Having strived for this long to make ambrosia, the food of the gods, I guess it was only a matter of time before I made the food of angels. A friend was leaving a couple days ago and requested angel food cake, so I pulled up a recipe from Epicurious and baked it.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had store-bought angel food cake, and if I have, it wasn’t memorable. A lot of people like it because it’s completely fat-free. It’s almost entirely egg whites and sugar and air, making it lighter than most cakes. Sugar and vanilla are pretty much the only flavorings as well, making it a mild backdrop to pretty much anything. In fact, there’s so much sugar that touching the finished cake made my hands as sticky as cotton candy would have done. When I served this, people raved about the floaty texture and the crumbly, caramlized crust, declaring it the best angel food cake they’d ever eaten.

As for me, well . . . I was underwhelmed. It tastes like fat-free cake. Initially, I thought the dry, sandy feel in my mouth meant I had done something wrong, but apparently that’s what angel food cake is like. The airiness seemed perilously akin to that of styrofoam, and the sweetness was cloying. This wasn’t helped by the sugary strawberry syrup, and I found myself saving the tart slices of out-of-season strawberries for last.

I guess ultimately it comes down to this: I’m just not that into angel food cake. I like my cakes dense and chocolatey, thick as fudge and rich as Gates. Kind of like, say, devil’s food cake.

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I was thinking the other day about macaroni and cheese. There’s the stuff from the box, and of course, my very serious version. It’s been a while since I’ve had any of them, though, because they’re a little too rich and heavy to be eating regularly. I thought about just making a very small batch, but on a whim, I did a search for “healthy macaroni and cheese” and came across this recipe from Martha Stewart. It was titled, appropriately, Healthy Macaroni and Cheese.

I really respect Martha and kind of love her too, although I think she was completely guilty. That’s why I think the revelations at the end of the Head Waiter How-To video are kind of tragic. If you don’t want to watch the video, she basically says that her husband left her because she made him hold the wall of her gingerbread house up for four hours. Also, when dressed as an accident victim for Halloween, she took a break from giving out candy to look at herself in the mirror and ask, “Why would anybody want to be married to you?” She relays this jokingly, but then says, “I’m not kidding,” and that I believe. I wonder if that was the same husband who cheated on her with Erica Jong.

Failed marriages aside, Martha makes a mean mac and cheese, and she does it without resorting to diet products like fat-free cheese. She replaces a lot of the cheese with butternut squash, which gives the pasta a lot of flavor but a very unphotogenic color. Ricotta makes it smooth and creamy instead of a roux. I’ve never been a big fan of cheddar, so I replaced it with the feta I had leftover from the squid dish. It gave it a salty tanginess that blended well with the squash. Feta isn’t a very melty cheese, so the pasta didn’t have the squishy gooeyness that regular mac and cheese has. In fact, it was more like baked pasta with squash sauce, which is what I called it in my head.

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I first became aware of squid through the classic Disney movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. In the movie, the squid does not look very appetizing.

In fourth grade, I disected a squid. This happened outside on the blacktop next to the playground instead of in a classroom, presumably to minimize the mess. I only remember that the squid had a beak, which I washed and took home with me for unknown reasons.

Somewhere along the line, I grew to love fried calamari. As a rule, anything fried is delicious, but squid has a texture that stands up to the thick crispness of the batter. I also grew to enjoy sautéed squid in vegetable dishes, albeit not as eagerly as I did the fried calamari.

For my sophomore year of high school, I became a vegetarian. This had something to do with proving my strength of will to myself, and when, after a year or so, I decided my point had been made, I stopped. In the meantime, I spent two weeks in Taiwan learning Mandarin. All the people given the task of feeding me were flummoxed by my vegetarianism, since even most Chinese vegetable dishes have a little meat in them. Because I was a pesco-ovo-lacto-vegetarian, however, I was served a lot of squid. By the end of the trip, I had sworn it off entirely, with the exception of my first love, fried calamari.

A couple months ago, when visiting Caleb and dining at a Thai restaurant, I made a startling discovery. Not only did I like scallops after years of disdain for them, but my taste buds had forgiven squid and welcomed them back to the gastronomical fold.

Two nights ago, we had Chinese fondue. This consists of a broth simmering in a fondue pot in the middle of the table and various raw ingredients to cook at one’s own discretion, before dunking into a mixture of soy sauce and egg and eating. One of these raw ingredients was squid, but we didn’t finish it all. Knowing that it wouldn’t last long in the fridge, I searched for a recipe in which to use it, and was delighted to finally have an opportunity to cook from Saveur. I love Saveur, with its fancy European spelling, its beautiful photography, its less conventional approach to food writing. It’s not that practical, though. Most of the recipes are pretty esoteric, requiring special ingredients and tools and looking like something from another world. Which is, of course, part of its appeal.

When my usual go-to sources failed me, however, I found that a catalogue of unusual recipes was perfectly suited to an unusual ingredient. This dish involves simmering the squid for a longer period of time, which is the only alternative to cooking it very quickly, and I found it tender and juicy at the end. I only had 1/4 pound of squid to begin with, so I reduced a lot of the ingredients. I wish I had reduced the amount of jalapeños much more than I did. I had initially intended to leave them out entirely, but I found a small can of jalapeños in the pantry. Stupidly, I added the whole can. It’s a feat of the dish’s tastiness that it was still edible. I ended up picking out all the peppers, but it was still unbelievably hot.

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