My brother Chuck sent me an invoice for CRP grass and “forbs” to be interseeded on land in Kansas that my sister and I own. I started by glancing at the final cost — not much — and then realized what was being planted. Black-eyed Susans, Prairie Coneflowers, Coreoposis, Gallardia, Partridge Peas, Maximillian Sunflowers, Purple Prairie Clover.

I have to get out to see these fields — more beautiful than tended suburban plots,

Williams Sonoma sells farming

A trend emerges and Williams-Sonoma is right on its heels.  Now farming comes in a box, cute, neat, and callus-free. (Leather gardening gloves, of course). To make it better, or at least fancier, it’s called “Agarian.” Probably the chickens even smell sweet.

The list of Food & Wine Best New Chefs 2012 was announced recently. There’s the usual smattering of New York chefs and West Coast chefs from Los Angeles to Seattle. And the obligatory Southern winners. Several women were included, which has been unusual in the last couple of years.

But no one from Boston — or even New England. Oh, yes, William Kovel (Catalyst) got a Regional People’s Choice, which is nice but not quite star status. Neither he, nor Jason Bond (Bondir), or a half-dozen more I could name rated the big-time. Even Jamie Bissonnette,(Coppa, Toro) who was last year’s People Choice and is on the James Beard finalist list for New England region, made it.

Boston is enjoying a raging hot restaurant scene and the depth of talent is strong. Why no love from the national stage? Maybe traveling to Boston to sample is not as exciting as Portland — or Dallas? Or even Nashville? Was this really a thorough vetting of the nation’s best, or somewhat more random?

I’ve been having a spate of bad luck — appliance-wise. Well, maybe not so much bad luck as just the passage of time. You know how it goes — you buy a pasta maker or a sewing machine or even a foreign car or a leather jacket, and it soldiers on through the years. You forget when you bought it or where or sometimes why, meanwhile fussing over the gadgets that seem to die almost before they’re out of the packaging — cellphones, Ipods, even laptops. Do toaster ovens ever reach the 2-year mark?

And because you take the warhorses for granted, you never expect the disloyalty, the slap in the face, when they fail. Making tortellini for Christmas dinner last December, I realized that the dial controlling the rollers on my pasta maker was stuck. It had long been touchy, but now it wouldn’t budge. Then, again, I got it in the first months I moved to Boston and fell in love with the North End, so I sighed and chalked it up to age. Then, I started to sew a hem, and my old Viking stalled — irrevocably it turned out — refusing another stitch of service. My PC is pretty much dead, although it lasted much longer than a computer is supposed to.

So then how do you explain — and I hesitate, fearing I’m going to jinx this– the Kitchen Aid mixer than my late mother-in-law gave me at least 25 years ago. Every week, it faithfully churns up bread dough and kneads it. In between, it’s been known to make chocolate cakes, whip cream, and fashion Italian meringue all in one morning. It’s not glamorous, and its only bell and whistle is a sausage stuffer attachment I rarely use, but it seems to be indestructible. Once, many years ago, while kneading a stiff dough, it bounced off the counter onto the floor. I unplugged it, picked it up, put it back on the counter, turned it on, and finished the bread making. It’s the Maggie Smith of mixers. Long may she live!!!

A Martha Stewart-style chicken

NEWS FLASH: Chickens are the pet of the decade. Boston suburban officials who a few years ago could not have imagined allowing homeowners to keep chickens in the backyard are finding the debate a hot topic at town meetings and in city halls. City dwellers who are generations away from even touching dirt, not to mention tending barnyard animals, are checking out whether Rhode Island Reds or those cute little hens that lay blue eggs would fit better into their lifestyles. And the public murmuring about the beauty of an egg laid yards away from the frying pan has become a roar.

Martha Stewart started it, of course, with her designer hens. And it’s always hens that are coveted — the noisy roosters seem to be beloved only by those hens. Author Susan Orleans pushed it along with her tale of being so besmitten by her flock that she found herself in the veterinarian’s office holding an ailing feathered friend on her lap. Now it’s so fashionable that not having a flock is becoming a social embarrassment.

It’s time for full disclosure. I grew up around chickens. My grandmother who lived next door kept a flock, and most of her neighbors did, too. Everyone had relatives a few miles out of our tiny village who brought in eggs. I gathered eggs when I visited my cousin Susan at her farm. Chickens regularly had their necks wrung for Sunday dinner, an event that modern hen owners would find ghastly. But I wasn’t fond of poultry. Maybe it was my grandmother’s rooster that chased me across the yards when I was barely a toddler. He seemed enormous, and had talons and a beak that kept even the largest house cats at bay. I remember feeling sure that some day that rooster would catch me.

But I’m thinking that I might have to reconsider my hen-phobia, or give up my foodie credentials. Can a childhood fear of feathers and beaks be overcome? Can I learn to love the clucks as well as the eggs? Can I, figuratively, cross the road to meet the chickens?

Charlie Trotter

Charlie Trotter has just announced that his 25-year-old testament to obsessive restaurateurship is closing next August.  In recent years, even he admitted business was off a little, but  his reasons are to pursue other interests — a philosophy degree among them. His decision makes one remember both how very famous he was (and is) and what it means to be a chef.

In an era of quickly-minted TV reality show “celebrity chefs,” it can be hard to recall that chefs used to really cook — and to remember that cooking is doing the same movements, the same recipes, the same preparation and clean-up over and over and over. It’s not winning a contest or being the loudest in the room,  but instead perserverance, and as he once told me “just showing up.”

I looked up a piece I wrote on Trotter for The Boston Globe in 1999, when Charlie Trotter’s was a slip of 12 years old, and  the chef came to Boston for a cookbook event (remember when cookbook publishing was important?). He agreed to talk to me, but it had to be at 11 p.m. because he was cooking with Rene Michelena who had worked for him, in La Bettola, a tiny South End restaurant where Petit Robert Columbus is now. That meant that Chef Trotter, then one of the two or three best-known chefs in the US, was hoisting pans and cutting garnishes in a kitchen the size of a closet.

When we talked in the basement office, Trotter’s first words were about the valet service at the restaurant the night before. No one greeted him when he got out of the car, and he thought that was disgraceful. We talked for over an hour, and despite the lateness and the fact that Trotter had been cooking all evening, and would leave for Chicago early the next morning, he could not have been more engaged, thoughtful, and passionate. He’ll take those attributes into his next career. And his example, if not his style of restaurant, should be the plan to follow for the chefs of tomorrow.

Reading Mark Bittman’s excellent proposal to tax soda and other junk food in the New York Times has me thinking: There has to be a way to make eating well sexy. Because as much as I agree with Bittman, charts, graphs, admonitions on diabetes and health care costs aren’t going to combat the magic allure of junk food. Or persuade the food industry, which as he rightly points out, controls the diet debate through its advertising and lobbying power, to change its ways.

Americans are obsessed with using food as an indulgence, as something to get away with. And it’s not just junk food. From the current foodie craze of gourmet calorie-laden hamburgers to Big Mac’s double cheeseburgers, from sugar-laden classic cocktails to Red Bull as a breakfast substitute, from poutine (a Canadian dish of French fries, cheese curds and brown gravy) at the trendy gastro pubs to boxes of Dunkin Donuts at the soccer match to iced mocha blueberry lattes with whipped cream flooding the land, we’re cheerfully adding calories onto calories, from gourmet land to trailer park.  Some of us may have more restraint — or more access to the gym — but it’s not just the cola-dependent poor who need to rethink their relationships with food.

I say tax sodas, fries and whatever else (Bittman was a little murky about exactly what might earn taxes) fat-laden can be added. But until a bowl of perfect green beans minutes out of the garden are as tempting as bacon-laced chocolate ice cream, we’re going to have trouble turning the tide. Who has some ideas on how to rock those beets for the common man?

We ate last night at Bondir, the tiny jewel of a Cambridge restaurant

Mangalista pig

by Chef Jason Bond. His is a short menu but so deliberate and carefully thought-out that it’s a little scary. All the newest, the most cutting-edge, the best-for-you ingredients are there: a bread with seaweed and dried shrimp, handmade burrata, teff polenta, periwinkles, burdock root, sassafras sorbet, triticale wheat berries. You almost need a glossary.

But luckily Bond is not only creative with his ingredients, but a really, really good cook. Lovely, pale green sorrel vichyssoise was velvety on the tongue with just enough hint of bitterness from the leafy vegetable, one of the first in the spring garden. The nutty, dark brown teff polenta provided a good foil for root cellar vegetables, and the morel and mousseron mushroom ragout for little scallops.

The best was an asparagus and calaminth risotto with lobster, mussels, and tiny periwinkles. All lovely, but draped across like a wisp of veil was Mangalista prosciutto, almost all transparent fat. It added a pretty terrific depth to the sea-clean tastes of the seafood, and in a funny way cut through the creaminess of the risotto.

The Mangalista, originally from Hungary and now being grown in the US, doesn’t really look like a porker, more like a sheep. Bond explained, as he talked to us for a few minutes after dinner, that he cured this prosciutto for two years, and that it was almost all fat.

Which was the beauty of it — the flavor is in the fat, and the proof of Bondir’s menu is in the eating.

Last night I dined on magnificent sushi for a cause – Oishii Boston’s benefit to aid the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation victims in Japan. Ting San joined with other chefs, including Dante deMagistris of Dante and Il Casale, Anthony Caturano of Prezza, Michael Serpa of Neptune Oyster, and Luis Morales of Tico, to raise funds for relief efforts.

Oishii sushi

The place was more than packed — a sold out house — and the food fantastic. Spicy pork meatballs with fonduta sauce from Dante;  oysters from Neptune, a spicy Asian-style taco from Tico, and pristine sushi from True World Foods, which supplies many of the sushi restaurants around town. But we found ourselves hanging around Oishii’s sushi bar where chefs, including this very young rockstar sushi chef (below), were putting out tray after tray of simple and irresistible sushi.

Sushi chef at Oishii

(By the way, we gladly paid the $100 each for the benefit — a belated and treasured Valentine’s Day gift to each other).

Johnny cake with smoked trout and caviar

Finding a table for two at 1:30 for lunch should be easy, right? Especially on a frigid, windy day. Even on a holiday Monday. If your destination is Neptune, the sliver of an oyster bar on Salem St. in the North End, don’t take it for granted. At 1:30 there’s a 20-minute wait, and the line stretches through the heavy flaps designed to keep cold off the tables near the door when people go in an out. In fact, Neptune is always crowded, and most evenings, especially weekends, crazy busy. It’s small, and cramped, and so noisy that shouting is the norm, and today at least half of it is freezing every time the door opens. But no one seems to mind, as what seems to be the lone and very hard-working waiter runs back and forth in organized frenzy.

This is a shaky season for restaurants. The South End has seen two big closings. Rocca, led by talented and veteran owners and a TV celeb chef, folded Jan. 1. Ginger Park, with another well-known chef, closed a month or so earlier. There are rumblings about more. Meanwhile, openings pop up like mushrooms after rain. And it’s January. And it’s cold. And it snows and snows and snows.

So how come Neptune is so busy this January day? Neptune has been going strong since November 2004, so owners Jeff Nace and his wife had the advantage of building up clientele and reputation in the fat years. In fact, it’s easy to see that the word has spread beyond Boston when you see patrons toting suitcases out, and the couple next to you is talking about home in Atlanta.

Small helps to fill the place, but turnover matters most — and Neptune’s kitchen staff, working in a closet-sized space, is fast, and the waiter super-efficient. Not to mention the lightning-quick shucker in the window. The menu is almost all seafood, and not cheap, but irresistibly appealing.

And then there’s that feeling that everyone is so happy to be there — to have found a spot even if the two young dudes adjacent are practically in our laps, and the couple on the other side is rather loudly explaining step-by-step their tourist trail  through Boston, and those blasts of cold air recur intermittently. We’re happy slurping oysters, and checking out who’s getting the clam chowder, and who’s holding out for lobster rolls. The feeling of everybody being in this together may be one of Neptune’s biggest and most-enduring attractions.