We've been out driving looking at lights (to a chorus of Entropy Girl's "oh, wow! wow!"), the kids have been bathed and tucked into their new Christmas PJs (reindeer for the Boy Wonder, snowglobes for Entropy Girl), the Night Before Christmas has been read and the babes are snuggled into their beds after one last check of the Norad Santa tracking radar. As I type this I am nibbling on a carrot trying to make the best reindeer-esque teethmarks I can and being sure to leave as many crumbs as respectable on the cookie plate. The stockings are filled, the presents wrapped and piled precariously below the tree, leaving ample room for train tracks and one slightly too curious cat.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

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I don't think I ever told you about the Worst Dinner I Ever Made. No, really, it was. Even Brainiac, who has endless tolerance for the worst of my offerings, shudders when he remembers.

It went like this: We were living in Binghamton, New York during the crazy and extreme winter of 1994/95, an unhappy situation. I was out of work and spent entire days dreaming up dinner menus and shopping for the supplies to prepare them at my first-ever Wegmans (a relationship that has since become an obsession). Anyway, on this particular day I had a raging head cold and decided that I would make a chicken soup the recipe for which I had come across in one or another of the many magazines I read. What's better for a cold than chicken soup, right? It's practically canon.

I had a chicken with which I could made a delicious savory broth, and I also ample supplies of carrots, chick peas, rotini, paprika and dried thyme - the remainder of the princple ingredients. And so I set about making broth and then the soup. I even cooked the rotini separately so that it would not become mushy and gummy in the soup while I was waiting Brainiac's return. So I cooked and tasted, cooked and tasted, producing the most wonderful, succulent, herb-scented chicken soup one could ever desire.

Brainiac ate precisely two spoons-ful, earning an evening's worth of my wrath. Why, I stood over that stove All. DAMNED. DAY. Was he not grateful? It's 10 degrees outside, any other man would be thrilled to come home to...blah blah, it wasn't pretty. I ate three bowls of soup just to show him.

Several days later I was casting about for lunch and came upon the leftover. Yum! I heated it up and sat down with a book to enjoy the remainder of my masterpiece.

You know the punchline, right? It was utterly inedible. In the haze of congestion and cold medications I used waaaaaaaay too much thyme and waaaaay too much salt and waaaaay too much paprika. Of course Brainiac couldn't possibly have eaten it, the soup was totally nauseating. And the poor dear didn't even tell me.

Yesterday I felt the beginnings of a cold that, so far at least, is promising to be a doozy. Ever mindful of the Lesson of the Chicken Soup, I very cautiously prepared tonight's dinner, a variation on coq au vin purportedly derived from the recipe that the Sainted Julia herself once used. Luckily, the dish doesn't call for too much ancillary seasoning, it's pretty much brown the meat, dump the stuff, simmer. Foolproof, even through a Nyquil mist.

Start by cooking about 1/2 cup diced bacon in a wide-bottomed stockpot (Julia's recipe called for lardons, something described as boiled bacon - but I am not Julia, nor Julie Powell, for that matter, and I say to heck with it). Remove the browned bacon, leaving the fat in the pan. Brown four good-sized chicken thighs and a couple legs (I removed the skin from the thighs)in the bacon fat. When nicely browned on all sides, season and add a cup of diced onion, cook until onions are translucent. Sprinkle the onions and chicken parts with two to three tablespoons of flour, stirring and turning the chicken so that the flour is distributed throughout. Remove the pan from heat and add 1/2 a cup of any non-sweet red wine you happen to have lying around, a cup or so of beef broth, two tablespoons of tomato paste and the cooked bacon. Cover and gently simmer over low heat for 20-25 minutes.

We ate this wonderful, warming dish with egg noodles to sop up the extra gravy and steamed broccoli. Brainiac, rightfully suspicious of anything I cook while sick with a cold, ate two helpings.

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