First stop: SPA CASTLE. Start out with the single-sex salon where it's non-stop no suits-allowed hot tubs, icy plunge pools,  jacuzzi baths, a steam room, scrub stations and an 187 degree sauna. And that's just the first floor out of four. Boys and suits are encouraged in the outdoor pools, as they are at the restaurants, smoothie bars, saunas, and sleeping rooms. 

Second stop: HONG KONG SUPERMARKET. With all that strenuous work relaxing it's time to burn some cash shopping. I'm a sucker for a great Asian market which means my cart fills up before I can be brought to my senses. I am now in possession of more lemongrass, enokis, shrimp paste, preserved duck eggs, seaweed, smoked duck, pickled tofu and Asian noodles than is strictly necessary. It could be worse.

Third  stop: All the soaking, steaming, sweating, pushing, grabbing, and trying to say no have made me hungry. Off to Joe's Shanghai, which happens to be right across the street from Hong Kong Supermarket. Given that the car was already parked (free parking!) and we were famished, a couple of orders of luscious crab-pork soup dumplings were more than enough to finish the day. An inspired restaurant choice? Not by Flushing standards. Delicious and hassle free? Unquestionably.

I'm feeling the Tiger is a force I can live with.

*Illustration by Florence White Williams from Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo, Guttenberg.org

Is this an authentic taco? No way. Is it pants-off delicious? You better believe it.

RECIPE FOR A GRINGO TACO:

Depending on how starved you are, lay 1, 2, or 3 tortillas on a cookie sheet. Shred some sharp cheddar over them (my house cheddar is Cabot's Extra-Sharp). Place the tortilla under your broiler with a timer set for 1 minute. (They may need more time, but it's SO easy to burn them.) When the cheese is melted and the tortillas are browning, take them out of the oven and transfer them to a plate. Now compose but do resist overstuffing your taco  - this isn't Chipotle's. The basics are:

Leftover chicken, fish, steak, pork (if you're leftover-free, fry an egg), shredded lettuce or cabbage, chopped tomato, hot sauce, sliced scallion & sour cream. (Don't ever insult your taco with store-bought salsa.)

CADILLAC TACO AMENITIES: Haas avocado, chopped cilantro, freshly toasted ground cumin seed, sliced radish, tomatillos, queso fresco instead of cheddar, crema instead of sour cream....

Take my advice: buy a very large bag of Satsumas and eat them out of hand. Dangerously easy to peel, I effortlessly gobbled a dozen yesterday in the Hannaford parking lot -- until I remembered to share with my family. Like I said, buy a big bag!

Many thanks to the smart and charming waiter who gave me a list of our wines at Ko. Our meal was stunning on its own but it was taken up a notch by a daring line-up of not-so-obvious wines that made up the $95 pairing.

Memorable, signature dishes: fluke with buttermilk, soy & poppy seeds; soft-cooked hen egg with caviar, onions and potato; shaved foie gras with lychee & pine nut brittle.

Do make the shaved foie gras dish for yourself. It's in Chang's book. Lusty!

Not familiar but delicious: yam sorbet with goat cheese ice cream (parfait?); cured fish with greens and furikake; daikon paper dumplings in broth; hand torn noodles with shaved black truffles.

The pasta dish reminded me to make my own noodles more often; the flavor is worth the effort. This dish also reminded me of the enviable pleasures of the rich: black truffles!

The yam-goat cheese dessert was the dish of the evening. Whoever made it needs a raise. Now. I bow down.

The meal we had, good as it was, was efficiently reproduced by David Chang clones. Don't go to Ko for a sight of kitchen genius on the fly. Don't go for a perfect meal, either. The menu had its misses (the salty, heavy, greasy biscuit amuse bouche, the very chewy skate), and its placeholders (the duck breast, good as it was, could have come out of Balthazar's kitchen).

Don't get me wrong. No regrets here. I've just ordered a case of the incredible Eric Bordelet sparkling pear cider. The perfume coming out of that glass will be my madeleine.

If you've ever eaten yourself silly while waiting until Monday rolls around to start "fresh" on a diet, you'll know what I mean when I say that the stretch between Christmas and New Year's is one very dangerous, fat-fraught week. So, rather than packing on 5 more pounds, I've decided to worship at the shrine of the vintage Kalish poster above. His first piece of advice: START NOW.

It only gets better. I suspect Kalish was a fatty or at least fought the good battle, judging by how wise and funny each of the 15 tips proves to be. If I'd put half of them into practice back when my husband, Dwight, gave me this poster years ago, I'd be in my skinny jeans today. It's never too late!

1. START NOW.

2. AVOID TEMPTATION.

3. ENLIST THE HELP OF YOUR LOVED ONES.

4. THINK ABOUT THE NEW YOU.

5. STOP TAKING SUCH BIG BITES.

6. STOP MAKING EXCUSES.

7. EAT MORE SLOWLY.

8. DON'T BE DEVIOUS.

9. BUY MORE PROTEINS.

10. LET YOUR TASTE BUDS KNOW WHO'S BOSS.

11. BE EXTRA CAREFUL ON VACATION.

12. LEARN TO SAY NO TO YOURSELF.

13. TRY STAYING IN BED AT NIGHT.

14. CUT DOWN ON YOUR DRINKING.

15. KEEP BUSY AND YOU WON'T THINK ABOUT IT SO MUCH.

It isn't often that primary sources are put out for general consumption. Most of that stuff -- the pork scraps that go into making the sausage that is history -- remain behind doors where only the cooks or, in this case, the librarians and historians, can enjoy them.

Here are those primary sources, in the form of a century's worth of book ads, all packaged up for the public. The images in Dwight Garner's "Read Me" are as juicy and delicious as raw material gets. Flipping through these pages will twist you back in time. From the squiggly, uncertain type on the original 1949 ad for Satre's "Nausea" to the bold graphic swish for Joyce's "Ulysses," from the 1970s bubble-type in the ad for McGuane's "Ninety-Two in the Shade" to the photo of a handsome young Ernest Hemingway presenting "his first full novel published last Friday, October 22," 1926, "The Sun Also Rises," Garner's collection will make you feel at once young, old, nostalgic, wise and maybe even plain lucky. 

Maybe what I like best about "Read Me" is how it throws into relief the books that have become so familiar they can't possibly need an introduction. These are the books that have left such a deep imprint on the culture and on us that they are always already present in the rambling landscape of our consciousness -- "Sister Carrie," "Charlotte's Web," "Light in August," "Bambi," "Silent Spring," "Lolita," "Winnie-the-Pooh," "Ulysses," "All the President's Men," "In Cold Blood" -- to name just a handful. 

If, like a lot of people I know, your history is as much defined by what you were reading as much as it is by what you were doing, you'll like "Read Me" -- a lot. It's an elegant homage to the book that feels both old-fashioned and post-post-post modern. On top of that, it arrives on the eve of the massive explosion that is the current competition for the best, latest, cheapest, smartest platform for the e-book. Print feels fragile these days. But we're not there yet as this book and my giant library and yours can attest. I say, let's enjoy ink on paper a little longer and the lovely, tactile ride it's given us all. 

*Full disclosure: I'm married to Dwight Garner. I suppose in its own way, this blog post is a post-print ad for a book of book ads that once appeared in print. Yikes!

I love this cake! On the eve of the candy fest that is Halloween, it puts me in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. Out with the cute, in with the gruesome and scary.

I wish I could say I made a cake this cool, but I didn't. This decorator has a far more skilled hand than I possess. Someone out there deserves credit; I wish I could give it to them.

I'm sorry to say, I don't know the source of the photo -- it came via a forwarded email with lots of other gruesome cakes. If anyone knows who made this cake, I'd like nothing better than to put up their name and a link.

So I succumb and buy a box. It's inexpensive (as little as $5 bucks a bottle!), environmentally sustainable (what with the efficiency of shipping a 3 liter box and the recycled cardboard in place of glass), and for-every-night-of-the-week swill, not SO terrible. 

So why do I still hate the box and what is the solution?

1. I hate the box on the table. It's ugly and reminds me of how poor I am.

2. The sound of the wine pouring with great force from the plastic spigot puts me in mind of nothing so much as a stream of urine hitting the toilet water.    

3. The fast-pouring spigot filled below eye level coupled with never-ending-4-bottle-box (it just keeps coming and coming), means that I drink too much.

As any fool might divine, these problems are at once solved by pouring the wine directly from the box into an clean, empty wine bottle. Remove the label from the wine bottle before you make the transfer. You do not, even for a moment, want to pretend to be drinking some fabulous Rhone or Burgundy when all you're drinking is some un-aged, shelter mutt of a wine. 

I can almost live with the label-free bottle of cheap wine. It's honest but has more dignity than the box. Best of all, the blankness is an absence I can fill with better things to come.

When I should be thinking about my favorite JonaGold apples, or what kind of plum jam I'll be making with the meager crop on the tree outside my bedroom, here I am dreaming of succotash and how it makes the perfect dinner when you have pounds of corn, beans and zucchini to eat. The simple truth is these summery ingredients are impossibly delicious when they're thrown together with fresh herbs, great olive oil, garlic and a little citrus.

For traditional succotash I like my own recipe -- of course! You can find it in my book, The New Steak. For a version with a spicy jalepeno kick and sliced chicken breast on top, David Tanis has a tasty recipe in his gorgeous book, A Platter of Figs.

Either way, succotash is perfect "home from the farmers' market" food to make the most of the last of the summer's bounty. Soon enough, we'll all be rhapsodizing about apples, pumpkins and winter squash.

*Image from kittenslair.com.

What could be better on a 90 degree-plus day than chasing a cooler roped to a tube down a slow, lazy river? As I do my part to empty the cooler over the two hour float, I'll need some salty crunchy.

First order for me? Plain Lay's potato chips. I know, I know. There are fancier, more carefully crafted choices, from those sprinkled with pink flakes of Hawaiian sea salt to the organic blue potato thins hand-fried in coconut oil. But the simple, paper-thin, always crispy Lay's classic in the yellow bag is my dream chip.

Maybe the answer to my love for this chip is as simple as it gets: freshness. Rancid oil will kill the most carefully made chip. Lay's is so huge, so dominant, and so popular that I've yet to encounter a spoiled chip. As I just learned, Lay's even has a chip finder on its website where you can figure out where the potatoes that make your chips were grown and where they were made. I guess this means Frito-Lay has gotten wise to the money to be made by going local -- if you call it that.

Either way, the results are consistently delicious.