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Forgive the jumpiness, see, I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. And to make matters worse, listening to a particularly jumpy Thelonius Monk album. I was, to be fair to both Pollan and Monk, rather jumpy to begin with--I used to be absolutely terrified, upon swallowing a slippery pip from an orange segment, that a tree would grow inside my belly. I had dreams of being walled in our garden trapped between citrus trees as my meals were lifted up to me in a dumbwaiter attached to the trunks.

Anyway, the next generation needn't worry (unless of course, their parents are buying all heirloom fruits and vegetables--in which case, watch out for those seeds!). Because most seeds spat out, even into a patch of Biblically fertile soil, and with the best rain, drainage, sunshine and a few hours of classical music a day, will not grow (at least, not true to type). They're all hybrids--bred for durability, speed, resistance to disease and chemicals and other things too.

I have also, as far as I can remember, felt an unsettling, urgent, high tempo anxiousness walking up and down the packaged meat aisles of the grocery store. Everything in bloody pieces. If it wasn't for good butcher shops and restaurant walk-in's strung up with whole goats--their tongues rolled out like the cartoon wolf at a hot lounge act--I might never get to see the whole, dead animal. And shouldn't everyone have to spend one afternoon catching a chicken, butchering, or carrying one limp rabbit by its long, soft, ears, to remind themselves of what they're eating. Er, maybe. Well, it isn't called The Vegan's Dilemma, is it?

It seems fitting after an inspiring morning of reading about precisions that I should have so much trouble making the simplest of things at work that I've made a thousand times before: pate de fruit. Pate de fruit seems like a natural evolution from early fruit and sugar preserves, jams, and jellies, the most basic of French confections--I remember buying them as a treat from our Saturday markets in La Ferte along with candied orange peels and coffee macaroons, and eating them in the backseat on the ride home.

They're often served as a petit four after the meal--a fruit puree sweetened and set with pectin so that it has a slight, soft chew, like a piece of firm jam, then cut or moulded and covered in granulated sugar. We make all sorts of flavours at work: litchi, quince, lime, raspberry, apricot, but it was a strawberry recipe I attempted--and failed.

It's not only embarrassing when one fails at simple things--I was glad that the kitchen was quiet and there was barely anyone to witness my mess--but it's a complete waste of prep time before service. I made two attempts, making two different mistakes.

First batch: I whisked constantly, but allowed the gas flame to curve around the back of the pot and lick the edge. And so the edge of the pot burned. If this happens, don't worry, just change pots quickly before you start to scrape the burned fruit into your mix, and turn down the flame so it's just under the pot and not around it. This batch is O.K, though I lost a little mass in the first pot, which meant it wouldn't quite fill the frame I'd set up for it. This means I'm not yielding as many pieces as I should be, that's bad. Note, an induction stove, if you have one, is a good safe way to cook the pate de fruit.

Second batch: I added the sugar in small amounts. But not small enough. The mixture cooled down too fast and started to set in the pot. By the time I "poured" it onto my framed silpat, it was strange and lumpy and needed to spread with a palette knife to smoothen out. Needless to say, that batch was trash.

So, even the simplest of experiments can feel something like wearing a pair wings glued together with wax.

There are many pate de fruit recipes--some use thermometers, some use time, and some use a sugar concentration measurer-but the basic format of all the recipes I've followed is generally the same: one begins with either fresh fruit, cooked down and passed through a tamis, or frozen puree, melted down. To this, a combination of pectin and sugar is added. And finally, some lemon juice or citric acid, and maybe some booze.

Harold McGee lists three things to set a pectin when making a jam: add a large dose of sugar, whose molecules attract water molecules to themselves, thus pulling the water away from the pectin chains and leaving them more exposed to reattaching to each other. Second, boil the mixture to evaporate water and bring pectin chains even closer together. Third, increase acidity, which neutralises electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel. Most pate de fruit recipes involve all three steps but use commercial powdered pectin. Pectins vary, as does the acidity of the fresh or frozen fruit, so keep this in mind when changing fruits or pectins or acid and using the same recipe. Boiron, who makes a lot of high-end fruit purees, has a great chart of pate de fruit recipes for all of their fruits.

Once the pectin is added to the fruit mixture, it's important to keep it above 80 degrees and moving so that it doesn't start to set too early. This means adding the rest of the sugar in your recipe in small additions and giving the mixture time to get hot again before adding more--adding it in too large of batches will cause the temperature of the whole mass to drop quickly, setting the pectin in lumps that will not melt back down again even if you get the mixture boiling.

Once the mass comes to temperature, or time, or sugar concentration, acid is usually added and the whole thing is poured out and allowed to set overnight. A thin coating of granulated sugar will make the surface less sticky and easier to work with. At work we cut it on a guitar, a clever set of wires that cuts anything of the right texture into perfect strips or squares, but a knife will work too, or pouring them into heatproof moulds to begin with and then just popping them out the following day. Or just forget about the whole thing, break your piggy bank, and order them on-line from Fauchon...

Snacking goes on in the back of the restaurant. Servers, cooks, managers, barmen, stewarding--we all reach our grubby fingers for a slice of bacon, a trimming of duck thigh, a leftover fruit tartlet, a piece of warm bread with butter. I am no longer surprised to see even the most poncy of staff, scoffing a croissant in about two mouthfuls and swallowing it down with a quadruple espresso before putting on a smile and heading back onto the floor.

But yesterday, I was surprised. A server was snacking on salad leaves. Salad leaves. And when I asked, because I couldn't help but ask, he replied that as a child he had in fact asked for salad as dessert after his, em, salad. He didn't like sweet things.

People have very odd food habits, quirks, obsessions, phases, likes and dislikes. And I find the idea of taste and nostalgia, memory, association etc. more and more interesting.

I was infuriatingly picky as a child. There were so many things I wouldn't touch. Colour was important, texture even more so--squishy things, slimy things were out of the question. I was all about crispiness and sourness. But now, there is almost nothing I won't try and only the smell of raw, ripe bananas sends me running away--the very thing I ate as a baby daily. There is even photographic evidence of my enjoyment.

Why do I now like coffee, liver, dark chocolate, and rhubarb? And why didn't I before? Tastes change. It's time for some new men in my life...Herve This, whose book comes out so very soon--it's not just about taste, but rather, as the title suggests Molecular Gastronomy, or experimental cooking, or cooking in a more self-aware and inquisitive way. I put the book on my kitchen's secret santa wish list...

It's wonderful to hear brilliant voices speak about culinary theory, and he really is brilliant. The first essay I read of his was his thesis, Molecular Gastronomy, a scientific look to cooking which defines the movement so eloquently, suggesting that we examine food with the same experimental and scientific spirit we examine the other aspects of our lives.

He uses the word precisions to describe aspects of cooking that are not necessarily part of the recipe--although they can be. For example, following a french mayonaise recipe, a note that menstruating women's mayonaises always fail. Ha. Or, a suggestion to add oil to the pasta water. Or covering/not covering a pot as the green beans boil. Some seem ridiculous right away, yes, because cooking is so culturally rooted, and then others make me go hmm, I don't know, does it make a difference? What's the difference?

It's eighteen pages of empowerment, encouragement, and a bit of humour that demand we question our grandmother's cautionary kitchen tales, explore recipes more fully, play with new methods, ingredients, and tools. Sharing and recording these simple experiments will lead us to newness--in the postmodern sense. I can't wait for his book, probably full of new answers and of course, new questions.

This is Green Apple Books on Clement and 6th where Martha and I went for the afternoon. It's full of wonderful used and new books and with an unusually large cook book section. The shelves are beautifully crammed and close together--reminds me of the little bookstores in Harvard where the books are piled up to the ceiling and there are stools all over the place to reach that crumbling copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It made me happy just walking around.

As luck would have it, almost every book I picked up was not in fact used, but new, and therefore the same price it would be anywhere else. Though I did find a copy of Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked--which is as the title suggests a bit raw and raunchy (for food writing) and very funny--for only five dollars. He says things like, Cosmic Gin Trance instead of drunken stupor, and I like him.

We then picked up some great Chinese candies and went to plan our Thanksgiving meal at, of all places to plan a turkey dinner, a shady heavy metal bar, over a couple of beers. And I'm excited about many things:

1. Beer, maybe I like it
2. Teaching Glyn to draw a turkey by tracing his hand on paper and drawing a beak on the thumb
3. Making terrines from my new Charcuterie book
4. Having Thanksgiving dinner with Martha, Stephen and Whitney

Yay, I can't wait till Sunday!

Green Apple Books
506 Clement Street
San Francisco, CA 94118

Less than a year ago, when I graduated and moved to London, I stopped in used bookstores, foraging through the dusty piles of books. No, not for cookbooks, but for poetry and other such nonsense. Because before cooking school and the sudden value of my taste buds, I chain smoked, wore all black, sat around in coffee shops across Boston snapping my fingers, taking notes in my moleskin and making Foucault references. Not really. But I did spend an awful lot of time reading, writing, editing, critiquing, analysing, not sleeping and otherwise thinking about writing and being part of a community of writers--which I didn't realise I was, and I now miss. A lot.

I feel very far away from Boston and who I was there. Because autumn here--at least I think that a week of grey means autumn--is a pale, ghostly shadow of an autumn in Boston. I can smell it. The leaves in the Public Garden, coffee, friends apartments, gin, my stripey blue scarf, the dusty hotness when the radiators gurgle, duck shit, more coffee, and warm freshly printed paper. Everything cold and golden. Then the snow.

Meeting and talking with Robert Creeley and Stephen Dunn in class was as exciting then as meeting Harold McGee was last week. Now Mark Strand, who didn't want to mess with Julia Child--who would?--has been bullied out of my bookshelf along with almost all the other weedy little writers I love. And only Shel Silverstein and Roddy Doyle remain amongst the big, hard backed cookbooks.

When Lee, who is now sculpting in New York, got in touch with me a few days ago, she first asked me if I was still writing. I wrote back, yes. That within the food world there can exist the same issues of newness, narrative voice, language, aesthetics and so on that we explore in literature. In cooking, we sometimes take part in the same trends, movements, ideas, and concerns over authenticity, story telling, and culture. But it's umm, edible. What I'm getting at, basically: it's all the same crap .

I've started reading M.F.K Fisher's biography by Joan Reardon. Fisher died in 1992 just before her 84th birthday, leaving behind years of graceful, intelligent, American food writing. I read The Art of Eating in college and was charmed right away, curious about her life. The lady had style. The black and white photos in the middle of the book are the first I've seen of her--and it's odd but people simply do not look like that anymore.

So the book--part long and informed People magazine article (who she went out with, who had a crush on her, what she spent money on, what clothes she liked), and part detailed collection of family histories. There are journal entries, excerpts from letters to lovers, and all sorts of naughty, juicy, little tidbits (subtitle is, after all, the lives and loves of M.F.K Fisher). There are also many, many footnotes that reveal where she fabricated, exaggerated, and lied in her writing and in her life. Reardon is taking her apart, chronologically, starting with the embellishments of Fisher's own birth, but she's doing it affectionately and respectfully, so I'm keeping on.