I know that sign over there says I’m at work. And I am at work. But I have to share.

I’m working on a story about dried chiles, and I was just at a Mexican restaurant talking salsa. As we were wrapping up, the bartender said to the cook, “Hey, there are chiles in the *chapulinas,* right?”

“What are chapulinas?” I asked.

“You want to try one?”

“Sure.”

It turns out there are no chiles in the chapulinas. Just some salt, garlic, and a whole roasted grasshopper. They showed me how to pull off the legs (“They get caught in your throat,” said the cook) and bite the head off.

It tasted disturbingly like Parmesan cheese. I can’t say I liked it. However, I did earn the right, next time I take people to this restaurant, to say, “Hey, you guys want to try some chapulinas?”

For weeks, ever since I got the book Charcuterie, I’ve been threatening to make my own sausage. Actually, I’ve made sausage before. Once, with more than a little help from my extremely meat-knowledgeable friend Matt Treiber, I made this:

That’s two kinds of Thai sausages, *sai krok* and *sai oua*, with the traditional accompaniments. Isn’t this the sort of thing you used to do before having kids?

Sometimes I make a quick Italian sausage recipe from John Thorne’s book Pot on the Fire, where you start with ground pork and add garlic, crushed red pepper, and fennel seeds. It’s a lot cheaper than good store-bought Italian sausage, and just as good if you don’t need links.

But this time I wanted to go whole hog, or at least 3/4 hog, since I’m still way too lazy to deal with sausage casings. So I got out the meat grinder attachment for the Kitchenaid, and Iris and I headed down to Uwajimaya.

If I made a top-three list of the best things about living in Seattle, it would look something like this:

1. The weather
2. Every bar, restaurant, concert, beach party, and backyard barbecue features great craft beer
3. Uwajimaya

Uwajimaya is one of the biggest and best-stocked Asian supermarkets in the US. Iris, who is a soy sauce fiend, was delighted by the fact that they had no less than three dozen soy sauces on the shelf. There was also an enormous dragon hanging from the ceiling, its tail stretching the length of the store. We got some eel sushi and a yakitori stick for snack, then went shopping. When you shop at Uwajimaya, most likely they’ll have what you’re looking for, and if they don’t, at least you can feel smug that you’re making something so unusual that you’ve stumped Uwajimaya.

Today’s shopping list was easy. The end goal: roasted poblano sausage, a pork sausage with three kinds of chiles: ground anchos, paprika, and diced roasted poblanos. The recipe called for fresh oregano, but they were charging $3 for those plastic packages of some very old-looking oregano. “That oregano not so good,” said Iris. I decided to substitute dried Mexican oregano. We got the poblanos, a nice piece of boneless pork shoulder, some cilantro, and a lime.

Making the sausage was quite easy. I roasted up the poblanos and the anchos, skinned the former and ground the latter. I cut up the pork into chunks, tossed it with the seasonings, and sent it through the grinder. I’d been warned by _Charcuterie_ to watch out for a terrifying condition known as *smear,* where gristle gets caught in the grinder and causes the meat to mush out in a gross-looking and non-tasty way, but it never happened. Smear probably looks ten times scarier in my imagination than in real life. I also learned, because Laurie read it on the box, that the wooden stick used to push the meat into the grinder is called a stomper.

The resulting sausage tasted a lot like Mexican chorizo, but with a fresh poblano kick. I sent some of it to my parents, who ate it with scrambled eggs, and put some in the freezer. But what to do with the rest?

I’d already put enchiladas on the calendar before setting off on the impromptu sausage trip, and I figured sausage enchiladas couldn’t be bad. They weren’t, although it wasn’t the best way to showcase the sausage. Probably some of the rest will end up as a sausage patty sandwich, maybe with some slaw on it.

While I was making the enchiladas I remembered that I once had some really good enchiladas with chorizo at [Cactus Restaurant](http://www.cactusrestaurants.com/) on Madison. Looking at their menu now, it must have been the chimayo enchiladas, with chicken, house-made chorizo, blue corn tortillas, and green chile sauce. Highly recommended. Cactus also serves this great tamarind lemonade.

After dinner, Iris made up a game where she pretended to send some meat through the grinder to make burgers for the whole family. Yes, I let Iris play with the meat grinder, although it wasn’t attached to the mixer at the time and was therefore no more dangerous than the average dingo.

I didn’t take a picture of the sausage, because it just looked like a big bowl of bulk sausage and then like a pan of enchiladas. Instead, have another look at this sausage I once made!

There! If that title doesn’t get me some major search engine hits, nothing will.

In his book Chocolate, Mort Rosenblum reserves his harshest critique for Godiva chocolates. He says he would rather eat Hershey’s. I have no opinion on the matter myself, since I don’t think I’ve ever tasted Godiva chocolates.

However, I don’t want to hear one harsh word toward Godiva ice cream, which is absolutely my favorite ice cream ever. Sure, I enjoy the freshly churned ice creams in exotic flavors, made by a pastry chef and served in quenelles, but you can’t take those home without cryogenic pants pockets, and I think ice cream is best eaten on the couch in front of the latest episode of Veronica Mars. Hmm, where can I get cryogenic pants?

Godiva ice cream (I always buy the Belgian Dark Chocolate flavor) is smooth. It is rich. It is chocolaty. It’s pretty much everything you hope for in chocolate ice cream and rarely get–although I admit I have a soft spot for Chocolate Mousse Royale at Baskin-Robbins. It makes brilliant milkshakes, malts, and sodas.

Now Godiva has introduced ice cream bars. One of the flavors contains white chocolate, so I ignored it, but the other is their Belgian Dark Chocolate ice cream with a milk chocolate coating. I just ate one. Frankly, I like a scoop from the carton better, but chocoholics are going to have a hard time walking past these bars in the freezer case. (The best ice cream bar I’ve ever had, incidentally, is from Roger’s in Victoria BC.)

I’ve noticed that few places make an ice cream soda the way I prefer them, and it’s one of my favorite summer treats–chocolaty enough for the true addict, but light enough that you can go out and continue surfing afterwards. (I don’t surf, but I plan to make it my midlife crisis project.) So even though it’s February and was 35 degrees out this morning, I’ll tell you how I make them. If you live in a sunny place like Hawaii or Palm Springs, consider an ice cream soda this afternoon. I was pretending to live in Palm Springs while eating my ice cream bar. I’ve never been to Palm Springs, but in my imagination it was very relaxing, especially since I imagined a piña colada in the other hand.

Put a few scoops of chocolate ice cream into a large bowl (if you have a stick blender) or a blender jar. Add a small amount of club soda and blend until the ice cream and soda are fully combined. Pour in additional club soda, approximately equal to the original volume of ice cream, and stir with a spoon until just combined. Pour into tall glasses and serve with a straw.

One last note about club soda. I had a total club soda epiphany last summer. Aside from ice cream sodas, we also like making Italian sodas and sparkling limeade, so we often buy club soda (or seltzer–can anyone taste the difference?) in the summer. I had been buying it in two formats: 2-liter bottles, which cost a dollar but go flat long before they’re empty, or single-serving glass bottles, which are about $5 for a six-pack.

It didn’t occur to me that there might be an inexpensive container smaller than a two-liter bottle. Turns out there is. It’s called a can. Now I buy 12-packs of club soda in cans for $2–just not when it’s so cold out I feel like I’m wearing cryogenic pants.

We haven’t found a lot of good kid’s books about food. The bibimbap book was pretty good, and there’s a series by Amy Wilson Sanger called World Snacks, the best of which is First Book of Sushi. It contains the immortal line, “Miso in my sippy cup, tofu in my bowl.”

But nothing beats Bread and Jam for Frances. I don’t know if Russell Hoban is a very hungry man or if he just understands that children are interested in the details of food. Even the Frances books that aren’t focused on food recognize that food is never far from the mind of a child (or certain adults). In A Baby Sister for Frances, for example, Frances decides to run away, but not before packing a snack of chocolate sandwich cookies and prunes.

_Bread and Jam_ features one of the best eating scenes in Western literature. I will quote a bit, and then you can get your own copy.

> He ate his bunch of grapes and his tangerine.
> Then he cleared away the crumpled-up waxed paper, the eggshell, and the tangerine peel.
> He set the cup custard in the middle of the napkin on his desk.
> He took up his spoon and ate up all the custard.
> Then Albert folded up his napkins and put them away.
> He put away his cardboard saltshaker and his spoon.
> He screwed the cup on top of his thermos bottle.
> He shut his lunch box, put it back inside his desk, and sighed.
> “I like to have a good lunch,” said Albert.

Can anyone recommend other good food-related books?