Carl died of a massive heart attack sitting in his car at a trainyard in South Chicago where he’d gone to take photos. It was a pretty spectacular exit. Louise and I scattered some of his ashes on some train tracks before we buried the cremains (isn’t that a creepy word?) with his mother in Jacksonville, Ill.

The coolest thing about Carl is that the last few years of his life were full of companionship and fun. He became an avid anti-war protestor (he was even interviewed on television at a rally). He joined an Asberger’s support group and made lots of friends. We were worried that no one would show up at his memorial service and almost 50 people were there. My aunt, his mother, was very fearful about Carl’s future after she was gone. Auntie, you needn’t have worried. He turned out fine.

One of the great things about the Internet and blogs is that folks who walked this earth, breathed the same air as the rest of us, and died almost anonymously can be remembered and memorialized. I was not the best cousin in the world to him. I should have tried harder. I flew up to Chicago last week and got Carl’s car for my 17-year-old son. It’s a pretty nice Ford Focus. I thought I’d be a little squemish about driving a car that someone had died in, but it turned out to be oddly comforting.

So while he was gone, I made normal portions of food and there were actually leftovers! The best was pasta with slow-roasted tomatoes – the first of the season from the Farmer’s Market in Franklin.

Slow roasted tomatoes sound gourmet, but they’re easy, easy. Just core the tomatoes and cut them in half. Lay them in a rimmed cookie sheet covered in foil. Drizzle a good amount of olive oil over the tomatoes and a spare amount of balsamic vinegar (they make the sauce), throw in some peeled whole garlic and sprinkle with salt, pepper and a little sugar. Pop them in the oven set at 275 degrees and just let them roast until they’ve shriveled up and are starting to get brown around the edges.

I just toss the tomatoes, olive oil and all, with fettuccine and add some freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Delicious.

The English Tea began as a mission of the Episcopal Women of St. Paul’s to raise funds for restoration of our historic church.  Over the years, the tea grew from a small event catering to about thirty guests to a juggernaut with two seatings for a total of 240 people and a precise order of preparation that had to be followed to the letter. Here is what’s involved in the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church English Tea. About four months before the tea the chair, Wanda Woolen, convenes a meeting of any volunteers who want to participate. But the main roles have been long filled with meticulous care. The food chairman is selected after reviewing the designee’s history as a very good cook, flawless organizer and having good enough standing with her fellow parishioners that she can convince at least twenty women to spend hundreds of dollars making tea sweets and savories, which we then turn around and sell to the public. The economics of this would not stand up to close scrutiny.

The decorations chair has also been pre-selected and a theme is agreed on. While the decorations chair starts rounding up whatever props are needed, the food chair starts recruiting volunteers to make a variety of tea sandwiches, sweets and scones. This calls for diplomacy befitting an ambassador to the United Nations because all cooks are not created equal. You must know who makes delicate, flaky scones and who turns out hockey pucks. The sandwiches each have their own set of rules: cucumber always goes on white bread rounds, pimento cheese on whole-wheat triangles, and chicken salad in phyllo cups. There are no variations and no substitutions.

The second tea I’m involved in is the Green Tea for P.E.O. That’s green as in raising money, not the kind of tea.  P.E.O. is a philanthropic educational organization that raises money for women’s scholarships. There is also a huge social side to P.E.O. All the members are referred to as sisters and we try to put forth the best attributes of that moniker. The Green Tea is a lot less meticulous than the English Tea. There were no formatted recipes, at least until I joined. By first assignment after initiation was as the Ways and Means Chairman. That actually means Green Tea Chairman, for that is the committee’s only duty.

So this morning, we had our first organizational meeting and the first order of business was sampling possible menu items for the tea. Which is a long-winded way of saying: Blue Moon Cheese Sandwiches. These are the most addictive, most unusual version of pimento cheese sandwiches ever in the universe. As I understand it, these sandwiches were served in a tea room in Montgomery, Alabama, that went out of business long ago. Thank heavens, someone saved the Blue Moon recipe. Here it is:

Blue Moon Cheese Sandwiches

2 cups finely grated sharp New York Cheddar cheese

1/3 cup chili sauce

3/4 cup mayonnaise

1/2 cup chopped stuffed olives

1/2 cup finely chopped pecans

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Directions: Mix together well and chill before using. Cut the crusts off whole wheat bread and spread with mixture. Cut into four triangles.

Chorizo Frittata

7.5 ounces Mexican chorizo (the kind you take out of the casing and it’s loose… 7.5 ounces is 1/2 a stick)

1 cup finely diced new potatoes

1/2 cup finely diced onion

Vegetable oil

Salt and pepper

6 eggs

1 cup grated sharp Cheddar cheese

Sour cream

Salsa

Heat a non-stick saute pan over medium high heat. Remove the chorizo from its casing and saute until chorizo begins to turn brown. Reserve.

Add a little vegetable oil to the pan. Saute the potatoes and onions, salted and peppered, until the potatoes are browned and beginning to crisp.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk the eggs with the cheese. Heat an 8-inch cast iron skillet to medium. Add enough oil to lightly coat the bottom. Add the chorizo, the potatoes and onions and the eggs. Cook over medium heat until the eggs begin to pull away from the sides of the skillet. Put in the oven and bake about 5-7 minutes or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Serve slices topped with sour cream and salsa.

I would have taken a photo of this, but we ate it all!

This is kind of what it looked like without the sliced green onions (but that would be a good addition).

Over the years, we’ve had deer, of coarse. Two years ago, during a drought, we had wild turkeys. But by far our favorites are the groundhogs. We realized something had shown up at our house one fall morning when we heard a frantic scratching outside the bedroom door to the sideyard. Something was clawing the underside of the deck. A little later, we looked out the window and realized it was a groundhog making a nest under the deck. We knew this because Mr. Groundhog (or, as it turned out, Mrs.) was ambling through the yard. This spring, after a good long sleep, Mrs. Groundhog emerged with two children.

They have been hilarious. They sun themselves on the deck. Scamper through the yard and come right up to the bedroom window to challenge our cats to a duel. I’m a little worried right now because I haven’t seen them in a few days. Do groundhogs leave home? I hope not.

So, on another topic, I’ve had this recipe sitting on my desk for about a month and today was the day to eliminate piles, pay bills and generally declutter (in between torrid rounds of Zuma). So here it is. You’ll like it.

Pork Medallions with Apples

1/3 cup real maple syrup

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1 pork tenderloin

Panko breadcrumbs

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

Butter

2 medium Granny Smith apples

1/2 cup or more of apple juice

Mix the syrup, mustard, salt and pepper. Set aside.  Trim the silverskin off the tenderloin and cut it into 1/2-inch thick slices. Salt and pepper the slices and then dip them into the breadcrumbs. Saute over medium heat in olive oil and butter (about half and half) until golden brown. Set aside in a warm oven. Peel, core and slice the apples. Add more butter to the pan. Then add the apple slices and the apple juice. Stew the apples until tender and most of the juice has evaporated. Add the maple syrup mixture to the pan and mix thorougly. Plate the pork medallions and top with the apples.

I made:

1. Three servings of cous-cous salad.

2. Two servings of regular cous-cous to heat up with something else for lunch.

3. Two servings of Asian Chicken noodles

4. A pan of Cheesy Chicken Mushroom Lasagne  from March’s Gourmet (very good, by the way), which we had for supper and from which three containers of leftovers were placed in the fridge.

Here’s what was in the f ridge this morning: 2 containers of cous-cous salad and my Asian Chicken Salad.  The boy had gone through two containers of cous-cous, one container of cous-cous salad and three containers of the lasagna from the time he got home at about 8:30 p.m. until he left for school!

I’ll make the lasagne again, even though I only had a SMALL taste of it before the leftovers disappeared.  Here’s the recipe:

Cheesy Chicken and Mushroom Lasagne

(Gourmet, March 2009)

1  (10-ounce) package cremini or white mushrooms, thinly sliced

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 tablespoon olive oil

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided

1/2 cup dry white wine

1/2 roast chicken, skin discarded, meat shredded (about 2 1/4 cups), and carcass reserved for stock. 

3 1/2 cups whole milk

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons thyme leaves

3/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

12 Barilla no-boil egg lasagne noodles (less than a 9-ounce package)

1 1/2 cups coarsely grated Gruyère (3 ounces)

Equipment: an 8-inch square baking pan

This year we were extremely worried that we wouldn’t do very well because of the economy, but the good Lord was looking down on us and we had record attendance. The one thing we didn’t consider, unfortunately, is that record attendance would produce record garbage. My goodness, the garbage. We had arranged for volunteers who were supposed to make sure the trash cans were emptied in an expeditious manner, but they, of course, just started drinking and forgot all about it.

The event chair came unglued. Garbage! Well, I know garbage. I have a teenage son. So in my expensive hand-knit sweater and linen pants, I get some trash bags and start shoveling out the garbage cans where our guests had thoughtfully piled dirty paper plates full of cocktail sauce and oyster shells about three feet above the rim of the can. One of the guests even felt sorry for me and pitched in to hold the garbage bag.

After that, I needed a couple of oyster shooters to steady myself before thinking of the clean-up after the event. It’s funny how people don’t think about the fact that someone is going to have to pick up the gnawed rib bones and oozing Jello shots off the ground with their bare hands. Why is that?

It’s O.K. It was a fun party. We raised a lot of money for the Community Resource Center and four days later, I’m still completely exhausted. So here’s what will cure whatever ails you.

Oyster Shooters: In a small cup, place a raw oyster with a little of its liquor. Top with a dollop of cocktail sauce and pour a thimble sized portion of good vodka over the top. Down it in one gulp.

After a delicious holiday meal of chili-cheese pups, Krystals and fries at the Krystal’s adjoining the Shell station in Cool Springs, we ventured to the carwash where Noah pondered the intricacies of keypadding in the carwash code. He was slightly taken aback by having the put the car in neutral and taking his foot off the brake so the conveyer belt could inch us into the carwash.

Here we go! Noah was slighly unnerved by the sensation that we were floating backwad in the carwash when, in fact, we were moving forward. I always get disoriented, too, and have to check that I haven’t somehow shifted into reverse. Have you noticed that a lot of carwashes now have colored soap? It’s kind of cool.

Mission accomplished! A clean car outside, if not in. I tried to mentally steer him towards the vacuum to clean out the inside of the car but it was too much for a teen-aged slobby boy to manage.  First words, first steps, first carwash. I’ll take the memories whereever I can get them.

I have made probably 40-plus recipes of spaghetti sauce over the years. Some of them made up, some of them from recipes. But I stumbled across the best method for making what I think is the best spaghetti sauce ever and it happened at my mother-in-law’s house. Granbunny is a good seat-of-your-pants cook. She doesn’t make fancy food, but what she does make is really, really good. We were over at her house one night and she served us spaghetti. It was the best sauce, but I couldn’t figure out what she’d done to get this dense consistency without any watery tomato residue in the bottom of the pan. Here’s the trick: She uses two pounds of ground chuck and she doesn’t drain the grease. So what happens is when you brown the meat, you go beyond the “gray” stage and you continue really browning the ground beef in its own fat until the fat disappears into the meat. Yes.

I’ve modified her recipe to make it even better, I think. Here’s the recipe.

Take two pounds of ground chuck and brown it until the grease has almost disappeared. Add about 1/2 cup finely diced carrot and 1/2 cup finely diced onion. Continue cooking until the vegetables are soft and the onion is translucent. Add two large cloves of diced garlic. Cook for about a minute and add a fourth of a can of tomato paste. Stir the paste into the meat mixture for a minute or two. Add a 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes and about a cup of dry red wine. Stir that in and then add about a tablespoon and a half of dried oregano, salt and pepper to taste and a teaspoon of smoked sweet paprika. Simmer until you can’t stand it anymore.

The smoked paprika adds a smoky depth of flavor to the sauce. I actually add it to any tomato-based sauce I make.

This is terrific sauce for lasagna as well as spaghetti. I’ve also been known to take leftover sauce, heat it up in the microwave and use it as a dip for Fritos.

Tonight the sauce pot on the stove is for my husband, son and his best friend, Evan, who thinks I’m the best cook on the planet and calls me “mom.” I’m not the former at all or the latter to Evan, but I enjoy both complements.

(By the way, take the rest of the tomato paste in the can and divvy it up among two or three sheets of Saran wrap. Freeze it and use it when you make your next batch of sauce.)