Really, sometimes I wonder why I started this. Perhaps I imagine myself publishing a cookbook. (Cooking with the Crazy Cat Lady; Everyday Cooking with Goose Fat). Part of me imagines myself on a food show, delivering witty commentary while whipping up beautiful dishes.

Then this happens.

Plus I realize that my earlier “discovery” of calabasa, to someone who actually has training in cooking, probably makes that person feel like I did when my Yan–oops, sorry, Northern friends asked me if I’d ever heard of okra.

But I press on for the sake of the little people, like me, who want to cook from scratch every day and try new things. We may not know what calabasa is. We may be trained only by our grandmothers, who had to kill their own chickens with their bare hands, churn their own butter, and eat poke salad because they could get it for free. We may burn our cauliflower soup on occasion. But (music swells to crescendo) we are going to COOK our calabasa and our cauliflower soup and IT WILL BE GOOD!!!

Which it was. Here’s what the final product looked like: