Mostly, it means the brook behind our house is flooding, filling the meadows with water. Not a bad thing, mind you. I'll be glad of it come July when the wildflowers flourish. But right now, it just means mud. And lots of it.

So it's a good day to stay inside and make cookies. The kind that empty the pantry: maple syrup, coconut, wheat germ, tahini, oats, chocolate chips.

Wow, are they good! Pour yourself a glass of milk. Whole milk. I mean, what's the point of low-fat? You saved, what?, thirty calories? Really? That's going to save the world? Listen, if you're going to make these cookies, go for broke.

But before we get to the recipe, a confession. (It is Lent, after all.) I like crunchy cookies. Period. I'm not a soft-cookie guy. Yes, I learned to like a few of the gooey ones for our chocolate cookie book. But mostly, I'm all about the crunch. Because I'm all about the dunk. You realize we're back to the milk discussion, right?

OK, Let's get started.

So today's from-the-sea curry is a different take, a twist on the last one on the blog: a different curry paste, shellfish, some green beans. This one's also more aromatic--and more luxurious. It's just the thing as winter morphs into spring.

I've been puzzling on this and I think I've come up with one delicious solution. Delicious enough that Bruce and I have had it for dinner now on two Tuesdays running. I had to share it with you: a skillet sauté for salmon fillets with potatoes and olives that get crisp.

Yes, even the olives. You really let them go. The potatoes, too. Until you have this crisp, salty bed for the salmon. Pure bliss. I sucked mine down last night with a glass of Coffaro Fresco. (If you don't know about the fantastic wines from the Coffaros in California, then check them out here. They'll drop ship right to your house. Plus, Pat's a pleasure to get to know!)

OK, so here's how to get the job done.

Once the pizza was cut into its pieces, Bruce drizzled each with smoked olive oil from The Smoked Olive.

Holy cow. Or olive. Or whatever.

If you don't know this stuff, you must. Now. It's a decadent, fantastic drizzle, great over a slice of this pizza--or any pizza. We used the Sonoma bottling, a little heavier on the smoke, with a nice fruity finish.

No cooking with it. Rather, dot it over the top. Of just about anything: scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, creamy goat cheese, a piece of pan-fried fish. In other words, it's a condiment, like a high-flavor, expensive olive oil, but with smoke! Check out the full line of products and order your own bottles here.

The Smoked Olive recommends using it over shucked oysters. I can't wait!

I've been thinking about it a lot. Pondering what's real and what's not. And trying to come to terms with why I see the high-falutin' pretension of so much of the current foodie world--let them eat grass-fed cake--so darn overbearing, so silly.

Yes, Bruce and I are real-food mavens. Yes, we do such crazy things as buying our beef from a local farm (see it here), our pork from our local CSA (see it here), and our eggs from several little roadside stands near us. Bruce spends most of the summer canning. Witness how many jams and pickles have appeared on this blog.

But then there's the silly stuff, the macho stuff: making your own sauerkraut, killing a wild hog, and showing the world your chest hair. Or the Earth Mother stuff: wearing your Birkenstocks, nurturing your own vinegar, and cultivating your whole-grain pantry. Neither is a real answer to the food dilemmas strafing the developed world.

Here's one of my answers: a real-food pizza that's not a make-it-yourself. Everything here is from the store. Everything here COULD be made at home--if someone had the time. But in the end, everything here is good and real, nothing fake, no chemical chicanery, no excess fat or sugar to mask half-hearted flavors. Just delicious.

Let me tell you about the person behind the first-place prize: Nancy Newsom. That's her behind the counter of her general store in Princeton, Kentucky, a store that's something out of a time past.

Nancy cures and smokes some of America's best artisanal hams: American country hams, sometimes mistakenly called Virginia hams or Smithfield hams, dry-cured wonders that hang in open barns for months, slowing curing like prosciutto crudo from Italy, but distinctly American, bold and full-flavored.

By the time the hams are ready to ship, they've dried out almost completely--but oh, what's left. Flavor compounds you wouldn't believe. Deep, complex flavors have developed in the meat--like the same molds in roquefort cheese. Some of the proteins have also bloomed, the same ones that make the milky, white spots in Parmigiano-Reggiano. You have to soak a country ham in water to reconstitute it and to get the salt out of the meat--all before you roast it. But holy cow! (Or pig!) Nancy's hams are a wonder indeed. So much so that she was the first American ever invited to speak at the international ham conference in Spain. (Yes, there is one.) And one of her hams is the only American ham ever invited to hang in Spain's ham museum. (Yes, there is one. If you know anything about Spain, you know they're serious about ham.)

Our first-place prize is a $75 online gift certificate for a Nancy Newsom ham--or for anything else you might want to order from her store. You might want to try her ridiculously good, two-year-aged prosciutto. You can have your selection drop-shipped right to your house. If you want to know more about her, check out her website here.

OK, with Nancy's country hams and her ridiculously quaint store in mind, here's the contest: names will be draw from a hat, raffle-style. How do you you get your name in the hat? Simple, like this:

You get your name in the hat ONE TIME if you take a picture of the book, HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER, and post it anywhere online (other than on this blog)--that is, facebook, twitter, your blog, etc.

You get your name in the hat TWO TIMES if you take a picture of YOURSELF with the book and post it anywhere else online: facebook, twitter, your blog, etc.

You get your name in the hat FOUR TIMES if you write a review of the book (be nice!) and post it to amazon, bn-dot-com, facebook, your blog, another blog, culinate-dot-com, seriouseats-dot-com, tumblr, etc.

At the maximum, your name can be in the hat SEVEN TIMES.

After you post your bit, send me a message via this blog. (The message box is just to the right in this column, down the page a bit. This way I'll have your email to contact you, but your email won't be in a public space, like on the comments thread to this post.) Make sure I know where your post is so I can find it.

The contest ends Sunday, 4/28. Bruce and I will draw the names and announce the winner on Monday morning, 4/29. Each person can only win one of the prizes.

And what can you win?

FIRST PLACE: a $75 (US) online gift certificate to Newsom's country hams. (That'll get you a 15-pound ham!)

SECOND PLACE: two of our ultimate, single-subject books, signed however you want them. I'll send you a list--Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book, Ultimate Potato Book, Ultimate Peanut Butter Book, etc.--and you'll tell me which two you want.

THIRD PLACE: a jar of Bruce's homemade strawberry preserves. 

So get obsessed. You could win the best of American artisanal products: a Nancy Newsom ham.

So. . . .

Lately, I've been obsessed with cardamom, my new favorite "warm" spice (as in "warm in the body," like cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace--not hot, and not herbaceous).

I've been putting it in chocolate cake, in ice cream, in chicken sautés, in just about everything. I was reading some cookbooks this morning and found a recipe for sour cherry cardamom clafouti. I almost passed out.

Last week, probably to stifle my cardamom whining, Bruce morphed the Indian sweet, kaju makrum (cashew macaroons) into ridiculously crisp wafer cookies with pistachios and, yes, cardamom. I swear, all week I didn't eat any sweets during the day so I could have a small stack of these with a glass of milk after dinner, my little-kid dessert while the Olympics were on. I was undone. They're that good. Try them. Promise.

I'd like to pull that talk front and center. To that end: yesterday, I found this on CNN. Check it out: a challenge to eat only "real food."

I don't know the blog or the blogger. But I have a feeling that the whole thing is wrong-headed in a particularly egregious way.

It's that first step: throw out everything in your pantry that's processed.

What in the world does that mean?

For example, rice. OK, let's say that white rice is processed food and therefore nixxed: branless polished grains. (I'm willing to grant it for a moment--but only a moment.)

So what about brown rice? It's "processed." To remove the hull. Once, under the aegis of Eating Well magazine, I took a trip to the Lundberg's fully organic rice operation in northern California. I've watched the grains go through the mechanization to become what we know as "brown" rice. (All rice is "brown," right? It's just a matter of removing the bran to make it "white.")

No doubt, brown rice is "better" for us. It's got lots more beneficial fiber, much more magnesium, and even rice bran oil, which in some studies has been proven to lower LDL cholesterol counts.

But does that really win any arguments? I mean, we've had twenty years of nutritionists telling us that stuff. Have people changed? I think not. Because life is more nuanced than that. Sometimes, a dish just needs white rice. I love brown. Really do. Ask for it when given the choice. Except in sushi. Blech. Or under a particularly aromatic Szechwan stir-fry. Blech again. I'd rather have white. Because the inherent sweetness in the white rice is simply a better balance to the other flavors: the wasabi, the fish, the Szechwan peppercorns, the chiles, what have you.

So where do you draw the line?

Because no matter what else you think about rice, brown rice is "processed." No doubt about that either.

Chocolate? Processed.

Coffee? Processed.

Tea? Processed.

Oat bran cereal? (Had it this morning.) Processed.

But are they real food? I say "yes." For a variety of reasons. But I'd have to throw them out to eat only some strict definition of "real food." I think I won't. But I'd like to know what you think.

In the comments to the canola oil, the über-fabulous Jennifer McLagan called me out on canola oil. Bully for her! And I fully agree, as I replied in a comment. Then Celia talked about her journey to get the food she and her family eat closer to its natural state. Mad props to her, too. But I'm not without my own contradictions. I think there are jarred pasta sauces, for example, that are real food.

Or are they? Where do you draw the line?

Or not so simple at all.

You probably know that Bruce and I have been hard at work on a ham book. But we've also been working on a seven-step plan to get all the processed food out of your life. That book, named after this blog, has proven so important that it's being published in two months! I've barely finished writing it and the publisher is crashing it out onto the market. Crazy. You can see more here.

I'll tell you more about it in the weeks ahead. I sort of consider it the anti-Pollan, anti-Waters book, mostly because I'm done with that hyper-elitism in all its forms. Our food dilemmas and obesity problems are not solved by sneering. Rather, they're solved by careful, slow, even steps.

Canola oil is a case in point. It was a big surprise when we looked into it.

I also know that simplicity is rarely simple. I guess you don't get to be my advanced age--almost 50 (how the heck did I let THAT happen?)--without knowing that simple things rarely are. Good relationships, good food, the good life--simple, right? Um, hardly. It's not so much studied as constructed. Or nurtured. Which takes time. And effort. And so is not simple.

All of which leads me to this pilaf. It's a little complicated, needs a little nurturing, but is so darn good. Here's how it goes: