This month on Culinate, I’m getting sweet on you:

Sugar daddy

> But caramel is nothing more than melted sugar heated until it browns. It’s actually quite easy to make, and it’s versatile, inexpensive, and fun. Want to impress your guests? You can crack open a $100 jar of caviar — or caramelize a few cents’ worth of sugar and serve homemade caramel sauce.

Don’t you hate it when Wikipedia outsmarts you?

Occasionally when I want a snack, I make myself a corn tortilla quesadilla. It’s always better in my imagination than in reality. I always make them the same way: two 6-inch corn tortillas with cheese in the middle. If I cook it in a lot of fat, it gets crisp and greasy. If I cook it in little or no fat, it’s not greasy, but the tortillas stay limp.

So I Googled. Naturally, the Wikipedia page for “quesadilla” came right up, and I learned that one type of quesadilla is:

> Corn tortilla based cheese tacos

> A corn tortilla thrown on a griddle to cook, then flipped and sprinkled with grated melting cheese such as Queso Chihuahua or Monterey Jack. Once the cheese melts it gets a smear of guacamole and is folded and served.

I heated a cast-iron pan and went right to it. I skipped the guacamole. It was great. You need two of them for a proper snack, but they’re quick. Perhaps the rest of you already make your corn quesadillas this way and are wondering what I was doing fooling around with two tortillas. I wonder that myself.

Does this sound familiar to you? You’re watching a TV show or movie, and a character holds out a wooden spoon of tomato sauce and says, “Taste this.” It’s probably a man, because tomato sauce is the only thing men can cook on TV. (Excluding Food TV, obviously.)

It happened on the episode of My So-Called Life that Laurie and I watched the other night. (We got the box set for Christmas.)

Has anybody ever done this sauce-tasting thing in real life? It sounds messy. Then on last night’s episode, someone tasted a soup and said, “This needs something.” I’ve never heard that, either. These are the food equivalents of the woman sweeping the entire shelf of pregnancy tests into her cart. (We just saw _Juno,_ too.)

Any other favorite TV food cliches you want to share?

I haven’t been around here much lately, what with assorted professional responsibilities and Chocolatier 2 and all. It will probably stay that way through March. In the meantime, here are some things I’ve been reading lately, in case I’m not doing my part to keep words in front of your pupils.

* My China, Kylie Kwong. Through stunning color photos, Australian TV host Kwong takes us on an encyclopedic tour of her collection of antique ceramic tableware. Actually, the premise is great–Kwong, who doesn’t speak Chinese, travels around China convincing people to let her cook in their kitchen. The kitchens are everything from a street stall to a lavish resort kitchen. There’s also history and recipes.

* Mouth Wide Open, John Thorne. Everything by Thorne is good, including this new book. What I like about Thorne, aside from his singleminded focus on food, is that he is the smartest person writing about food in English, but he never makes you feel like a smart person is talking down to you. It’s more like, wow, I get to apprentice myself to this guy for a few hours and learn a bit of his trade.

* The Best International Recipe. The subtitle to this one, I believe, is “Foreign recipes we didn’t screw around with too much.”

* ChopTalk: The Gourmet Food and Travel Blog. Gourmet as in the magazine. This was only brought to my attention recently, and there are a lot of talented people (Francis Lam, Julia Langbein, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, and Fuchsia Dunlop, just to name a few) writing for it. Updated daily, which is more than you can say for *some* blogs.