Background: For a friend's Christmas dinner, I baked a chocolate "decadence" cake from the Silver Palate Cookbook. 

“It looks pretty saucy. Is it saucier than usual?”

This is Josh, my college student, home for the summer. He’s examining a frying pan filled with flavored chopped meat, perplexed, nay concerned, that the dinner set before him isn't quite right. It’s Taco Tuesday, you see, a weekly event in our kitchen because Josh misses Cornell’s make-your-own supper, in which he indulged every Monday last school year. (They don't menu plan via alliteration there, apparently.) Taco night relieved Josh from the monotony of ...

You should have seen me Saturday night, wiping salt off my tongue. Not wiping. That’s too civilized a description. With a force of desperation, I was dragging a linen napkin over my tongue, from top to bottom, top to bottom. Occasionally I’d jam a finger in and wrap it around my tongue to scoop out more of the assaulting mess.

Toppling out of a meeting at my kid’s school 8 o’clock at night, famished and damn sick of the black pumps squeezing mytoes, I was happy to learn that Son No. 1 had remembered to take the chicken wings dinner I’d prepared in advance out of the oven. Until I read his text: “Please never make them again.” Pissed, I scrolled to the next message, from my  husband: “Wings for me? They’re all skin.”