Wherefore art thou, Bon Appetit?

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I knew the February 2009 issue of Bon Appetit had arrived. Knew I'd seen it. Could not find it. Looked everywhere. Was getting concerned I'd thrown it out by accident.

Just now, found it. In 10-year-old son's room.

Recipe: Savory bread pudding with caramelized onions and Comte cheese

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Oh, yes, my husband is a happy man today. Because, you see, he is home for lunch, and a little earlier I made savory bread pudding.

I believe I've already enlightened you about my love affair with sweet bread pudding, especially my signature version with chocolate and cherries. But savory bread pudding, that's another thing entirely. Combine stale leftover bread with grated cheese, crumbled bacon, an herb or two, and a custard base of eggs and milk or cream, and you've got - well, you've got heaven in a baking dish. And, to bring the dish up another notch (if that's even possible), today I included the unbelievably delicious caramelized onions I made yesterday, using the method in an article by Russ Parsons in last week's Los Angeles Times.

I'm writing the recipe the way I made it, but you can change the cheese to your taste, mix in leftover cooked vegetables, switch out the herbs. It's completely flexible. It's a great side dish for a dinner party because you can assemble it ahead of time and let it sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, or even overnight, before you bake it.

Savory bread pudding with bacon and caramelized onions

• 1/2 loaf leftover challah
• 8 eggs
• 2 cups heavy cream plus 2 cups milk (or 4 cups half-and-half)
• 2 cubes porcini bouillon (available at gourmet stores, or leave it out)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• ground pepper to taste
• 2 cups grated Comte cheese (Gruyere is a good substitute)
• 1/2 cup crumbled cooked bacon
• 3/4 cup caramelized onions (substitute: 2 sauteed onions)
• 1 tsp dried thyme

Tear the challah into bite-sized pieces and spread them out on a cookie sheet. Leave them out for a few hours to make them slightly stale. Alternatively, toast them in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes to dry them out.

Soften the bouillon cubes in 1/4 cup of the milk.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs. Whisk in the cream and milk. Fold in the bread cubes so they can absorb the liquid. Fold in the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Let the mixture sit in the bowl for an hour, stirring it up every 15 minutes to redistribute the ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Spray a 9x13 baking pan with cooking spray and turn the bread mixture into the pan. Bake at 400 degrees for about 50 minutes, until the top is golden and puffy. It will fall after a few minutes out of the oven, but no matter. It will taste just as lofty.

Recipe: The story of my roast chicken

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I'm going to say something really radical here. Are you ready? Sitting down?

I like roasting chicken cut up, rather than whole.

I know this is clearly not the mark of a real cook. I admit it. I am not a real cook. I am a busy, multitasking, corner-cutting home cook. And I have a butcher who is willing to do all the messy stuff.

So I go to the wonderful Bob's Market, just around the corner, and I ask Rich the butcher for two of their terrific corn-fed whole chickens. And I ask him to cut them up for me. He knows how I like it by now: in eighths, with the backbones in a separate package for making stock.

I come home with four legs, four wings, four breast halves, and four thighs, which go onto baking sheets. No, I do not separate the dark and light meat. I like them to commingle, so that the fat from the dark is available to baste the light. I sprinkle everything with a generous amount of garlic salt, which I consider to be a deity among seasonings. And then into the oven it goes.

The oven I preheat to 450. When I slide in the chicken, I turn on the convection for 15 minutes. No more, or things will be dried out. I find that the blast of circulating hot air gives the skin a head start on crisping. After this initial period, I turn off the convection and turn the oven down to 375. About 40 minutes later, it's all done. Oh, I look in on it occasionally, baste once or twice. But that's all the TLC this chicken requires.

While the chicken is roasting I start the stock. I put the backs and any odd scraps of fat I've pulled off the thighs into a pot with water and turn it on. No onion or carrot or anything else. Just chicken. I let that simmer until the roasted chicken is done.

The first thing I do when the chicken is cool enough to handle is to eat the wings. All of them. All by myself. My reward for being the cook. Haven't you wondered, Michael, why there are never any wings on the chickens I roast? Ha.

And then I do something completely un-real-cook-like.

I get out a big plastic container. I take all the chicken meat off the bones. Some comes off in big pieces, some I have to pick. Doesn't matter. This chicken I will serve to my kids, or put into quesadillas, or make into chicken salad, or throw into a casserole. It is a necessary component of my culinary life.

And I take all the bones and skin - including the ones left from the wings after I've devoured them - and throw them into the stock pot. Using already-roasted chicken scraps gives my stock a full, meaty flavor you just don't get from raw chicken. My chicken stock takes like big, fat, weightlifting chickens. Nothing delicate about it. The stock simmers for another hour or so. I strain it, cool it, de-fat it, and put it away for soup, or casseroles, or cooking rice in, or a hundred other things.

The end.

The perfect sweet roll: A sugar bomb for my sugar daddy

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Isn't this one of the most gorgeous pieces of pastry you've ever seen?

I had the good fortune to attend a baking class the other night on simple yeast breads, taught by the darling Clemence Gossett of Gourmandise Desserts. I've been to two classes of hers now - well, one was a demo, and this latest was a hands-on class, so two different things, actually. She's got a great energy, happy and warm and non-doctrinaire, which I think is so important when you're in the kitchen. Don't like it this way? Do it another way! Want apricots instead of apples? No problem! Dough a little sticky? Fix it like this! I really enjoyed the three hours we spent in the beautiful professional kitchen over at the St. Joseph Center in Venice. Anyone here in L.A. who wants to spend a few hours making sweet treats would do no better than to drop into one of Clemence's classes.

The simple yeast dough we used for these sweet rolls (and some other sweet rolls, and some savory rolls) was a revelation to me. I'm not going to publish the recipe here, because it belongs to Clemence and I haven't asked her whether I may, but suffice it to say that I have never used buttermilk in a yeast dough before, and this dough is awfully good.

We rolled the dough out and filled it with apples and nuts and sugar and cinnamon and butter and pecans and...lots of deliciousness. And we made a sugar-butter syrup to pour into the bottom of the pan and over the rolls. And some of the other rolls had a cream cheese glaze. Really, the aroma that night - I will dream of it for months.

For the savory rolls we folded in grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and some dried thyme, but we forgot to add salt to the dough, which we agreed would have made the rolls better. We did put salt on top though.

I brought home a bakery box with a few samples of our work. Both my husband and my children were happy and impressed.

Regarding the title of this post: My husband did call this sticky bun a "sugar bomb" when he tasted it. He is not, however, technically speaking, my sugar daddy. I do laundry and dishes, and I only occasionally prance around in revealing lingerie.

Recipe: Impromptu pasta with broccolini, mozzarella, onion and chicken sausage

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This was one of those nights where I experimented and the results were quite good.

Our neighbor Susanna showed up at the door yesterday with a bag of organic greens from her husband Victor's garden. So lucky, we are, not only to have nice neighbors, but neighbors who bring us homegrown organic produce! One bag had chard and kale, and that's still in the refrigerator. The other had adorable broccolini, already washed and begging to be used.

So I boiled up some bow tie pasta. While that was in the pot, I sauteed a sliced onion with three chicken sausages (the ones that are already cooked, Italian Parmesan flavor) sliced into coins. When the onions were softened and the sausage rounds were brown around the edges, I added three cloves of chopped garlic and the chopped broccolini. When the pasta was done, the toppings were too.

I tossed it all in a bowl with cubed fresh mozzarella (smoked would have been good too, but I only had fresh), a handful of grated Grana Padano, ground pepper and the juice of half a Meyer lemon.

I loved it. Husband loved it. One kid ate everything but the cheese. The other kid ate only the cheese. Jack Sprat lives on.