The tragic meal

I write in my cookbooks. The exuberant star is the finest possible accolade.

"Approved by children" is another high success notation. It happens to be written on a light and frivolous chocolate mousse which, once made, I must defend with an old shoe until the proper serving time has arrived.

Somebody's birthday and the parenthetical date is a lovely message for a person of particularly sappy sentiments to find and find again and again.

But there are, burning in my brain and carved into the pages of some of my culinary guidebooks, various emphatic NO! NO! memorandums which save, hopefully, my family from enduring a known flop a second time.

Cooking involves virtue. It requires faith and hope and honesty. It entails love, naturally, in one of its most practical forms.

It takes one's attention. It is one of those tasks which is simple but not necessarily easy.

It also involves risk and various sets of statistics, just like baseball. Therefore, occasionally, the cook enters a slump and issues forth the culinary misfire, the public, pivotal error. This person needs patience and forgiveness. Encouragement. Humoring.

In my life, I have perceived that bad cooking occurs in bouts or sieges, as do plagues and epidemics. They are triggered by an initial incident and then, sometimes, they expand and must run their course.

I, for example, have failed many times making jello. Perhaps the print is too fine. Or it could be the nerve assault of those electrifying artificial colors.

Perhaps I don't buy it in the first place because I tend to resist boxes. Who knows, but it has turned out runny, rubbery and with large, wet, sore-looking areas on the surface that make it appear quite unappetizing even to my junk-hungry offspring.

I am proficient at bread, yet I once baked a single loaf for three hours or more, forgetting that the grand aroma filling the house was a cue to eventually remove it from the oven. This gives you an attractive and unusual doorstop but nothing for sandwiches. Nothing for dinner. Nothing but hooting.

As children, my sister and I once made a cake for a special occasion. Very exciting. I can still see our imagined result -- a beautiful chocolate cake topped with dear little pilgrim candles, a spotless kitchen, the surprise and delight of our parents, the milestone of it, our first real cake without supervision.

The cake, mercifully, turned out as we planned. It was solid and dark and came out of the pans without significant protest.

The frosting, however, called for a mysterious commodity which we -- a literal pair -- interpreted to be the sugar with which one made confections. And surely that was us in our jolly kitchen, joined at the helm of our own ship with the wonderful rain enclosing our house and our parents gone and just the cat Jasper, watching us with his blank approving stare.

Perhaps if our recipe had come out and just said powdered sugar, we might have spent less of that late aftenoon in the fruitless frenzy of attempted salvation, and our beautiful offering might have had icing on it in classic whirls and peaks.

It might not have been, instead, thinly slicked over with a gooshy, opaque sort of liquid, very much like the mud which we knew was beginning to ooze out into our favorite play place under the snowball trees, where our riverbank and transport system was built.

It might not have slid, slowly and inexorably, along with the catatonic pilgrims, into a large desparate pool on and around the festive platter we had so carefully chosen for the occasion.

Oh well. Worse things have happened. But never enough to develop enough generalized angst to keep me from my experiments.

I have scorched, undercooked, overbaked, overstirred, underwhipped a broad array of items in the pursuit of expertise.

I have dropped whole jars of herbs into soups. I have somehow used up a quantity volcanic ash, cleverly bottled with the spices.

I have offered raw food people, guests with a tendency to sneer, beans and cornbread. This was awkward.

I nearly killed a young logger with my salsa once. He was bold but naive. This started me writing witty and sentimental epitaphs. Limericks. Odes which he did not appreciate.

In the name of thrift and morality I have done too much with soybeans, burdening my innocent brood with vegetarian patties made with brewers yeast and the residue of homemade tofu.

These little items were loaded with roughage and protein. Clean food that made us feel hollowed out and breathy.

But I do learn. For one thing, I experiment with one thing at a time now. This ensures that there will be something edible forthcoming when there are hungry people looking my way.

And I keep in mind a couple of sure-thing recipes, that use a minimum of ingredients. Home-Baked Tortilla Chips are such a thing.

All you need are flour tortillas and a few minutes. Get the best tortillas you can, to start with, looking for slightly irregular shapes and small, dark blisters. This tells you they were made with the right dough in the first place and then rolled rather than stamped out like cookies by someone who didn't care.

The label will tell you where they are made and the closer the better. Freeze any you don't plan to use within a week.

For 4-6 people, use one dozen tortillas.

Preheat the oven to 450.

Get together a small pitcher or bowl of salad oil and a pastry brush, the wider kind makes this go quickly.

Brush one side of all the tortillas in the stack, then turn the whole stack over and brush the other side. Now, with a scissors or with a very sharp knife, cutting about 4 tortillas at a time, divide the short stack into 6-8 wedges.

Place these, in a single layer, onto cookie sheets. I use all the sheets I have and stack them up crosswise so they are ready to take turns in the oven. Once this is done, I can go off and do other things with the timer in my pocket, while the baking goes on.

If you like, just before baking, sprinkle each batch with kosher salt, which is coarse but not huge, and/or sesame seeds.

Bake 4-6 minutes or until golden and slightly crisp.

Allow to cool. Serve with salsa or any other dip you would use with crackers.

Simplicity itself. So be dauntless. Make hors d'oervres and then something wild for dinner.