I won't bore you with all the details of my morning.

Suffice it to write that highlights (or would that be lowlights?) include fishing a little girl's hair accessory out of the toilet and witnessing our emphatically non-LOL-cat barfing under the kitchen table.

Do you ever wish you had a magic rewind button for your days?

Yeah. Me too.

Thank you to everyone who participated in my Book Naming Contest. I'm sorry to have taken so long to decide on a title, but it was a three-way tie in my mind for quite a long time. Many of you had terrific ideas, and every comment made me smile.

The tie was broken when I decided to combine two submissions, which means there are two winners who will each receive formal acknowledgment in the book and her own signed copy.

The lucky winners are:

Charrette! and Deb!

And the title of my forthcoming cookbook is:

Comfortably Yum: Food for Body and Spirit

My goal is to finish up the publishing details on Friday; I'll let you know as soon as the book is ready to ship!

I'm thrilled (and a bit nervous) to announce that I've been writing a cookbook, and that I am self-publishing it through Lulu. If you have ever enjoyed one of my recipes (filed under the Delicious Dish category to the right), then I think you'll find this cookbook to be a great addition to your kitchen shelf. I've been having a blast re-testing many of my recipes to make sure they're worthy of publication; it has been a fun project.

Here's the only problem: I can't think of a title that I like. I've bounced a few ideas around with Patrick, but nothing has really worked for us. So I open the question to you, my faithful and patient readers. Can you think of a great title for my cookbook? Something that is witty, original, thoughtful, and connotes deliciousness? Something that will compel the consumer to buy ten copies as holiday gifts this season?

If so, submit it to me in the form of a comment on this post. (No, Pez, I am NOT just fishing for comments here. No, I'm not.) Do me a favor and run your submission through Google or another search engine beforehand, just to make sure it hasn't been used somewhere before.

If I choose your submission as the title of my book, I'll not only mention you prominently in the acknowledgments, I'll send you a signed copy free!

So put on your thinking caps and get to work! I can't wait to see what you come up with.

That's what's printed on a T-shirt for sale at Fleisher's, my 'local' butcher. It makes me laugh every time.

Last Thursday, I called Fleisher's owner, Josh Applestone, to check on the availability of trotters and suet. Suet he had frozen, he answered, but he was getting fresh trotters in on Friday morning, and he could hold some for me for a day or two if I liked.

I hadn't planned on going up there for another week or so; I had slated Friday to be an all-writing day, and it's an hour each way to Kingston from my house. But fresh trotters were too good to pass up, so I made the trip and bought a month's worth of meat to make it worth my time and gas.

Josh is a great guy, a former vegan of 17 years who now supplies locally raised, sustainably produced, grass-fed meat to everyone from Mario Batali and Dan Barber to, um, me. We chatted about Thanksgiving turkeys (this will be our third year getting our bird from him) while I chose what I wanted. Besides the trotters and suet, I got ground beef and lamb, two gorgeous London Broils, four chickens, some liver, and a partridge in a pear tree. (Just kidding about the partridge; I didn't see any game birds in the front case on this visit.)

Regular readers of this blog know why I avoid feedlot and factory-produced meat whenever possible (but click on the link if you don't). I'm glad to know that the animals whose flesh I buy at Fleisher's lived happy, healthy lives in pastures on small farms and were slaughtered with dignity and compassion.

There's a difference between 'cheap' and 'frugal.' I try to be frugal. We don't eat meat every day, and when we do eat it, I make sure it's the very best quality, and I use every part of it. I use bacon grease and chicken, duck, and goose fat in my cooking. I save the bones from the meat we eat and use them to make stock. I make chopped liver and lard and demi-glace.

I actually don't believe food should be cheap; I think this society has a damaging addiction to cheap food. I'd rather know that when I buy it, farmers and producers are being fairly compensated, not squeezed by big corporations, then subsidized by our government. One way to know that is to make sure you buy locally produced goods, whether from a CSA, a farmer's market, or from a small, independent store like Fleisher's.