolina flour for extra crunch before roasting. And then some smothered savoy cabbage, made with Porcella’s pancetta.

I think I need another nap.

When Nassau grits appeared in Saveur, I couldn’t remember ever having heard of them before. It turns out I’ve had an essentially identical recipe on my shelf since 2002, in the cookbook A Real American Breakfast.

This illustrates a phenomenon I’ll call recipe rot. Everyone wants to talk about recipes from the new issue of Gourmet. Nobody wants to talk about recipes from last month’s issue. Same goes for cookbooks: _A Real American Breakfast_ has dozens of brilliant recipes in it, all of which I’d forgotten about except for the one waffle recipe I make over and over.

Similarly, there’s a book called The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper that is one of the most compelling Italian cookbooks ever published. When I first got it, I cooked dinner out of it for weeks, ended up trying at least a quarter of the recipes in the book, and wrote a whole column about one of them. But I haven’t cracked it in ages. It has passed into my mental back catalog. Do you have this problem, too? Is it a problem?

An aside about that potato gatto column. When I made the dish for the photo shoot, in summer 2001, the photographer, Steve Ringman, brought in this large contraption with all sorts of gadgets hanging off it and said, “I think I’m going to try this out.” It was a digital SLR camera. “I wonder if everyone will be using these someday,” I remember thinking.

Laurie’s parents gave us a bottle of hard cider for Christmas. It’s made on Sauvie Island, near Portland, OR, and it’s the best hard cider I’ve ever tasted: truly dry, complex, loaded with apple flavor. A real adult beverage, unlike the many oversweetened ciders on the market. And the company has a sense of humor: their web site boasts that the cider is made from many varieties of “ugly little apples.” The top of the bottle is dipped in wax. Too cool.

Yes, it’s fair to say I like everything about this cider except the fact that it’s only sold in Oregon–and the name.

I posted a while ago about the first rule of baby food.

The first rule of baby food, in short, is “there’s no such thing as baby food.” Babies can, with few exceptions, eat the same food as their parents. This is the easy rule.

The second rule of baby food is ten times harder, even though it basically tells you not to do anything. The second rule of baby food is:

**Once you put the food on the table, your job is done.**

I’m paraphrasing from Ellyn Satter’s book Child of Mine, which is really the last word on the feeding of older babies and children. (The book talks about breastfeeding but in much less detail than a good breastfeeding book like The Nursing Mother’s Companion.)

Satter puts the second rule slightly differently: you and your child have a *division of responsibility*, she says. You decide what and when to eat. Your child decides whether and how much to eat.

That means absolutely no cajoling at the table. No making sure they eat the peas *and* the larb. No getting upset if they want to fill up on bread. And no freaking out if they don’t want to eat a single bite of anything.

Probably no single piece of advice has saved our family more stress, even though it’s a pain in the ass to actually follow it, and probably no one follows it perfectly. Abiding by the second rule is as hard as choosing to ignore some of your spouse’s annoying habits.

Even though toddler feeding patterns have been notorious for as long as there have been toddlers, new parents still seem to be shocked and frustrated by them. There have been many days when Iris has eaten nothing more than half a cup of milk before her afternoon snack at 3:30pm. Other days, she’ll eat a whole piece of buttered toast and a bowl of Greek yogurt for breakfast and then be hungry for snack 90 minutes later.

Especially, I think, if you’re a guy (and more especially a guy who worked for years in tech support, like me), it’s easy to see the world as a series of problems that you might be able to solve. If you knew an adult who regularly skipped breakfast and lunch and then ate the fluffy inside part of the bread for dinner, you’d stage an intervention. But a toddler who eats that way doesn’t have a problem.

For all the parental handwringing, toddler eating is much less neurotic than adult eating, at least in the US. Toddlers eat when they’re hungry and the food tastes good. They won’t eat because the food is good for them or because you want them to.

Or let’s put it this way: If you look across the table, see a 20-pound kid, and think, “Oh, I can totally win this,” you may as well be saying, “Look at that small country in Asia. I could totally win a little war there.”