Last week I started cooking for all the daddies in my life. The only one missing from my list is my very dearly loved father, Andrew Benson. He died in 2006 so I went wild making tons of treats for everyone else in his honor. My list includes my husband, Andrew Fox; my ex-husband (The Baby Daddy), also named Andrew (I can't seem to get past the first letter of the alphabet) but people call him AJ; a whole bunch of my girlfriends' husbands - Kevin Eyer, Jim Capparell, Mark Stollsteimer, Chris Summa, and David Kelly ; Joseph Griffin, a sweet, wonderful man who manages the barn where we keep Cecilia's horse, SpyBoy, so he's kind of like SpyBoy's Daddy; Lawrence Adams, my next door neighbor, and father of Cecilia's best friend, Julia, whom all the world, including her parents, refer to as my second child because she pretty much lives with me.

I have a reputation for being ridiculously ambitious in the kitchen. Every time I am in the midst of some insane project as pots and pans are stacking to the ceiling I vow never to do it again... and then, of course, I do. Hence, the Father's Day Project has been much like many others. Cecilia and Julia "helped" me make Spicy Abita Root Beer Jerky, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bacon Cookies, and Abita Beer-Orange-Cardamom Carmel Sauce. Their "help" largely involved sampling and bitching  about me bitching at them until they abandoned me to return to their seemingly never-ending South Park/That 70s Show/Scrubs/Skins/Futurama/My Name is Earl marathon.

This afternoon we will all gather for the Father's Day Potluck at my grilfriend Tiffany (AKA T-Bird or Bird)  Eyer's urban farm in Gentilly.  Katrina flooded the home she shares with her husband and children so they jacked it way up in the air, bought some of the properties around theirs, ajoined all of the back yards, sold the other houses to their friends and enclosed the whole thing with a fence, creating a large compound complete with horses, chickens, dogs and cats. What a Scene.