A few years ago I was watching the NBA finals, and Michael Jordan was playing. As the game got underway, the announcer said he’d just been informed that Jordan had been experiencing flu-like symptoms, and perhaps we should not expect him to perform up to his usual standard. Of course, Jordan went on to score like 175 points, and the announcer kept saying, “Look at that shot! And with flu-like symptoms!”

My point here is that last night I developed flu-like symptoms, so I am lying in bed not feeling like eating anything. I just had a piece of plain Texas Toast. I’ll know I’m getting better when I start to crave peperonata. Last night I was up half the night with a fever dream that, among other things, involved someone complaining, “You got tzatziki on my dashiki!”

I picked up Ken Haedrich’s book Pie from the library, and I flopped it open to a random page, trying to take my mind off my various aches and pains. On the page was a sidebar about National Pie Day, created by the American Pie Council. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s today, and I’m in no condition to eat pie. What other sorts of baked-good councils do you think there are?

> The APC services two special groups…pie loving consumers and pie-related business professionals.

If I were an undercover CIA operative, I would answer questions about my line of work by saying mysteriously, “Let’s just say I’m a pie-related business professional.”

So I forced myself to celebrate NPD by eating a couple of leftover cookies that Laurie made from the book The Weekend Baker by Abigail Johnson Dodge. They’re bar cookies with a brownie layer on the bottom and a chocolate chip cookie layer on the top. It sounds like a gimmick, but they’re delicious and not hard to make, and the book endeared itself to us by giving ingredients by weight. I’ve thought about writing a polemic about weighing ingredients, but a guy I know already wrote one, The Kitchen Scale Manifesto, and it’s much more thorough than what I would have come up with.

I think I may have solved the adult bib problem. Laurie got me a Salumi apron for Christmas. It’s black, with Salumi’s great pig logo on the front. I’ve been wearing it in the kitchen, and then when it’s time to sit down for dinner, I conveniently forget to take it off (although Iris will often say, “Dada, take off Dada’s apron”). This does leave a dangerously exposed area between the top of the apron and my neck, but it’s much better than nothing.