Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite Toast ($3 or less, fifteen minutes)

This is not a picture of food. It is, instead, a painting by Delacroix, called "Liberty Leading the People," or more correctly (sans accents) "La Liberte guidant le peuple."

See, what's really funny in a not-pleasant way about all the franco-hysteria of 2003 and/or -- oh, now -- in which legions of people were introduced to sliced, deep-fried potatoes as "freedom fries" and battered, pan-fried bread as "freedom toast" is that freedom is what the French were all about. Might even be currently all about. The Statue of Liberty? Made in France. Our freedom as a country from the British Empire? Assisted by France (via Lafayette [he looks like he likes a stinky cheese, don't he?], among others). Freedom from undergarments like corsets and to show one's breasts, as in the painting above, while killing aristos? You know it: FRANCE.

Thus this is VERY FRENCH TOAST.

Which itself is an irony, since no decent French person would touch the stuff, I'm sure. It's pure American.

Ironies upon ironies abound.

This is why Tea-baggers are idiots (does this sign even make sense?), largely -- okay, one of the reasons. Zero ability to sense irony.

For le pain faux-francais, what you need is some stale bread (not moldy! just stale!). Also milk, a couple of eggs, a little sugar, a little cinnamon, and a hot, greased pan.

In a bowl -- here I feature the beautiful gift bowl I got last week from the Brickman-Curzons -- beat a couple of eggs with about a 1/3 c milk for every pound of bread. You might need more or less, but that's the beauty [use your mute button freely at this link] of this recipe. The freedom of it, you might say.

Sprinkle on about 1/2 tsp sugar and a 1/4 tsp cinnamon. Mix this all up well. You can see I waited to beat my eggs until I'd added the other stuff. That's okay too.

Heat the pan with a little oil, until when you shake a wet hand over it, the water pops or dances immediately.

Take a slice of bread and briefly dip it, both sides, in the bowl of eggy-cinnamon-milky-sugar stuff. DO NOT SOAK the bread. You want just to coat it.

Drop it in the pan. If the pan's big enough, do several.

Here I've used my own bread (a recipe I'll post later) -- it's a very dense whole wheat which is good to keep the batter on the outside. White bread will absorb more, more quickly, so keep in mind that you want to be quick in the batter with Wonderbread sorts of breads.

You'll be able to smell this as it cooks and see the edges browning. Lift up each slice to check underneath to see if it's the right color -- brown colored. Like French toast colored. When it's that color, flip and cook the other side.

Set the oven on warm and set an oven-safe plate inside. Put each slice on the plate as it's done, to keep it warm.

Meanwhile, heat a little REAL maple syrup (the other stuff is gaggy and people tend to use too much of it trying to get it to taste like something. So dish out for the real, and use only a little.). I just put the glass bottle next to the pan, not touching, and it's warm enough by the time I'm done.

When it's all cooked, take the slices you want out of the oven and butter and drizzle with maple syrup. Then chow. Or, powder with confectioner's sugar if you need to -- though since this has some cinnamon and sugar in the batter, you might find that's overkill. Fry a runny egg and put it on top, if you don't value plaque-free arteries. Use it as sandwich bread for a thick bacon or slab-o-ham sandwich. Have at it. Do whatever. You have that freedom.

There you go.

Note: Here is a picture of what Chuck made of the batter leftovers. He says to say, however terrible it looks, it was mighty tasty. He simply turned the batter into the hot pan, shoved it around until it cooked, sprinkled it with grated cheddar and jalapeno paste (cinnamon and jalapeno??) and ate it.

In no other country would this be legal. I swear.

Bread Made with Bananas (maybe $5, about an hour and forty-five minutes including baking)

When your bananas look like this, it's time either for the Banana Angel to descend, wrap your bananas in a cloud of glory, sing hosannas, and lift them miraculously into banana heaven where they hang, forever green, under the dancing, fat green leaves of their mama tree (which is actually apparently a grass, but well, what does it matter in the banana afterlife?), dreaming of uncorrupted sweetness and sucking eternally at the nectar of banana-mama's sap.

Or it's time they were mashed with a fork and scraped into a batter, poured into a loaf pan, baked at hellish temperatures and incorporated into your mortal cell structure with the accompaniment of much butter.

I wonder if the latter bananas are bad bananas. Is banana bread a kind of fruit hell? Or could we think of it as a kind of limited immortality, a sort of banana limbo, given they get to walk around as you for a while?

Maybe eating banana bread is sort of like allowing banana possession?

This, by the way, is why I'm not in seminary.

Well, it's among SEVERAL reasons I'm not in seminary.

Okay, so when your bananas look like this, and you've consigned them to the hell/limbo that is Banana Bread (after having waited, in vain, for the angels), this is how you do that.

I'm pretty sure this recipe is my maternal grandmother's. I'm absolutely sure this is my mother's recipe. I mean I sort of stole it from her, so yeah, I can be absolutely sure. Probably one or the other of them got it from a magazine.

What you need

• 3 VERY ripe bananas, mashed (should yield about 1 c)
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 c butter, melted and cooled
• 2 eggs
• 3 TBSP sour milk (milk plus a splash of vinegar)
• 2 c white flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup chopped nuts

Grease and flour a loaf pan.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, soda, powder and salt.

In a large bowl, mix sugar, butter, eggs by hand until combined. Stir in milk and bananas until combined. Add flour mixture and combine. Add nuts and combine.

See? EASY.

Pour the whole lot quickly into the loaf pan, and let sit for twenty minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 and bake for about 60 minutes. The loaf is done when a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from pan when it's cool enough to handle.

You eat this in slices, slathered with butter.

You'll hear angels singing (not like this, or these guys), I promise.

There you go.

Because You Can Never Get Enough Squash in Your Dessert (maybe $10 for a whole pan; about 40 minutes)

These are pumpkin-based dessert objects that I could sit and eat forever, except that if I did I would also feel shame forever, have to go to my first confession (this is a story [not by Frank O'Connor] for another time), and spend too much time atoning.

That Catholic thing never leaves you. The Jesuits were right. I haven't been to mass since the last Catholic dead person forced me there, but I still get the guilties, just like the good nuns told me I would. Or Jiminy Cricket. Sometimes I get the two confused.

On the other hand, being a mother the BVM would likely appreciate that I am eating my vegetables and fruit, even if they do come looking like something intensely bad for you.

What I have for you today, the day before I have to step back into the classroom and try to justify what I love best (writing, reading, and not stock-reports), is Pumpkin Treats. They're very modified versions of BH&G's Pumpkin Bars, over which the BVM would weep if she could read English, given the sugar and oil and such.

[Hey, when you get bodily taken up to heaven, do you think you get to learn everything? Like, say, reading -- since I'm betting good money (drachmas? talents? shekls?) that the wife of a carpenter in Nazareth during Roman times was illiterate. Or, say, what the hell a pumpkin is, since I don't know if they grew ditto. Or, say, how come the word pumpkin, a nice enough word, gets all cutesified by people in the throes of sentimentalism over children, wives, dogs, what have you.]

What you need:

lasagna pan or large lasagna-pan type baking dish, lightly greased (I use spray-grease)

2 c flour

1/4 c sugar

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cloves (ground)

4 eggs, beaten

1 can pumpkin (15 oz)

1/8 c oil

1 cup applesauce, preferably home-made. This way you get chunks and not much sugar.

Preheat oven to 350.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (on the list, everything through cloves). In a separate bowl, combine the wet stuff. Pour wet stuff into the dry stuff, and mix thoroughly, then pour into greased lasagna pan. Smooth out lightly with a spatula.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool and cut into squares. Try not to eat six at a time. I bet you can't.

The original recipe calls for frosting these with cream cheese icing. Gilding the lily, I say, but if you want to, gild away.

There you go.

Cornbread (about $2; 40 minutes)

I was reading something the other day -- don't ask me what -- and someone was complaining that she couldn't make cornbread because there wasn't any buttermilk. That got me to wondering what the heck she was talking about. I guess you could use buttermilk. I'd never used it. But I guess you could.

And anyway, the chemistry of using buttermilk in baking is easy enough that you can substitute spoiled milk (or sweet milk curded with a little vinegar) for buttermilk, in a pinch.

People get their panties in a wad for the weirdest of reasons.

Witness: the sugar issue (this person's actually pretty mild in her disapprobation; she only kicks you off the website). Apparently -- I'm really outside this debate (here's another random sampling), too, so can't be trusted to represent it at all well -- if you add sugar to your cornbread you are [insert nasty regional epithet here]. "True" cornbread, the food of [benevolent regional description]ers, is sugar-free.

I don't know. You could take out the sugar I guess, just add a little less milk, and see how it does. All depends on whether or not you want to be a [nasty region]ist, or if (heresy, I suppose) the matter of sugar really does mark you as a [nasty region]ist.

Alright: here's the recipe. I make this in a cast iron skillet, and make 1 and a half of this recipe to fill it. As written below, this will fill a loaf pan.

You'll need:

1 c self-rising cornmeal (buy local!)

1/2 c white flour

1/4 c white sugar

1 egg (what I want for my birthday)

milk

corn or a very small can of creamed corn (6 oz?)

Oven at 350.

Grease the skillet or loaf pan generously.

In a bowl, mix meals and sugar. If you're using corn niblets, add them to the meal/flour mixture. I put about a handful in mine -- so maybe 1/4 c?

In a large measuring cup, beat the egg with creamed corn if you're not using niblets. Don't do both or you won't have bread so much as corn pudding. Which is delicious, but won't really sop much.

Add enough milk to the measuring cup to make about a cup and a half of liquid. Keep the milk out since you may need a little more wet.

Mix the wet materials into the dry materials all at once. Add enough milk that the consistency of the batter is like very loose pancake batter. You should be able to pour it. Mix just until everything's incorporated, then immediately pour into your greased pan.

Bake about 30 minutes. Eat hot with lots of butter. Sop up soup if you want.

NOTE: I use this for stuffing at the holidays, only I make it hot and spiced. I double the recipe, add garlic, red pepper flakes, oregano, sage, basil and thyme. Cook in a large skillet. Leave out overnight, then crumble with regular bread for your stuffing. It's my secret. Shhhhh.

There you go.

Collards Are Not Nasty Tasting (about $10; prep, 20 minutes; cooktime, 4-6 hours)

I don't remember if I've always been a fan of green stuff. I can remember a time that I ate only Egg McMuffins (college) and a time when I ate a lot of Hamburger Helper (someone needs to make a horror movie with that little hand thing) and London broil (age whatever to 18). Given my druthers, I'd probably sit down to a bowl of homemade mac n cheese every day -- though now I like it weaponized, and with cauliflower -- so maybe that means I'm not secretly still two years old, culinarily speaking.

I don't come from a collards-eating culture. My parents, the son and daughter of German and Scots-Irish immigrants, grew up in northwest Pennsylvania. They understood sausage and pot roast and hamburger. Vegetables were carrots, peas, potatoes. Onions as a garnish. No garlic. Tomatoes maybe raw on hamburgers; tomato sauce was for the "low-class Italians" on the other side of town.

Broccoli I remember eating in the 1980s, maybe for the first time. It was steamed, with margarine (has its own European association) and salt.

You understand where I come from. Collards thus were so off the radar that I had no idea, seeing them for the first time, what they were. And had no problem avoiding them as I saw them cooked when I moved to the real South -- full of nasty bits of greasy pork fat floating in bitter-smelling, soapy-looking water.

I don't remember why I tried cooking them for the first time -- probably, again, because of the CSA in Carrollton and their heaps of greens mid-winter here. Now, come December? I can't get enough of them. They're cheap (I got six pounds for 50 cents. I kid you not.); they're really good for you; and the way I cook them, they taste incredible.

Here's what you need:

One bunch of collards, de-stemmed, washed, and chopped into about quarter-sized bits. You can get bags of collards at the Publix already chopped up; if you do this, use just one bag.

2 smoked turkey wings (you can substitute any smoked meat. DO NOT use fatback or fat pork or fat yuck -- use meat or a smoked-meat substitute.) NOTE: remember to remove all the packaging. Sometimes I inadvertently skip this step with interesting results.

red pepper flakes
salt
about a 1/4 c sugar
1 c white vinegar
about 5 c water

You'll need a big crock-pot (OOOOooo. A three-holer!). If you have the smaller kind, halve the recipe here.

Put the meat on the bottom of the pot. You might want to take off the skin, but you don't have to debone. I don't do either: I just slap the stuff in there.

Put the collards on top of the meat.

On top of the collards, put a couple of TBSP of red pepper flakes or however much you like. I tend to fill my palm and put that much.

Then dump on about a 1/4 c white sugar. Much as I hate sugar in savory dishes, collards need it. Sorry.

Add some salt, maybe two tsp. Smoked meat has salt as part of the processing, so go lightly and add salt when it's finished and you've tasted it.

Then add the vinegar, and enough water that, when you put your finger just under the first layer of collards you can feel the top. For me, it's about five cups. Might be a little more or less for you, depending.

Cover the crock-pot and set it for four hours. If you want to give it a stir mid-way, you can, but it's not necessary.

You'll smell this when it's done -- it's very fragrant when it finishes. To check for doneness, make sure the leaves have turned dark green and the meat comes loosely off the bones or pulls apart very easily. There should appear to be more water in the pot than when you started.

If your meat has bones (never use anything with small bones unless you want to kill someone -- so thighs, wings, NOT legs, NOT backs or breast with backmeat), this is the time to remove them, and the skin if you don't have a Chuck around to eat it. I use long tongs ("long tongs" sounds so nasty!). Everything will be VERY hot in temperature, so be careful.

I serve this with cornbread to sop up the pot liquor (I'm a damnyankee). Hardly ever are there leftovers.

There you go.

Oat MEAL.

Way back in the bad old graduate school days, my neighbor was a psych grad student and I was dirt poor, I mean poorer than I've been since I was babysitting for a living. I'd lost a job, my boyfriend at the time lived a bazillion miles away, my dissertation director was abusive, I was in the midst of both a divorce and a nasty sexual harassment debacle, and maybe not coincidentally, I wasn't writing. Which meant I wasn't finishing my dissertation, and that was bad, bad, bad. I cried. A lot.

I needed work, I thought. If I could do something, I would be okay. My neighbor, probably a do-gooder who pitied me, but at that point I didn't care, told me she needed someone to read her psych texts into a tape recorder so that she could listen to them as she drove, and she would pay me $10 or something a tape. They were the most boring books I ever read. At one point, she told me to stop yawning since it was dangerous: when I yawned, she did, and that made her sleepy, and after all -- she was driving, so could I PLEASE stop yawning. Yeah, I didn't.

[Right now I'm yawning. Typing the word makes me yawn. Saying it makes me yawn. What IS that?] [Holy crap. Watch the chimps yawn. Mirror neurons? Wow.]

But this was several weeks after she found me crying in the back yard of the trashy little house I rented (and loved) [search Woodrow St, Athens, GA at this site]. She told me I was depressed, and asked why I didn't come over and have some oatmeal and we could talk.

Her name was Amy, she was very concerned in a nice maternal way, and I hated oatmeal. I said, yes, (snork, sniffle), expecting at least to find comfort, if not good food.

This is Amy's oatmeal, minus the mashed banana, only because my bananas weren't ripe. And I ate probably three bowls of it that morning. Afterwards, I went home and threw away my instant oatmeal packets -- never even thought twice again about buying those shitty little envelopes of pre-made oat-refuse my mother'd pawned off as oatmeal. What Amy made, and that crap, are not even kin. I'm telling you what.

What you'll need:

Oatmeal -- I've gotten snobby and buy steel-cut oats (they have their own website!), but plain Quaker regular-cook oats will do

water

dried fruit (here, raisins and dates)

nuts

applesauce or finely diced apples

a little butter and sugar (maple syrup is also good)

Milk or cream if you like to eat your oatmeal that way, though I don't.

Oats cook at a 3:1 ratio: three parts water to one part oats. For three people, if you're having toast, 3 c water, 1 c oats. If you're feeding Chuck (search Bowie on this website), this feeds two people, with toast. One if he's really hungry.

If you're doing just these servings, you'll need about a 1/3 c nuts, 1/2 c dried fruit, 1/4 c applesauce or one small apple, about a TBSP butter and a tsp of sugar.

Boil the water with a little salt, maybe a tsp or so. Add oats (and if you are using diced apple, the apple), stir once, return to boil, turn heat to low, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the water is absorbed.

Meantime, break up the pieces of nut into bite-sized bits with your hands. In a small frying pan, melt a little butter and toast the nuts over medium heat. When they smell like toasted nuts (intensely nut-smelling) and start to turn deeper brown, sprinkle with about a tsp of brown or white sugar and take off the heat.

When the oats have absorbed all the water, add the nuts, dried fruit, and applesauce. If you're using just diced apple, you may want to add about 1/2 tsp cinnamon and a little sugar. Stir. Taste. Adjust salt (for more intense taste); sugar (for more sweetness); or butter (for more richness).

Eat. Think of Amy who was kind to me when I needed it. Thank you, Amy.

There you go.