We’re going off line at DL for six months so that I can give appropriate time and attention to a couple of other ventures. The first is a new business (being built as part of an old business), and the other is an ultra marathon scheduled for the 6th of September. Sometime shortly thereafter, I’ll be back. In the meantime, I’ll be gathering some good stories and some even better pictures.

Leaving you with gorgeous gnocchi I cooked last week.

Clearly, I love to eat. It is, in fact, the sine qua non of me. But, as some of you may have guessed, I also love to cook.

I’ve never thought of cooking as chemistry, although it is, and lots of very accomplished cooks do extraordinary things working within that sort of framework (Achatz at Alinea comes to mind). Nor do I see cooking as a sport, as something that you must excel at to better others or to feel better about yourself. Cooking contests are fun to watch, and I like the Chairman and his stadium as much as the next guy. But, there, something lacks as well.

I find joy in cooking. I am rarely happier than when I’m in the kitchen, or thinking about the kitchen. I hold no illusions about it, no romance. But the smells and the sights of a meal coming together cause me to smile.

I’d grown up eating some version of chicken paprikash, concocted by my father, based no doubt, on some recollection of a story he read someplace. Then, sometime in the mid- to late-nineties, a radical (as in communist battling, flee the country, and work hard to undermine the system) Hungarian who I will call A, fixed a pot of chicken paprikash that changed the game for me entirely.

I’ve spent the last 15 years trying to get the same flavor…and I’m getting closer. But more than anything, more even than nearly transcendent moment when I tasted his version, I love cooking chicken paprikash because it is such a visceral dish. It is visceral in the way that babi guling is visceral. It it, simply, a joy to cook.

From the very beginning, when the cut-up whole chicken browns in butter with salt and pepper, the kitchen takes on the smells and sounds of a place where something good is happening. The butter, just as it begins to brown, gives off that wonderful rich, sweet smell, that then is transformed with the addition of the chicken into what is probably the consummate primordial smell: sizzling fat.

Once the chicken goes into the stock, and onions, and paprika, and begins to cook slowly into tenderness, the deep tangy richness of the the smell combined with the scarlet color (and the knowledge that I’m half-way to eating) makes this moment by second favorite of the dish. There is something about the color, the multitude of visual and physical textures, and the sound that inspires another glass of wine (and, conveniently, this is right about when you should need it…THAT I did take from my father’s school of paprikash manufacturing).

Despite the earlier addition of thinly sliced onions cooking in butter and chicken fat, my absolute favorite part of the dish is when, chicken removed to platter, I begin to cook down the stock, the onions, flour, paprika, and the chicken juices. Once I can pass a spoon through the mixture and leave a trail, I know that it’s time to whip in the sour cream, bring everything to a bubble with the chicken added, and then serve over noodles (or, if you’re feeling Germanic, spaetzle).

It is a joy. Anyway you serve it.

There is something wonderful and decadent about cooking for friends on a Saturday night. While the rest of the world is out standing in line, or waiting impatiently for their bread and water to show up, you can relax around a busy, much smaller kitchen, drinking perfectly appropriately priced wine, and tasting as you go. What is not to love?

A couple of weekends ago I spent the better half of a day out doing all of those end-of-summer tasks that one finds impossible to ignore anymore. After cutting grass, planting a couple thousand little bulbs, picking pieces of backed-over driveway lighting (circa July) out of the gully that used to be a nice landscaped water feature, and enthusiastically trying to kill off the remaining 31 mosquitoes in the back yard, I turned to dinner.

It felt—in my bones—like a rotisserie kind of night, and I’d been waiting for an opportunity to do babi guling. Babi guling is one of those dishes that you just know on hearing about that you’d be willing to give up a wee bit of your soul for a long, uninterrupted evening of rolling around in the sand with a big hunk of pork. Traditionally served during the religious holidays of Galungan and Kuninga, babi guling is a suckling pig stuffed with herbs and spices, and then slowly roasted over a fire of corn husks. The resultant buttery meat and very crispy skin, while undoubtedly offensive to any honest pig-pikin North Carolina pit master, is legendary.

Having a certain dearth of suckling pigs, or an abundance of corn husks, or frankly a good holiday, my version used a pork loin, which while clearly lacking the necessary skin to ever be very crispy, had the distinct advantage after a day of being outside not cooking babi guling, of being both much easier to get, and cooking in under 12 hours. The pork loin itself is not really all that exciting. If you close your eyes and think about a pork loin, you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of what I was dealing with. The spice paste, known to Balinese everywhere as bumbu, is where the babi guling steps up to its porcine brethren, clears its throat, and says, “excuse me, but I’m just going to pop out and total f with the way people think about little four-legged, short-snouted, curly-tailed swine.”

The babi guling bumbu (or at least the one I made, and I generally stay in the same hemisphere of interpretation), is made from shallots (this is not strictly traditional), thai chilies, chopped ginger, garlic, turmeric, some galangal, lots of lemongrass, some cilantro, black pepper, lime juice, and brown sugar. A cook, well-steeped in the appropriate culinary lore of Indonesia, would have worked this mixture over in a big mortar with pestle until it was the smoothness of melted chocolate. I added a bit of oil, threw everything into the food processor, whirled it until I had the smoothness of chocolate, and wiggled my eyebrows at my relieved looking mortar. I then sauteed the mixture until it smelled like heaven and took on a sheen, stuffed the pork loin with it, tied everything tight, rubbed the loin with the remaining bumbu, and then ran a rotisserie stake through the middle.

A couple of hours later I paraded the fragrant and deeply caramelized roast through the appropriately cooing throng on the way from grill to platter. After 15 minutes of doing nothing but trying to undertake polite conversation while the deep and deeply seductive aroma of the pork washed over us, we convened in a manner that had a small furry desert creature been watching would have been disturbingly reminiscent of a pack of jackals happening upon a slightly dazed and decidedly plump elephant. With our third (or fourth) bottle of wine, we settled into an evening of babi guling, rice, and some really nice caviar stuffed new potatoes (another entry altogether).

Take a 3 lbs (or so) pork shoulder roast (or pork loin) and cut a long, deep slice from end to end; blend shallots, chilies, ginger, garlic, turmeric, lemon grass, galanga, cilantro, black pepper, lime juice, salt, brown sugar, and enough vegetable oil to make a nice paste; stuff the pork, tie it, and stick it on the rotisserie for about an hour and a half to two hours. Let sit for 10-15 minutes (if possible) before slicing and eating. Serve with rice, some sambal, and wine or beer.