Cake.

I have been trying to bake more this year, cupcakes and cake cakes and cookies galore, expanding my repertoire. The March birthday party was today, and I thought I would try cheesecake. Chocolate cheesecake. For days I looked at recipes, trying to find one that looked easy, that would taste good. I walked up and down the aisles of the grocery store, grabbing the ingredients I thought I would need, cream cheese and eggs and chocolate wafers. For some reason Whole Foods did not carry chocolate wafers, so I bought a bag of Chocolate Teddy Grahams. They would have to do.

Finally I turned to Ina Garten, whose recipes have never failed me. The chocolate espresso cheesecake would be easy, even if I needed to swing by the supermarket for espresso powder and sour cream. I ground the innocent-looking Teddy bears into fine crumbs, added melted butter, spread them in the bottom of a springform pan. It went into the oven while I melted chocolate, beat together eggs and cream cheese and vanilla and almond extracts. Cut back the sugar a little, as always. The crust cooled, I poured in the custard, licked the bowl. It was delicious, a promise of things to come. Slid the cake in, crossed my fingers. It emerged cracked, deep fissures in the smooth brown surface of the cheesecake. Whoops.

In a bowl set over simmering water - a makeshift double boiler, although I actually have one - I melted together more chocolate, heavy cream. Stirred together it became a ganache. The picture that accompanied the recipe showed a smooth mocha-colored cheesecake spattered Pollock-like with dark ganache, but I would do something different. I poured the ganache into the center of the cake, tilted the pan so it formed a neat circle, like a dark pond, hiding the disfiguring cracks below. Perfect. Few things in life cannot be patched over with a smooth coat of ganache.

After lunch the next day, the cake is adorned with lighted candles, sliced and handed around. Murmers of approval rise amongst those who have not given up sweets for Lent. F. gets up from his seat, walks around to put his hands on my shoulders. You are a god, he says. I think I have a new cake for my repertoire.

Friday Lark.

I order seared foie gras, which comes with cabbage stuffed with some sort of pureed root vegetable, and scattered with mustard seeds in a sauce that seems to be nothing more than a little wine, the juices of the cabbage, and whatever fat comes out of the foie gras. I tell K. that it is the best version of foie gras I have had at their restaurant, and wipe up every last drop of sauce with scraps of caraway-studded bread.

The John Dory (which always reminds me of that Agatha Christie story about the thumb-mark of St. Peter) comes on a bed of cipollini onions tossed with sweet mussels, in a buttery, wine-scented sauce speckled with garlic and chopped parsley. Again I clean my plate with pieces of bread - we are in a Depression, no sense in wasting butter - and lean happily against the wall, turning to watch the room behind me fill with diners.

My dessert is a dense tart of coconut wrapped in caramel and dark chocolate, on a crumbly-crisp chocolate crust, with a scoop of coconut sorbet floating on a cloud of shredded coconut alongside. It is a bit like one of those Fran's chocolate bars, only bigger. And therefore better. I turn in my seat and find that the foie gras protesters are here, waving their signs and fists at us. Most people ignore them. As I get up to leave I realize I will actually have to walk past all these shouting and waving people, and M. asks if I want her to walk me to the street. I should be fine, I tell her, and open the door.

I walk outside and the wave of sound hits me like a slap. The protestors are all ages, both sexes, including a smallish person of indeterminate gender dressed in a duck costume, who skips and jumps along the sidewalk. One man politely hands me a flyer and asks that I tell the chef to stop serving foie gras. Aside from being rather loud, they seem a decent bunch of people, so I refrain from telling them that not an hour before, I had enjoyed a small portion of foie gras, one of about forty servings of foie gras I have eaten (some less happily than others) in the years since 1994, the year I encountered it at the Hunt Club as a freshman in high school.

Out of the past. red-braised beef noodle soup.

When I was growing up, we often went to Green Village restaurant in the International District for red-braised beef noodle soup. (Red-braised refers to the use of soy sauce in the cooking). After the original restaurant burned down, two new ones emerged from the ashes, a regular restaurant with cozy wood booths and live seafood, and a more casual fast-food-type joint that offered takeout and a selection of cold dishes packed in clear plastic boxes.

I found beef shank at the supermarket, grabbed bundles of spinach and scallions. Came home and immediately set to work, bringing the beef stock I had taken from the freezer a few days ago to a rolling bowl, adding soy sauce and a few stars of anise pods. J. comes over to pick up his cupcakes and lingers over a few glasses of wine and Tagore. The broth is intense, lightly fragranced with anise and heavy with beef. A few more hours pass, and the meat begins to slide from its knob of bone; time to bring some water to a boil and toss in a handful of thick wheat noodles.

It is not quite what I remember, and at the same time it is better.

Friday Lark.

C. and I head down to Lark for dinner. It has been a long week, so we order wine along with our dinner. I order for us, no meat because it is Friday and C. is observing Lent. (Which also, alas, means no dessert). We drink our wine - mine is a Côte du Rhone, selected at random - and eat bread-and-butter, and a salad of golden beets tossed with slices of Cara Cara (the name is like a song) oranges and lumps of blue cheese. I am curious as to who first thought of pairing cheese with beets, and how it spread from restaurant to restaurant like a red-and-white rash. The turbot is wonderful, heaped with shavings of fennel and just lightly touched with the heady, oily weight of white truffle oil. C. has the Spanish mackerel over pasta with chorizo and escarole; it being Friday she picks out all the chorizo, and I wonder what the kitchen makes of it. I give into a craving for steak tartare, which comes with onion crackers and a little tangle of something curly, like baby frisée. Like my glass of wine, it is exactly what I needed tonight.

The foie gras protesters are late, and have not gathered outside by the time we leave. Perhaps next time.

Late afternoon. Café Presse.

It has been months since I went to Café Presse. The menu is limited and the service is unpredictable. But sometimes you just want a bowl of soup, or a croque monsieur. So I head out after work - I am unusually early - and find a seat at one of those strangely olive-colored tables. I order onion soup and grapefruit juice, and settle in with a book. J. did not answer his phone, so the odds of him showing up are extremely slim. His loss. The soup is as good as I remember, sweet (the way caramelized onions are sweet) and savory (with cheese and broth) and intense, with an excellent ration of cheese-to-toast-to-soup. I finish my soup and juice and order hot chocolate. A hot chocolate, or a chaud? asks the waiter. (He is very cute). I order a chaud, which is very thick and chocolatey and comes with a separate saucer of whipped cream, and it rounds out my afternoon snack/early dinner very nicely.

Usually I see a familiar face here, people I often see around the neighborhood (once I saw two rather well-known tv actors and the frontman of a local band), and today I see K. (one of the owners of Lark) at the bar with M. (who is one of the owners of Licorous, next door), deep in discussion.

Friday Lark.

Ordinarily I head to Lark on weekends, but today I think I will head down a day early, even though the foie gras protesters have postponed their sign-waving verbal assault until tomorrow. So I sit at the bar and chat with the servers as they stop to mix drinks and pour wine. As always I order a few specials, and sit back to wait for my dinner. There is crispy-skinned fish (fluke, or something), curiously like the black cod some weeks before. Then lamb tongue, served on skewers. (Who doesn't like a little tongue, cracks J., when I tell her I love tongue and always order it when it is available). I finish with mango sorbet layered with slices of blood orange and grapefruit, with little lemongrass-infused marshmallows scattered here and there, and fluffy bits of shaved coconut. It is cool and sweet and just a little tart.

Dinner for three. Barrio.

My neighborhood has changed since I started working here nearly six years ago, and even more since I moved in three years afterwards. The eight or so blocks between my apartment and the lab is now a minefield of restaurants (in addition to the old pubs and clubs that stand steadfastedly against the yuppie tide), from an inexpensive Japanese(-American) noodle joint to a fancy gastropub, with Lark a few blocks out of the direct path. A new condo development has sprung from the shell of an old building, housing an organic pizza place and a Northwest-inflected Mexican restaurant, Barrio.

On K.'s suggestion we head to Barrio for dinner. I walk by this place almost every day, with its dark wood tables set for dinner even at seven in the morning. We are flummoxed by the towering wall of dark-metal-studded wooden doors, the main door handle somehow invisible to the naked eye. Oh. There's only one door. (Hint: it's on the left side, closest to the sidewalk). We are led to a table by the window, seated at what feels like a rather high table (we are short), on chairs that are heavy and uncomfortable. (They have deep cushions, but there is nothing to grip, so it is hard to move your chair unless you stand up). Through the window I can see K. sashaying down the street, and stand in front of the door, as we had, trying to figure out how to get inside. Nearly every other diner who comes in that night has that same problem.

We order tuna crudo and seared scallops to share, and a pork cheek tamale, the tortitas, and the tacos. Actually, we wind up sharing everything, from the crudo served with jicama chips to the tacos heaped with grilled steak, shredded barbecued pork shoulder, and bbq prawns. I rather like the tortitas, which are soft buns filled with that same pork shoulder, ancho chile chicken, and chorizo with a quail egg. It is all very tasty, and I wish I had ordered more. Another time. We finish with churros served with a thick chocolate sauce, crispy and light and rich. Definitely there will be another time.

On our way home my mother and I walk towards Lark, where the foie gras protestors are out in force. They are waving signs and yelling - they hadn't told me about the yelling - and making so much noise we can hear them halfway across the Seattle University campus as we head back up the hill. You have to admire their passion, even if you don't agree with their beliefs.