Secrets of a Happy Marriage

I learned a great lesson on how to keep a marriage happy from the French master chef Jacques Pepin. He was on the radio on Thanksgiving Day (on NPR, of course—you know me!) talking about cooking for the holiday with Lynne Rosetto Kasper of The Splendid Table. She does a turkey day program every year called Turkey Confidential. Listeners can call in and ask all manner of questions regarding the preparation, cooking and serving of virtually anything you can imagine. It’s quite informative, and lots of fun to listen to if you happen to be alone in the kitchen on that day!

Lynne Rosetto Kasper

 

One of her guests was the aforementioned Jacques Pepin. He’s very amusing and entertaining, and being a Frenchman of the old school, I must say that he is also charming. In the midst of all the discussion of how to choose your ingredients, how to clean, slice, and dice them, how to safely cook them and how to beautifully serve them, Monsieur Pepin slipped in the most valuable nugget of info of the decade. I will share it with you. Perhaps many, many marriages and other relationships can be saved.

Jacques Pepin

Jacques Pepin noted almost offhandedly that there was a point on which he and his wife disagreed. They therefore did what she wanted, as their plan is that when they differ, they do what she wants. At the same time, when they agree on things, they do what he wants. This, he avers, is completely fair. I agree. It just ain’t never gonna happen in this marriage. You recall that I am married to the Center of the Universe, so we handle things differently.

In our marriage, CoTU handles all the small decisions, and I handle all the big decisions. We’re just so lucky that in all these years we’ve never had to make a big decision.

Tuesdays With Dorie

Remember how good “Tuesdays With Morrie” made you feel? Remember how it nourished your soul and your spirit and made you think about how you wanted to live your life and what mattered and how to handle run-on sentences? Me neither. Oh wait—no, I really do remember, and not just because I heard Mitch Albom speak here in St. Louis last week. (He has a new book out: Have a Little Faith. We’ll talk about that in a couple of days.)

So the only thing that could be better than all of the above, it seems to me, is Tuesdays With Dorie! Dorie Greenspan is a fabulous cook and baker extraordinaire! You may have heard her on The Splendid Table, an NPR show “for people who love to eat” hosted by Lynn Rosetto-Casper. Dorie’s latest book is called “Baking From My Home to Yours”.

If you still doubt the value of Twitter, let me just say that I would not have known about the Tuesdays With Dorie phenomenon if not for yesterday’s tweet by Scott Simon (“NPRScottSimon” on Twitter) – yes, let us never forget that I am the world’s biggest (and shortest) nerd—about Dorie’s “World Peace Cookies”. Now seriously, can you even read that sentence and not follow the link and plan to bake cookies called World Peace Cookies? I didn’t think so. Here’s what happened.

Yesterday Scott (yep, he’s my bud, I call him by his first name—um… don’t mention that to him if you see him) Tweeted about Dorie’s cookies, said they were the world’s best cookies, and insisted (all within his allotted 140 characters) that that was NOT hyperbole.
From Dorie’s website, here’s the précis on how they got their name!

I was given the recipe in 2000 by Pierre Herme, who had created the cookie for a restaurant in Paris called Korova and so, when I included the recipe in Paris Sweets: Great Desserts From the City's Best Pastry Shops, I naturally dubbed the sables Korova Cookies. I don't have the stats to prove it, but my guess is that those cookies were the most frequently made recipe in the book.
Because the cookies had become such a hit -- and because I was making batches of them at least once a week -- I wanted to reprise the recipe in Baking From My Home to Yours and had it all written and ready to go when I ran into my neighbor, Richard Gold, who couldn't stop talking about how much he loved the Korovas and how much everyone he'd ever made them for loved them too. "In fact," he said, "in our house, we call them World Peace Cookies, because we're convinced that a daily dose of the cookies is all that's needed to ensure planetary peace and happiness."
How could I not rename them World Peace Cookies!



I don’t know about you, but I’m baking today! Here’s to World Peace Cookies, and to World Peace! Hmmm… Why do I suddenly have the urge to watch the movie “Groundhog Day”?