I can't imagine suffering a glut of duck fat when there are potatoes to be roasted and confits to be made, but if you find yourself in such a pickle, do like Grandmere Yvonne and make some:

Duck Fat Soap  

1 can of Red Devil lye from the hardware store
5 – 6 lbs. of duck fat
5 c. cold water

Line a few shoeboxes with parchment paper, cheesecloth or muslin.

Pour the water into a very large stainless steel or enamel pot. CAREFULLY—lye burns if it gets on you—pour the lye into the water. It will bubble and steam and get very, very hot (like when it's eating through drain clogs). Let it cool to room temperature, 75 degrees or so. DON'T test it with your finger or a thermometer; just feel the outside of the bowl.

Meanwhile, melt the duck fat and let it cool to body temperature.

Put on some gardening gloves and, with a long-handled wooden spoon or wire whisk—CAREFULLY, so it doesn't splatter—add the fat SLOWLY to the lye mixture. Keep stirring, until it begins to thicken like custard. This may take as long as 20 minutes, or it might happen right away.

Pour the mixture into the shoeboxes, and cover them loosely with a cloth. In a day or two, they will be hard. Turn them out of the boxes, and cut into bars. Keep them somewhere cool and dry and out of reach for 3 to 4 weeks to cure, after which the lye will have been eaten by the fat and the soap will be gentle enough to wash a baby.

Or, as they say in the U.K, Macaroni Cheese. They also call Egg Salad “Egg Mayonnaise.” They are so direct, those Brits. Just the ingredients, and get on with it. Who needs connecting verbs.

5 or 6 thin slices of pancetta, torn apart

3 Tbsp. butter 

3 Tbsp. flour 

3 c. milk 

2 c. (total) fontina, asiago and parmigiano, heavy on the fontina 

a few leaves of fresh sage

a couple of peeled garlic cloves, smashed

salt and freshly ground white pepper

and for the top:

2 Tbsp. melted butter

4 Tbsp. grated parmigiano

4 Tbsp. dry breadcrumbs

Heat the oven to 375. Put the cooked pasta in a large bowl. Have ready a buttered baking dish, 9x13 or comparable.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan with the garlic, sage leaves and the pancetta. Sizzle for a few minutes, until the sage and pancetta are crisp and the garlic is beginning to brown. Discard the garlic and put the sage and pancetta in the macaroni bowl. Whisk in the flour, sizzle for a minute, and add the milk, whisking constantly to break up any lumps, but a few are fine. Nobody will notice. Boil for a minute or two and remove from the heat. Gently stir in the cheese, add salt and pepper to taste, and toss with the macaroni. Scrape into the buttered baking dish.

In a small bowl, mix all the topping ingredients together with clean hands and sprinkle on top of the macaroni.

Bake for about 30 minutes, or until crusty and bubbly and browned.

Best is the day after, when the leftovers are congealed. Slice into thick slabs and fry in a hot, well-seasoned (ergo, non-stick) cast-iron frying pan on both sides, until crisp. If it makes you feel better, serve it with leaves of butter lettuce, dressed with a simple vinaigrette.

A Simple Vinaigrette

1 Tbsp. dijon mustard

1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar

8 Tbsp. light olive oil

salt and freshly ground pepper

I have an aero latte (a battery-operated milk frother that you can get at IKEA for almost nothing) that I use to mix this up. You could just use a fork.

Last weekend, we had Sauerkraut Sunday at Victoria's apartment in Brooklyn. She invited her longtime friend Carl, who teaches cooking classes at Astor Center in Manhattan. And me—I'm Kristina, her newish friend and the person who happily posts her images and text at this blog while she keeps busy as a food stylist and mom. And my pal Julia, a magazine designer by trade and a foodie at heart.

I got to Victoria's garden abode at around 1:30. She'd mentioned she'd be digging a hold in the backyard to store the sauerkraut, so I arrived ready and willing to pick up a shovel. A little manual labor does a city dweller good, in my opinion. Instead, there were Victoria and Carl at the kitchen table, a bottle of crisp white wine ready to be shared and a freshly made batch of macaroni and cheese for our feasting pleasure. Two words came to mind: yay and yum.

We had one of those lovely kitchen-table afternoons that you wish (or I wished) would go on forever. Eating, talking, laughing. Eating some more. Victoria showed us one of her recent projects. It was for the magazine Swallow Magazine (http://coolhunting.com has a nice interview with James Casey, its creative director, here, and if you go here, you'll see where the magazine was honored with a D&AD award earlier this year), and it was inspired by the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. Victoria's concept was to have an arrangement of food and related items on the lefthand side of the spread cast a shadow on the right that referred to a well-loved Andersen fable. (It's trick to explain, and I don't have the images handy, unfortunately. But if we can get them scanned, I promise to post them.)

Victoria also showed us The Foxfire Book—one of her favorite tomes—whose sauerkraut recipe we dutifully followed. The proportions are 1 quart of cabbage to 2 Tbsp salt. Not being much of a kitchen person myself (though I'm working on it), I can't give you step-by-step instructions, but I did take some photos of the goings-on.

Make sure you have your computer's audio on for this video clip. It includes some very important directions:

keep it up from kristina f on Vimeo.

Lunch was as delicious as it looks. Julia came by just in time for the apple tart tatin. Victoria didn't finish hers (you can see her dessert plate on the bottom here), but the rest of us didn't have that problem.

We got a late start because of our languorous lunch, and Carl had to leave before long. So Julia and Victoria established a sort of assembly-line process. Victoria grated the cabbage, and Julia added it to the large ceramic container Victoria had lugged out for the occasion. Julia also took care of the salting duties.

Here's what the would-be slaw looked like when it had been in the container for a bit and the salt had brought out the moisture.

When all the cabbage that could be shredded had gone under the blade, it was all about sealing the sauerkraut. Julia added a layer of the cabbage leaves Victoria had removed.

And then, on top of that, a plate.

And then, a baggie filled with water. One of the rare times that any of us considered water weight desirable.

At some point during the sauerkraut-making process, Victoria had the idea to start a food group. "Like a book club," she said, "only about food." I don't know if she's planning to make her macaroni and cheese a regular part of the proceedings (though I'd like to officially vote in favor of that right now), but if the food group does come to fruition, we'll be sure to include you by way of A Long Hot Simmer.

I’m showing you a picture of Theo picking grapes in Sonoma, rather than the violet mustard, which those lovely grapes were tortured into. Sort of. I first tasted the stuff when we photographed it for

The New York Times and then again earlier this summer when I bought a jar from Grandmere Yvonne (see last week’s post). It’s an ancient recipe from Limousin in France, to which one of the Popes Clement was so addicted, he ordered up a constant supply for the palace. Violet mustard is made of the freshly pressed, slightly acidic grape must from black grapes, boiled down until syrupy, then mixed with black mustard seed and spices. It makes smoked duck very happy.

Recently, I had the pleasure of working with Stephen Lewis on a project for Newton Vineyards in Napa Valley, from whence, at the end of the day, cameth a case of black wine grapes. I took them home. Pressed them in an unbleached muslin bag by hand. Boiled the must down by ¾. Soaked some black mustard seeds I had left over from some other project in red wine vinegar I made from those grapes Theo picked. Then whirred it all together in an electric coffee grinder. Vile. Truly vile. Vile-let Mustard-Sludge, in fact. I should have followed the recipe in that New York Times article. 

This is the marquee at Shields Date Garden’s musty in-house theater. One can imagine countless date palms having anonymous sex while they show the short film , based on the 1951 retro-funky slideshow narrated and created by Mr. Shields, and featured at the Palm Springs International Film Festival last year.

I bought the DVD (and a bag of date crystals to sprinkle on Theo’s bacon-and–peanut butter sandwiches), which includes the original slideshow-with-narration and which makes me wonder if Mr. Shields ever got any from Mrs. Shields, if you know what I mean. 

These are their thankfully-never-redesigned bags of date crystals, which they sell on their website, along with the DVD and a lot of date paraphernalia, including the recipe book from which comes the equally retro-funky recipe for:

Mrs. Shields' Date Rumaki