Ann LeBlanc's THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE

Whomst among us hasn't been here: you're the very best cheesemaker (curd nerd in the parlance) outside of Earth's gravity well, famous for your unique, creamy and full-flavored products on every space station, asteroid and shuttle plying the solar system (and possibly beyond? You really don't pay much attention to matters of trade; you've built yourself a body perfect for stirring, curd cutting, measuring and tasting, and hacked your brain decades ago so you can tune out absolutely everything else in the universe and just concentrate on making that beautiful RedOrion), you've got an entire asteroid hollowed out, moved into a stable orbit, kept at the perfect temperature, humidity and gravity and inoculated long ago with the perfect population of beneficial microorganisms to assist in the fermentation and aging of your famous handiwork... and then suddenly one day you happen to hear a snippet on the news about how a big shot businessman has announced that an asteroid he owns and manages for his silent and reclusive genius of a business associate is going to be let go and allowed to crash into the Sun. It will burn up with all its contents in about two weeks. Wow, sucks to be that sucker. But hey wait, which asteroid was that again?

Such is the plight of Millions Wayland, cheesemaker of, in, among and to the stars, or at least the bodies orbiting this one, whose life's work is currently careening sunward on a collision course for financial reasons beyond her comprehension, in Ann LeBlanc's stunning little novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. And of course there's no time to handle this the way most artisans of her caliber would; she's going to have to cross a rather large volume of outer space to even begin to lodge a complaint, and meanwhile there's these batches of cheese she just got going here in her workshop (not in the hollow asteroid-cum-cheese cave, not aboard the space station where that irresponsible jerk of a managing partner is, either, but another third place where crewed spaceships don't even go, just automatic cargo shuttles that periodically bring in supplies and bring out fresh wheels of space cheese to transport them to be aged in the cheese cave with the suddenly curtailed life span).

So, Wayland does what any of us would do: she makes a perfect cognitive duplicate of herself, memories, personality, connectome and all, and shoots it in a tight-beam to the space station in near-Earth orbit where the restaurateur, who didn't even bother to warn her about her cheese cave's imminent demise before she heard it on the news, lives and works and maintains contact with the financial, military, civic and religious authorities of Earth. She -- or rather, this newborn version of herself -- is going to give that chucklehead a piece of her/their mind, even if she has to confront, head-on, the scene of the greatest trauma of her past, and of his -- and of all the other versions of themselves that are out here in space.

Versions? 

Yep. This is a trans-human soap opera, kids, and all of the characters except a few heavily armed thugs recently come up from Earth are cyberpunk interations of one of the first people ever to decide to upload himself to the Net and start making custom bodies for himself -- work bodies with extra arms, business bodies that look good in suits and are focused on the bottom line, party bodies for various recreational pursuits (mostly food and sex) and oh, by the way, before most of the copies of this character came into being, the original made a male-to-female transition, which is why I've mostly used female pronouns in this post but switched to male ones for this paragraph. There is trans-humanism and then there is trans-humanism. Which I should maybe call trans-trans-humanism? Except that would be silly? I mean, some of the bodies containing versions of the Millions character are more like giant robot millipedes than anything else, and are capable of directly metabolizing starlight and thrive in conditions of hard vacuum, because at some point in Millions' life they decided the best way to explore beyond the solar system would be just to become the spaceship!

Which is to say that, title aside, this book is only superficially about cheese, though in addressing the question of whether or not future batches that Wayland Millions may make in the future, without her cheese cave, could be regarded in any way as the same cheeses she was making with it, The Transitive Properties of Cheese takes on lots of bigger questions about how far the society in which she lives -- and the one she left behind when she left Earth -- are going to be willing to stretch the idea of "humanity," and how much that is even going to matter.

All in just over 100 pages. Because LeBlanc is a goddamn storyteller, who makes every sentence count for "world building," character development, plot advancement and the conveyance of exquisite sensory detail. In an age of 800-page doorstops, half of which seem to be devoted to that first (and least interesting) element of a piece of fiction, LeBlanc's talent for the tight and pithy novella is cause for considerable celebration. And The Transitive Properties of Cheese deserves to sell many, many, many more copies than any of those doorstops. What are you even doing? Go! And while you're at it, have a look around the publisher's site. They have a lot of good stuff there.

Helen Oyeyemi's GINGERBREAD (Narr by the author)

Once I thought I had a hard and fast rule that no novel narrated for its audio edition by its author could be as good as one narrated by a professional narrator.* But that was before I heard the soft, sweet, not quite-childlike but nearly child-pitched tones of Afro-Surrealist (and possibly Post-Exotic) queen Helen Oyeyemi. I've immensely enjoyed settling down each night to let her tell me the weird and wonderful bedtime story** that is Gingerbread.

Caveat auditor/caveat lector, though: you're likely to wake up the next morning with a fierce craving for the titular treat. Myself, I prefer sliced from nice loaf, with a good glop or two of lemon curd, over the biscuit/cookie variey, but you do you. 

Anyway, this magical, disturbing and bizarre little novel, what?

We first encounter our triple protagonists***, Margot Lee, her daughter Harriet and her granddaughter Perdita, in plain old 21st century Yorkshire. The younger two share a flat on the top floor of a seven-storey house far too old and ill-regarded to have an elevator. Margot lives elsewhere; we don't find out for a while where,  but it's just as banal a setting as the flat. So far, so dull. 

How we meet them, though, is through Harriet's famous-or-infamous gingerbread, her primary means of communication with her fellow humans. If she is courting you,  or worried that you're angry with her, or suspects you and she are in any way at odds, she will present you with a tin of what a "gingerbread addict" once described to her as tasting like Revenge:

It’s noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d get away with it,’ the gingerbread addict said. ‘That heart, ground to ash and shot through with dars of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon.

"You are phenomenal. You have ruined my life forever, " the addict had continued."Thank you."

Now, I make a pretty great loaf of gingerbread (and am pretty good at fruit curds, too) but nobody has compared it to a feeling that satisfying. So, first of all, goals. And second of all...

It's this really just a book about baked goods? And if so, wouldn't that be a bit, I dunno, cozy for a book covered here at Kate of Mind?

Oh, ye of little faith!

For the Lee family, at least two generations of them as we know to start, are not native to Yorkshire. Or to England. They might be said to be natives to Europe, but only if your idea of Europe can stretch to accommodate possibly imaginary, or at least notional countries that at one point were officially recognized by just four other nations in the world, but now maintain any kind of relations at all only with the Czech Republic. Such is Druhástrana, a land where one may be sentenced to public execution for unspecified crimes but where few actually die this way, because a stay is granted if one of the spectators at the event of imminent death agrees to take full legal and moral responsibility for the criminal in future by marrying them. For instance. 

This is how the Lee family got its start, when Margot impulsively volunteered to wed a very handsome crook -- despite the fact that she had observed him to be weirdly in cahoots with another female spectator. Before we know it, the not very happy pair, Margot, the daughter of a fabulously rich family of dubious scruples, and her formerly condemned bridegroom, are reduced to eking out a living on some rather poor farmland and living in a rather poor house, but welcoming a beautiful daughter, Harriet. And then, before we know it -- but that would be telling. You see, there are many mysteries behind Harriet's talent for gingerbread and her recipe, and of how Perdita came to exist at all. And these are the mysteries we are here to explore alongside Perdita as she embarks on a mission of discovery via... baking up a batch of her mother's famous gingerbread with an extra, unknown but possibly psychoactive ingredient, eating it all up and... slipping into a coma? Surrounded by the apparently sentient but laconic combinations of dolls and houseplants that have grown up alongside her while guarding the corners of her four-poster bed?

Well, yes. What part of "Afro-surrealist" would possibly lead you to expect a standard and cozy book about baking? That would be boring. And Oyeyemi, while she sounds gentle and soothing and only slightly amused as she narrates her tale, is not here to bore anybody, least of all herself.

Also, that whiff of fairy tales that a title like Gingerbread gives off for most of us? That's no accident, and one in particular is evoked by the name of Harriet's sly and not entirely well- meaning best friend, whose faintly flour-dusted fingerprints turn out to be all over the middle Lee generation's life, and thus those of her mother and daughter as well. 

Along the way through this story of mother's and daughters and gingerbread, Oyeyemi has left odd little ambushes of insight that wait to attack us like packs of wolves, or wolf pups at least. An "authenticity theme park" full of ersatz gingerbread girls here, a professor with wise bons mot about the writing of Emile Zola there, a lesson or two about what we will and will not accept in exchange for doing what we do better than anyone else around another corner... and, strangest and most confrontational of all, the idea of a near-utopia in which every kind of equality between people prevails except for economic equality. People may get bored with lives in which sexes, races, religions, sexualities, degrees or attractiveness or physical ability or intelligence are all on a level playing field, the land of Druhástrana seems to have concluded, as long as the chance of "unexpected abundance" (often in the form of some kind of lottery winnings) is present. Would that be so? Oyeyemi doesn't give us the answer to that; we must decide for ourselves. 

All this and at least one seriously adorably funny sex scene!

I have but one complaint about Gingerbread, and that's about the ending, which throws in several intriguing but unexplored new plot elements and characters at us by way of teasing a still-to-come reunion between Harriet and her old Druhástranian friend and on the whole feel like they've come from some other book entirely. It's a book I'd very much like to read someday, but I don't feel like it was a great way to end this one. 

Nonetheless, I've added the rest of Oyeyemi's output to date to my endless TBR, and will look forward to new work from her with anticipation and pleasure, like a freshly baked loaf of something dark and complex and delicious straight out of the oven. 

*Though one must always make allowances for the likes of Podiobooks and any similar efforts by aspiring authors who are trying everything they can to get attention for their beloved book babies, especially nowadays. Too many authors who have truly enriched my life got their starts that way, and some, like Scott Sigler, have never abandoned this practice. 

**If you're OK with tripping balls in your dreams that night. 

***Played in my imagination by 1980s-era Joan Plowright as Margot Lee, Juliette Stephenson as Harriet Lee, and Joely Richardson as Perdita Lee, because I spent many years with only a handful of movies on VHS to my name and my very favorite, watched until it wore out, was Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, a film I still haven't tired of, by the way! And yes, the text makes clear early on that the Lee women have "pearl gray hair and bark-brown skin" but I couldn't help it. Once the idea leaked into my head, it couldn't be budged.

Mathias Énard's THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS GUILD (Tr Frank Wynne)

I never realized, before plunging into the fray of Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, that a work of fiction could have terroir. This is not the kind of sentence I ever imagined myself writing, or taking such pleasure in having written, but it's the best way to describe this novel, at least insofar as I understand the concept I'm evoking here. 

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, hereinafter referred to by your lazy blogger as TABotGG, teems with the kind of rural characters that a reader might will be terribly romanticized -- but stubbornly refuse to be, who persist in their Rabelaisian crudity (the works of François Rabelais, and of François Villon, echo throughout this text even before the title scene begins quoting these guys outright) and gossiping ways as our main point of view character struggles to document their way of life for his anthropology dissertation, all while realizing that he doesn't really even understand his own. 

David Mazon, late of the academic world of Paris, has done field work before, but this time he's really got to dig into his subject and get his hands dirty (beyond his futile battle with the weird red worms infesting the bathroom of the hut he's renting from a local farming couple). But of course, like most academic fish-out-of-water types, he's realizing that his course of study and lack of experience outside of studenthood hasn't even prepared him to research well. He spends most of his time playing with the farm cats who adopt him, and playing Tetris, at least at first.

So,  TABotGG could easily fall into cliché and bore us to tears as yet another supposed sophisticate finally learns about real life from colorful locals -- but it never does. We get a certain amount of arrogant bumbling on David's part, and of deserved comeuppance, but Énard is much more interested in pulling us deep into the soil and its produce here, avoiding also the tiredness of bewailing how every particle of dirt in Europe has passed through innumerable human bodies over the centuries, Europe is a bone heap, etc: Énard is here, instead, to celebrate this. And, in the process, to hint rather gently at the responsibilities of stewardship these facts impose on the agricultural communities who have made all of this possible. But only gently. No preachy environmental polemics here!

Instead, as we follow David through his rounds of interviews and tours and trying of his hand at the odd farm chore -- and David turns out himself to have quite a bit of character, as we see early in his story when a winter storm knocks out power to the village and he resorts to stealing candles from a church for the benefit of a near stranger who is stranger than he knows (we'll get to Arnaud -- oh, Arnaud! -- in a moment) -- we are invited to feel the course of waters through the soil and the decomposition of bodies, and the nutrient cycle, but, again, without being lectured about it. 

Meanwhile, we get to know lots and lots of characters, and not just in their current incarnations; we're a bit in Eastern philosophical territory here, as, upon a character's ordinary or dramatic or untimely or actually pretty funny death, we follow his or her soul, unstuck in time but very much confined to this geography, through karmic cycles of lives as people and animals of other eras in the region. For instance, David's wormy nemeses have human stories, too.

This is best explored through the character of Arnaud, whom we first come to know as the poor, neurodivergent young man whom the locals think is fun to get drunk and make him do his one seeming party trick of being able to rattle off a historical precis of everything of significance that ever happened on a particular date. We learn later in the book that there's much more to this seeming fixation and... look, I would read a whole book just about Arnaud. Arnaud is the best. But this is a book about a banquet, according to the title, right? A banquet held by the people who start up the process of converting the meat puppets we walk around in for a few decades, back into soil.

And these guys know how to party.

"...as was his wont, he filled the glass to the ringing brim until the surface of the wine was slightly convex, which he checked, stealthily approaching the glass with the wiles of a Sioux warrior, chin resting on the tablecloth, as though the precious liquid must be caught unawares before it should flee: once again Martial Pouvreau managed to ambush the wine’s meniscus; with pursed lips and an inhuman slurping noise, he drank off a good two centimeters of Chinon in a single draft before lifting his glass by the foot, with airy insouciance."

Oh, the banquet scene, the novel's capstone and center and longest (and most exhausting) chapter by far. I initially complained a bit about it to a few of my book-nerdiest friends, who all agreed that it's a bit much and a major tonal shift that can feel out of place. It is, however, the title scene, in which a hundred or so funerary professionals from all around the greater area of western France (or it might be the nation, excluding those from the cities?) come together for three days to discuss business a little and eat and drink a lot. Traditionally, these three days are a time when no one dies so that the gravediggers and cemetery caretakers and embalmers and hearse drivers and whatnot can let their hair down, and boy do they ever. We are treated to careful and meticulous details about everything they eat and drink, to their shop talk as they guzzle, and to their over-the-top feats of public speaking in which they quote and paraphrase France's earthiest literary figures.

“Of a sudden, darkness fell upon the battlefield below. 

“‘Gendarme, an eclipse! The darkest shadow has surprised our armies!’ 

“‘Not so, Commander, ’tis the giant’s schlong that blots out Phoebus! His tumescent pork sword is big as a billboard!'"

Which brings me to translator Frank Wynne, one of the greatest to ever do it, and who had his work cut out for him in rendering many versions of spoken and written French, prose and poetry, into something like their equivalents in English; as he shares in a terrific translator's note at the end, for instance, he  cleverly resorted to rendering one character's outré and vaguely archaic dialect... as Scots. 

It totally works, by the way. In a scene in which a judge is struggling to understand her testimony in court, even with the help of a local "interpreter."

But so, this isn't, like, Doc Martin  (for all that I could see Martin and many of the other residents of Port Wenn at work and play here) but a French novel by the same guy who sent Michaelangelo on an imaginary sojourn in the Ottoman Empire; trigger warnings galore, here. There are bawdy and sometimes gross jokes. There is a very vivid description of rape and its aftermath. There is cruelty and negligence and lots of talk of creepy crawlies and rotting corpses and inept gunplay and cheerfully lusty sex. But there's also a nice love story or two and many depictions of healthy marriages and friendships and fellowship and good food and well-turned earth. 

Basically, TABofGG is a hefty French novel about hobbits. It's a book I didn't even know I needed, but find that I most certainly did. From now on, whenever I contemplate the Shire, I shall not imagine them with those rich English countryside accents, but robust and fruity French ones, starring Gerard Depardieu as Bilbo Baggins and Romain Duris as Frodo. Your mileage may vary. But I think you'll have more fun if you do. Give it a try, non?

Marie Ndiaye's THE CHEFFE: A COOK'S NOVEL (Tr Jordan Stump, Narr Edoardo Ballerini)

Cuisine is an art form that still resists duplication. A painting can be made into prints, as can a film; a book can be re-printed in a variety of formats but still with that original text. A recorded performance can outlive its performer(s). But a culinary artist's specialty? That can barely be approximated, a recipe published, yes, but is it the same when someone else, following mere written instructions that only poorly communicate the scents, sounds and colors occurring in the process, attempts to make it? Or if the chef/cheffe has to make it AGAIN long after he or she has grown tired of doing so, for, in order for a new person to experience this art, the artist has to create it all over again from scratch. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci having to paint that famous smile anew every time someone wanted to see it!

Then, too, there is a huge chasm between the appreciators, fans, of great or even just good, cooking, and those of any other art form. Only perhaps aficionados of pornography feel the same tinge of shame that lovers of food for its own sake either actually feel or know they are expected to feel; gluttony and lust are both among the seven deadly sins, after all. And making a meal for someone is perhaps as intimate as titillating them sexually, for in the realm of the art of cooking it's pleasure and not mere consumption of calories to sustain life, that is the object of the preparation and consumption of food. 

Which is all to say that the life of the woman known only as The Cheffe* in Marie Ndiaye's novel is more fraught with ethical and moral issues than it is with the kind of cutthroat competition and tests of skill and endurance that we more usually associate with the restaurant business, with the professional kitchen. Anthony Bourdain: The Novel this ain't. Though it has glimpses, perhaps, of Michael Pollan: The Novel. If Pollan had a creepy stalker trying to stage-manage his life from behind the scenes.

We learn of the Cheffe's childhood poverty and unpleasant early education, all the steps of her rise to prominence as that rare thing, a female chef in France, through the unctuous narration of one of her assistants, a man who would gladly have been her lover had she any interest in such a thing,  and whose feverish idolization seeks a kind of possession of her anyway. He claims to be the only person who ever really understood her at all, to have known her better than anyone else ever did, but of course it's the Cheffe emulation that lives in his head that he tells us about, even as he expresses complaints on her behalf about how misunderstood she was. Voiced by actor Edoardo Ballerini doing his best Jeffrey Coombs impersonation, his every word is fawning, admiring, exacting but also more than a little creepy. He's younger than his idol by quite a bit but there's still something Humbert Humbert-ish abouut him, though it's a Humbert who genuinely is, instead of just wants to believe so, the submissive in the relationship, as he constantly revels in her moral superiority to him, and of course her greater culinary gifts and her status as his employer. 

A bit comically, the narrator, who refuses to see a single flaw in the Cheffe, sees nothing but flaws in the one person who may know the Cheffe even better than he does: her daughter, who is almost exactly his age. 

The venom Ballerini imparts to descriptions, even casual mentions, of this daughter reaches levels of absurdity that perfectly complement the poetic adoration of his perfect goddess of a boss, only barely letting escape here and there any hint that maybe the daughter, whose greatest sin in his eyes is disloyalty to her divine mother, might have a story of her own to tell of the Cheffe that isn't quite so flattering.

Hilariously, he constantly accuses the Cheffe of speaking of her daughter with the exact same refusal to find fault that he uses to speak of her, never once noticing the blatant projection and hoping that we don't, either, always perfunctory apologizing for mentioning it and rushing to return to the subject of, not so much cooking itself as the sublime meditation and the moral universe in which good cooking can take place. He has no sooner stuck another knife into the idea of the daughter than he's off again expounding on the Cheffe's commitment never to waste ingredients or to disrespect either the animal a kitchen worker is dismemberment or the kitchen workers themselves.

The result is a bit of a stifling read, this account of an obsessed man obsessing about the object of his obsession, anxiously micro-managing our every impression or idea about what's going on, but it's still also such a glorious story of life and art and food that you keep reading, or listening, anyway. Truly, this is a book that will make you hungry, will tempt you to blow that diet you started in January while I was indulging in tamago sandos in Japan.

But we never get to enjoy the literary food porn for long before our narrator is yanking our attention away from the food like a stern host who is saving those dishes for more important visitors, even as he makes us doubt their existence; the Assistant goes down in my books with some of the all-time great unreliable narrators. By about a third of the way through the novel, his status as an unreliable narrator really starts to sink in; I found myself speculating that this whole story is a bit of slight-of-hand, meant to distract us (again I think of Humbert Humbert) from, perhaps, an actual crime or two,  and not just crimes of the heart on the part of our boy. Neither of the women of whom he so passionately speaks ever makes an actual appearance on stage, as it were. Both are just figures he manipulates as he tells the story, the one serenely engaging in various acts of creation and kindness in his memory, the other maligned and despicable in his present account. Is this really "a novel of cooking" or a heavily disguised confession? 

Have I just been reading too much crime fiction lately?

It would be interesting to someday read a counterpart to this novel that is more truly a character study of the Cheffe as she struggles for and wins her place in the still deeply sexist world of fine cuisine, with the tremendous pressure and discomfort of fame and being misunderstood through that fame, with the values of her dignified but bohemian parents who raised her in simple and, our narrator insists, strangely happy poverty but have no wish to benefit from her success. She overcomes these obstacles and more, but in this book we only see her indirectly, an elegant insect trapped in the amber of a dude's imagination. Which is maybe the whole point of this book. I bet Ndiaye herself has had a few guys like this narrator in her life. I think most of us have. 

Meanwhile, parts of the Assistant's strange post-Cheffe life have crept in. He seems to be sort of hiding out in a very posh retirement village he is technically too young to live in, spending wonderful days on various terraces in the kinds of endless parties that cannot but remind me of those in J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, a novel I did not expect to be thinking of in reading this book. A sub-plot involving an approaching visit to him by a suddenly announced daughter there becomes so prominent in the last quarter or so of the book that it starts all but breaking up paragraphs about the Cheffe without really seeming like it's ever going to have anything to do with the title character. Many reviewers have complained about all of this as an annoying distraction, a diminishment of quality on the part of critical darling Ndiaye, but if one understands that this is the story, not of the Cheffe but of another's hijacking of her legacy, all of this material snaps into place. The Assistant confides to us that he's never told his new friends and neighbors that he had a modest culinary career in the shadow of greatness and gloats over the pleasure he takes in being always given their own inferior efforts in that direction to try and how their condescending assumptions about his uneducated palate (more projection on his part, of course) amuse him. It all leads us further into the labyrinth of his telling of the Cheffe and her life as we wonder not only what became of her beyond those quiet late nights with him in the kitchen of her famous restaurant (a fait accompli from The Cheffe's earliest pages so this is not a spoiler), but how he came to retire so early and in such splendor. 

This is my second Marie Ndiaye novel, and my first read for my follow up to January in Japan, February from the French (I'm focusing not merely on novels from the nation of France, but from throughout the French-speaking world, so I couldn't call it February in France). If my public library were quicker about buying stuff I request, or I were more in funds, I would be in great danger of just letting this turn into Marie Ndiaye Month. It's a bummer that I can't. But I console myself that I've got some Virginie Despentes and Yasmina Khadra and Balzac and Collette and more on the pile. It should be a pretty great month here at Kate of Mind!

Matt Wallace's ENVY OF ANGELS

So, if you've always wanted to know more about the pink slurry that is formed by varied and largely unknown means into chicken "nuggets" or if you think there's not enough speculative fiction about the highly competitive world of professional catering, OR if your favorite H.P. Lovecraft story just happens to be "The Festival", well, you're slightly nuts but Matt Wallace has you covered anyway, though not so much that maybe you deserve it but rather that you absolutely deserve it and the extant sequels already come and coming down the pike and ready to violate your little eye-holes.

S'all right? S'all right.

But also.caveat clowns. Possibly worse than Pennywise clowns. OMG clowns, etc

But so, Envy of Angels is the first entry in Wallace's Sin du Jour novella series, which focuses on the eldritch adventures of the owner and staff of a catering company with a very unusual (even diabolical) clientele whose tastes require extraordinary effort to satisfy. So, for instance, the crew involved in procuring ingredients are all half Indiana Jones, half Harry Dresden and half Repairman Jack. And yes, that's three halves and what part of "eldritch" weren't you understanding?

This first entry introduces us to a pair of new hires who are immediately sucked into a near impossible effort: finding a way to prepare a meal that tastes exactly like the expertly prepared flesh and blood of an angel but doesn't actually.contain any angel because who wants to kill and cook an angel?

And yes, this leads to adventure and horror and hijinks, because how could it not, you guys? How could it not?

Bonus points for some gawdawdful humor at the end, too. Holy shih!

Paleo Portobello Pizza = Foodgasm

If you're at all like me, no pizza will ever do that is not loaded with mushrooms -- and there are never enough. Well, here at long last is a pizza with sufficient mycological content. It's paleo, too. And, seriously, FOODGASM. Like Harry Met Sally, only there is no fakery. Check it out.

This recipe makes just one pizza to serve one person.

INGREDIENTS:
1 whole portobello mushroom, stem removed
Garlic oil spray (we didn't have any of this, so we made do with a little vegetable oil with some garlic powder mixed in)
1 T tomato sauce
2 T shredded mozzerella cheese
Other toppings as you like (we used chopped black olives and artichoke hearts)

DIRECTIONS:

1. Heat oven to 425°. Spray or brush both sides of mushroom with garlic oil and place on a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake for 30 minutes or until fork-tender, turning over once halfway through baking. Remove mushroom from oven and increase heat to broil.

2. Turn mishroom gill-side up and top with sauce and cheese and other toppings as you would an ordinary pizza crust. Place under broiler for 1 minute or until cheese melts and bubbles. Enjoy!

Big hat tip to My Own Dear Personal Mom (@Casherr on Twitter), who found this recipe in, of all things, an Atkins Diet ad in a magazine.