Sons and Other Flammable Objects is my friend Porochista’s debut novel. It’s due out any day now. It’s got a fantastic title and a fantastic cover, and if it’s anything like everything else I’ve read by Porochista, it’s going to be fantastic reading. While I wait for my pre-order copy to get here, I’m enjoying watching Porochista make the press rounds. Today, her diet for the past week is up at New York magazine’s Grub Street. It was an eventful week: a fainting spell, a hangover, two trips to Subway, one to Olive Garden, halvah at a Hare Krishna temple in Brooklyn and Lambrusco despite herself.

The Monterey part is straightforward enough when you consider that the cheese was first marketed from that picturesque peninsula in California. Where did the Jack come from though? It’s complicated.

I’m back at work today after a 12-day trip to San Francisco and Las Vegas. After too many days on the road, I needed something nourishing and filling but I didn’t feel like spending a lot of time cooking.

I picked up some broccoli on the way home from the airport. (I always crave fresh green vegetables after traveling.) I steamed the broccoli until it was tender but still bright green, and then sprinkled it with salt, pepper and a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice. To go with the broccoli, I toasted French bread with ricotta cheese and drizzled some olive oil on top.

The two dishes went well together. The broccoli and lemon cut the richness of the ricotta, and the cheese’s sweetness balanced the slight bitterness of the broccoli and the tartness of the lemon. It was a comforting but easy welcome-home meal.

Colman Andrews, one of the co-founders of Saveur and currently the restaurant columnist for Gourmet, has a short essay in defense of (over)eating at the New Republic that feels, in a good way, like an excerpt from Between Meals:

It is my opinion that whoever said “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels” has probably never sat down with three ounces of Iranian osetra, a stack of freshly made blinis (the kind that aren’t made with pancake mix), a small bone spoon, and nobody else in the room; or attacked a steaming plateful of fettuccine alfredo made the right way (with only very rich butter and the best parmigiano-reggiano, no cream); or addressed a big, juicy bacon-cheeseburger with homemade fried onion rings and a bottle of Cornas on the side.

Or maybe that person has done all or some of the above and just didn’t like the experience. It’s possible, I guess. We all have blind spots in our appreciative abilities. Vladimir Nabokov apparently didn’t see the point of music. François Truffaut, in so many ways the quintessential Frenchman, considered food a necessary annoyance, and probably would have preferred watching an Ozu movie for the fourteenth time to eating lunch. Me, I wouldn’t care if I never saw Cirque du Soleil again in my life.

Is Andrew’s ode to gluttony just a pleasant personal essay from the man who wrote an entire cookbook on Catalan cuisine (which he described as “monochromatic, murky-looking brown…food made to be eaten, not admired from a few steps back”)?

Or is The New Republic implicitly siding with senior editor Michelle Cottle over senior editor Jonathan Cohn on the issue of the “Twinkie Tax”? For irregular TNR readers: in 2002, Cottle wrote a piece critical of the tax. (It’s available as a PDF.) Cohn, whose excellent book Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis–and the People Who Pay the Price came out in April, has defended the idea of a tax on junk food.

While I’m in the process of moving, I have been looking more objectively at all my stuff — trying to figure out where it all came from, how on earth I’m going to pack it all, and what must be packed last, because I need it up until the very last second. In the kitchen, the one thing that’s staying behind is my George Foreman grill.

When I got it as a a castoff from a family member’s kitchen purge, it seemed like a one- or maybe two-hit wonder. Sure, in the absence of a real grill, it could make my summer burgers and hot dogs inside. But what else could it do? An initial test of zucchini, eggplant and bell peppers had me impressed with how easy it was to use. A few chicken breasts later, and I was pretty convinced it was worth its weight in plastic and metal.

Then came the day I grilled a cheese sandwich. The perfect melty texture and crispy bread, without any of the drippy greasiness, solidified the grill’s permanent place on my countertop. A few times a week, if I don’t go straight to my standby of sharp white cheddar with tomato on dense semolina bread, I try out a new sandwich.

My current favorite concoction goes like this: Slice half a bell pepper into thin slices and grill them. While they’re cooking, spread goat cheese on two slices of bread, then layer that with thinly sliced roast beef. Add the peppers when they’re done, then assemble the sandwich and put on the grill. Cook until the bread is crispy and cheese is melted. Delicious.

BonBonBetty commented on my post last week and recommended pancakes with Nutella and raspberries reheated on the Foreman. This got my mouth watering, and my head wondering about the other other possibilities I had not yet explored. Suggestions?

Speaking of lentils and other ancient crops, in last week’s (which is to say, this week’s, the August 27) issue, the New Yorker ran a piece on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault is meant to serve as a “doomsday seedbank” where nations can safely store all the seeds of their indigenous crops. This is another excellent behind-the-scenes article by John Seabrook who has also written about fruit tree conservationists in Umbria and the pith helmet-wearing writer known as the Fruit Detective.

The seed vault article is not online, but you can hear Seabrook talk about the story here. Wired ran a story on the vault back in May. You can also read more about the seed vault at the Global Crop Diversity Trust’s website.

We really appreciate everyone who spread the word about Cookthink last week. We asked our root source subscribers to let four friends know about the site and to copy us on the email. We got cc’d on a ton of emails and what you had to say about Cookthink made our week.

And congratulations to Cookthinker Becky Utech, whose name we randomly picked from the list to receive a Cuisinart Mini-Prep.

We hope you’ll all keep telling your friends about Cookthink. Soon, we’ll have some cool new features that will make sharing recipes and cooking tips a lot more fun. Stay tuned.

I didn’t know that the Puy lentil had protected AOC status. Or that Paul Bocuse was one of the French lentil’s “knights”. Find out more about this small legume in this week’s root source on lentils. If you’re not a root source subscriber, you can sign up for it here.

Catching up with Brys last night on the phone, he happened to mention the fresh figs he’d had at dinner in one of the Google cafeterias. We’ve been exploring possible ways of adding simple desserts and fruit dishes to cookthink.com, and Brys’ experience with the simple, fresh figs got us excited to move forward with that.

Then this morning, just before boarding his flight from San Francisco to Vegas, Brys forwarded me this serendipitous email from a friend who’s living in the Ukraine:

Dear Brys,

I am sorry if you receive a million of these after your newsletter goes out but I just wanted to echo (from the land of cucumber and tomato) that cucumbers are indeed delightful and, I think, underappreciated. I also wanted to suggest a post on figs at some point. They are amazing and regrettably do not receive their full due.

Hope things are well there,

Jessica

We took that as a sign to get on the fruit and dessert plan. We’ll report back here soon with our plans. (For the record, Jessica, we love hearing from you. We’re always happy to get suggestions for the root source, the blog and the main Cookthink site. Email us at cookthink@cookthink.com.)

In the meantime, all this talk of figs got me craving them, so I picked up a couple of cartons at lunch. Usually, we eat figs so fast that they’re not around long enough in our house to be used in a recipe. But I’m setting these aside to use in something tonight.

Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Poking around, I noticed that we’re not the only ones with figs on the brain.

I’ve been in San Francisco all week on some business. Of course, I’m also doing a lot of good eating, thinking about why the fog rolls in (and why it’s good for some grapes), taking long walks through the city, and hiking in Marin.

I ate impeccably fresh Alaska salmon nigiri and broiled Kumamoto oysters at Sushi Ran, one of Chip and Elizabeth’s old haunts from life in Sausalito. I stumbled upon Essencia in Hayes valley, and learned how well sweet potatoes, cucumbers and cilantro go together.

Today I’m having lunch with Amy Sherman at A16. (I’m curious about the tripe — maybe Amy will walk me through it.) Then I’m driving over to Berkeley and down to Mountain View to have dinner at Google with our friend Michael.

It’s always fun to be out this way, but I’m really looking forward to getting back in the kitchen and adapting some of this restaurant food to home cooking. More on that later.