TANG!

Here are a few food items we've been cooking and consuming recently. The first is a quickly improvised desert which turned out to be delicious! We took some left-over chocolate cake, tore it up into little pieces and topped it with a thin custard sauce flavored with brandy and vanilla. Cherries on top, of course. The next plate is saltimboca alla romana with patate al forno. We object to the poor treatment veal calves receive, so we make ours with pork cutlets, prosciutto di parma, sage, and a little white wine pan sauce. The patate al forno is made with a bottom layer of mashed potatoes, a layer of sauteed mushrooms and onions with red wine vinegar, a layer of any sauteed veggies one chooses-- carciofi and rapini in this case-- and another layer of potatoes. We top it off with parmigianno regianno and bake until bubbly! This is a Mario Batali recipe.

The third, the opus magnus, is a little something I like to call "creamsicle milk." I have heard of people trying to flavor milk with orange juice, but of course the milk curdles. I tried adding OJ to soymilk and had better luck, but I got the best results when I added about two heaping teaspoons of orange Tang to eight or ten ounces of soy milk. Oooohhh... creamy, sweet, and orangy! Not even the astronauts had it this good!