Yes, it's another post about cherries. But, honestly, what did you expect? Cherries are everywhere at the moment.

About this time every year, a little Depression Era song makes its return to the food blogoshpere: "Life is Like A Bowl of Cherries." One can bet that this song title will be borrowed for somebody's cheerful blog post about the fruit almost as assuredly as on can count on those swallows invading the poor, decrepit Mission San Juan Capistrano.

And, much like those damned birds, this song (words by Lew Brown and Buddy De Sylva, music by Ray Henderson*) is as chirpy as they come.

Not that that's necessarily such a bad thing. I mean, who couldn't use the occasional reminder to shrug one's shoulders and enjoy life?

Just have a look-see at the lyrics to see what I mean:

Life is just a bowl of cherries

Don't take it serious

Life's too mysterious

You work, you save, you worry so,

But you can't take your dough

When you go, go, go.

So keep repeating, "It's the berries."

The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life to you were just loaned,

So how can you lose what you never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries,

So live and laugh at it all.

Why is it that Depression Era songs cling to me (please excuse the stone fruit metaphor) like fuzz on a peach? It's probably my chronic broke-ness. And the fact that I have a penchant for music that was born about the same time as my parents. Whatever the reason, this song is stuck in my head.

I am taking this as some sort of sign. Therefore, I am also taking its message to heart.

No longer will I over-complicate my feelings toward cherries. I will do my best not to think of them as symbols of transitory beauty, who in desperate need to retain their youth, turn to alcohol for support. Instead, I will eat them and enjoy them as they come. And when I dip into a brandied one or two come winter time, I will no longer view them as Helen Lawsons-in-a-jar.

Nor will I focus on the seedier side of the cherry pit-- that hard, bitter thing that can crack a tooth or choke a baby. I will not think of them as cyanide-laced stones that, if eaten in large quantities, offer up confusion, anxiety, vomiting, and death. Nope. I will dream of cherry pit ice cream instead.

From now on-- or, at least until cherry season is over-- I am going to focus on the now, the keep-it-simple, life-does-not-suck message of this glorious little song.

And I will live and laugh at it all.

Fresh Cherries with Ice and Mint

Why ice and mint? Why not ice and mint? This is how we serve them where I work. The ice gives the natural tartness a fighting chance against the sweet, much in the way that serving a big red California Cabernet Sauvignon at cellar temperature allows the inherent acidity of the grapes to balance out hugeness of the fruit (and masks the high alcohol). The mint is crushed and torn and shredded over the ice and cherries so that, as the ice melts, the mint's essential oils gently wash over the fruit, giving the cherries a subtle little extra somthing-something.

It is simple genius, if you ask me.

If you haven't tried it, you should. If you don't want to try it, what on earth is wrong with you?

Ingredients:

A bowl's-worth of cherries. Bing, Brook, Ranier, etc. Whatever you prefer. Whatever is currently available.

A handful of crushed, fresh ice. Please do not use ice that has been sitting in your freezer for months. If you do, you'll be washing all sorts of interesting flavors over your cherries.

A few leaves of spearmint, cleaned.

Preparation:

1. Wash cherries, place in large bowl.

2. Add ice to cherries. Toss gently.

3. Tear mint leaves and sprinkle over cherries and ice.

4. Serve immediately and eat without a worry or care. Unless, of course, you crack a tooth or ingest an extreme amount of cherry pits. In that case, I advice you to contact your local dentist or poison control center, respectively.

*On an interesting note, these fellows (either in collaboration with each other with other artists) gave us a selection of more food-related songs like "You're the Cream in My Coffee," "Animal Crackers in My Soup," and "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Every %@*&-ing where I go. The store windows, the hideous wreaths on the bumpers of SUVs, the Holiday sweaters, the music (please, God, make it stop). I'm already up to my turtleneck in Holiday Crazy and we're two weeks away from the big day.

It's a tough, depressing time of year for a lot of people. The days are short, the nights are cold, and the pressure of putting forth good cheer is enough to drive anyone slightly mad. Alright, it's enough to drive me mad. I promise not to speak for anyone else.

I should just count my blessings and remember all of those things I said a was grateful for over the last holiday.

One of the things for which I am currently grateful is the fact that I do not live in Sweden. It's a gorgeous country alright, with gorgeous people and whatnots, but really. If it's cold here, it's colder there. And the nights? Long. Really, depressingly long. I sometimes wonder how they get through the winter in one piece.

Apart from the medicinal use of sunlamps, one major way the Swedes cope with the winter blues is alcohol. And lots of it. Of course, this is how a lot of people cope with the Holiday season. It's a double-edged sword, really, (do I need to mention that alcohol is a depressant?) so you may want to proceed with caution. May.

This winter, one of my several drinks of choice is a nod of solidarity with my half-frozen Swedish brothers and sisters-- glögg. It's festive without trying too hard, it's simple to make in large batches, it's warm, it's delicious, and, with the help of a little brandy, it really helps take the edge off the Holidays. And, of course, it's just plain fun to say. If you're not quite certain how to pronounce it, just sidle up to a Swede-- they're a friendly lot.

Glögg

Makes about 6 servings

One of my favorite things about glögg (apart from its remarkable warming powers) is the fact that the Swedes have included bar snacks right there in the drink. By adding almonds and raisins that (usually) sink to the bottom of the glass, you've got one more reason to say "bottoms up" or, if you really want to carry the Swedish thing a bit farther, "skål."

Ingredients:

1 bottle (750 ml) dry red wine. Don't be foolish enough to use one of your best bottles. One that is merely drinkable will do.

1 cup brandy

12 while cloves

6 to 8 cardamom pods, lightly crushed

2 cinnamon sticks (you may break them into pieces, if you like)

1/2 cup sugar

4 to 6 strips of orange zest (which may be used later as garnish)

raisins and blanched almonds for garnish

Preparation:

1. Combine wine, brandy, cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium head for about 15 minutes. Do not boil and do not over-simmer or else you will cause too much of the precious, medicinal alcohol to evaporate. Stir in sugar and orange zest.

2. Sprinkle raisins and almonds into the bottoms of however many glasses you're using.

3. Strain glögg through a sieve, saving the orange zest for garnish, if using, pour into awaiting glasses, and serve hot.

Anxiety is a snowball rolling down a hill. That's a cliche, I'm aware. I don't know how to accurately frame it in the right physiological terms, but I know how it feels, and it feels kind of stupid -- like a clumsy cliche. I won't pull out the $30 workbook a therapist made me buy years ago, but I'll do my best. It starts with an errant thought -- a rickety wheel sliding off a safe train into the imagination's most dangerous corners, flooding the body with false signs of warning, gaining momentum in thin shards of half-remembered facts and hearty swirls of lunatic fiction. Regardless of the worry's origins, sometimes, rarely, it's so bad, you can't really sleep. You wake up preposterously early, eyes so open they might shoot out of your head. You drink tea and watch the sun rise, but everything feels terribly wrong. A leg won't stop shaking. There are a million things to do but you can't start doing any of them. Something is stuck. You're overwhelmed, consumed, pouring over whatever is troubling you at the expense of every other concern -- so focused, in a sense, that you're distracted.

Sleep is important from a health standpoint, but it's also a little boring. I don't mind losing a little bit of it here and there -- especially for a good cause. Appetite, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether.

I was a senior in college the first time mine was threatened. The catalyst was utterly mundane, the sticky, drawn-out fizzling of a relationship that probably shouldn't have started in the first place. Suddenly rudder-less, I flipped out, laid low, wore the same jeans for two weeks straight, and stopped eating. After a couple of days, I started again, very gingerly. I subsisted almost entirely -- two meals a day, pretty much every day -- on packages of Lipton's noodle soup. I'm not sure why I decided to submerge my strain and sorrow in salty dyed broth and slippery strands, but in retrospect the choice makes sense. Soup suited an emotional invalid in need of rehabilitation. It was also austere, a form of self-doled punishment for my melodramatic pining. I couldn't eat anything else. I tried to have a veggie burger with fries at an on-campus dining hall. The first bite was unswallowable, dry and mealy. The rest of the sandwich fell apart in my hands. The ketchup was a sickly puddle, like melted make-up. The thumb-sized fries were soggy, unpalatable to begin with. I pushed the plate away and went home for soup. Towards the end of the episode, I began gussying up my steaming bowls with vegetables smuggled from the dining hall salad bars. I'm not sure what actually eventually caused me to calm down. I just woke up one day feeling better.

If dieting, not convalescence, had been my aim, the two weeks of biting nails and sucking soup would have paid off. Somewhere along the way, I had lost ten pounds. Once-tight pants now had a flowing, Hammer-esque cut. I bought new jeans. And I started eating real food again. It was February in Ohio, in a tiny town just ten minutes from Lake Erie. My house-mates and I threw a barbecue on the snow-blanketed hill behind our sprawling white house. The air outside was wet, cold, and invasive, but everyone bundled up. I wore a silly apron and grilled myself a shark steak I'd purchased from the nearby IGA. It was fishy but I relished it on a bun with ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and Srirachi sauce. I started drinking again. Cans of beer have never since tasted quite so good. I had one after another, and I thawed out, and saw a little bit of amazing in everything.

These two weeks, I'd later learn, were a preamble, a canape, really. I had a problem, but I didn't know it yet. I soon graduated, from slipping past traumatizing break-ups to fumbling with larger, more complicated issues that sadly proved much more of a challenge to my increasingly ambitious cooking and eating habits.

I'm not looking to spill a lot of ink on the subject of my own kookiness. This is the first time I've written about any of this, and it's kind of pleasant doing so from a fresh perspective. All the same, I'll keep it pretty brief. The second time I lost my appetite I was almost 25. I'd been living in San Francisco for a few years and working at my second paralegal job for nearly six months. I had a girlfriend and a big house full of friends deep in the Mission District. I was home for the holidays, back in Kentucky, preparing to fly to New York City to celebrate New Year's Eve with friends. I ate a shrimp quesadilla with mango salsa a few hours before I was supposed to head to the airport. Thirty minutes after the last bite, a wave of weird nagging pain crashed through my stomach. I didn't feel sick, but it hurt. I felt light-headed and frantic. The feeling passed. As my plane circled LaGuardia, I nibbled a few peanuts, and it returned. Two hours later, I was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at a Polish restaurant with a friend. I contemplated the platter of boiled cheese pierogies, cabbage, and applesauce set before me. I took a bite. Something in my belly bucked. It was as if my innards were caught in the the throes of a coursing electric current. This time, the pain stayed -- fluttering in the depths of my gut like a little molten bug -- and my whole body couldn't help but shake -- just barely, but almost constantly once I realized the sensation in my stomach wasn't leaving. I gobbled antacids but they did no good. I didn't want to eat because food made my stomach hurt more. I wasn't sick in any other way, but I worried I was dying nonetheless. I ran up a bad, bloated cell phone bill calling and texting my girlfriend back in California. Each day, from the second I awoke, until I flopped down to sleep hours later, my gut was twisted in painful knots. More importantly, my thoughts had gone haywire. Regardless of what brief bug or extended twinge of indigestion had triggered my symptoms in the first place, anxiety had now taken over. I had an ulcer. I had cancer, of the stomach, perhaps the colon as well. I had been infected with a rare form of evil bacteria that was swiftly chewing its way through the lining of my worn-out tum.

At some point, not long after my return to California, the stomach ache faded, but the next year was still a hard one. I'd awakened something. My brain were on high alert, constantly combing my body for symptoms on which I could fixate. Any ache, cough, or unsettling sensation was an excuse to worry, and when I worried -- regardless of what I was worrying about -- the pain in my stomach returned, accompanied by dreadful premonitions, sweats, and heavy heart palpitations. I fretted about everything, usually medical concerns, like incurable cancers, aneurysms, devastating hemorrhages, and drug-resistant infections, but my fears truly knew no bounds. My doctor wanted to shoot me. I'd bump my head hard and think brain damage was imminent. I'd walk through Union Square and worry about stray bullets, the live-action equivalent of cartoon pianos dropping from the sky in Toontown. I hated driving because all I could think about were hideous mangled car accidents. I jumped from worry to worry, living like a sick person when I was not sick. I missed too much work, staggering around the house, wrapped in a towel, behaving like a consumptive mentally unsound very minor poet stricken with mysterious ailments for which there were no known medical solutions. I needed leeches and balms and wizardry.

My psychological state governed my eating habits. When I sensed no symptoms, I dined out and cooked fancy meals. When I was anxious, eating was unappealing, a tough predicament for a lover of food to face. Above all, I had to find foods that wouldn't torture a nerve-wracked digestive tract. I ate no Mexican for months and months at a time, which was sad considering my proximity to El Metate, El Farolito, and La Torta Gorda. Nothing spicy or rich agreed with me when I was feeling anxious. I ate turkey sandwiches and, yes, soup. Rice was okay, so long as I didn't cover it with curry, gumbo, or a lake of hot sauce. I had to stick to the bland and uncomplicated food groups. Even vinegary salads made my weak stomach throb.

One of my most persistent concerns was food poisoning -- probably because I'd never to my knowledge suffered from it. I'd known a guy in high school who'd almost died from E. coli in his blood, and I'd read some things online that I, knowing my tendencies, should not have read. One night that year, my girlfriend and I ate squid stuffed with chicken at a Thai restaurant. After a few bites, a slice down the middle in the right light revealed that the filling of one crispy bulb was slightly raw. We met friends at a bar afterwards, but the image of the glistening under-cooked meat, pinkish and pale, studded with nuts and spices, stayed with me. I felt feverish, and headed home early to sweat out my worries.

Obviously, my anxiety about illness wasn't just about illness; it was largely a reflection of other concerns. By preoccupying myself with symptoms I had to address in the moment, I could avoid thinking about real issues -- my relationships, my family, figuring out something to do with my life -- and my worrying about imagined problems actually ended up impeding my ability to find solutions to potentially legitimate ones. I was obsessed with dying -- from uncommon illness, in a freak accident -- because it was a reliable distraction, and the fact I couldn't consistently eat well made everything worse. Food is wholesome and sustaining, but my relationship with it at the time kept it framed in an unhealthy light. Food was something that had once made me very happy. I was tired of surrendering it to an unpleasant fantasy realm, where my brain waged war against my body, and limited what it could enjoy. That pissed me off as much as anything about my predicament, and I finally decided to do something about it -- with some counseling, a gym membership, and plenty of tacos. I wanted to spend my life eating, and in time, maybe make a living doing so.

Yes, I know. The word of the hour is recession but, frankly, I don't know the difference. Nor do I much care, since I've never had much money to lose anyway.

On Tuesday, my cousin Stephanie sent me an odd little collection of cookbooks from the 1930's-- all three of them product-related (Heinz 57, Royal Baking Powder, and Crisco). They made me giddy. And then, out of nowhere, my friend Lyle hands me a book called Cheerio! -- a cocktail book from 1930. Published in New York in total contempt for the Volstead Act. If ever there was a time one needed a drink, it was the 1930's. Unless it was the 1940's, of course.

On Wednesday, Amy Sherman commented that online traffic to low-cost ingredient recipes has nearly doubled in the past three months.And yesterday? While soaking in a bathtub full of gin before work, I noticed, as I flipped through the pages of Saveur magazine, that this month's issue is featuring items like Mock Apple Pie, Rabbit Stew, and pasta, pasta, pasta.

In case, you didn't know, that's poor people food.

Is the American mindset taking a turn towards the cheap? I think this will be rather fascinating to watch. History repeating itself often is. If one doesn't mind reruns, of course.

In the meanwhile, I think I'll just pour myself a Cholera Cocktail, put a little Al Bowlly on the Gramophone, and wait for all this anxiety explode into a delicious panic.

Have a lovely weekend.