It really isn't your grandmother's Joy of Cooking. Why not? For one thing, the recipes have far more calories per serving than in your grandmother's day. Researchers found 18 recipes present in all seven editions of the classic cookbook, reports USA Today, and found that the average calories per serving jumped in 17 of the 18.

"Using standard nutritional analysis techniques, serving size and calorie levels for those recipes, the researchers found that the average number of calories per recipe in 1936 was 2,124, with about 268 calories per serving. In 2006, those numbers had risen to 3,052 calories total in each dish, with 436 calories a serving.

That's an increase of an average of 168 calories in a serving of a recipe from 1936 to 2006. This increase was caused mostly by a change in ingredients (more fat and sugar) and partly due to larger serving sizes."

USA Today says the dishes included brownies, sugar cookies, apple pie, macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff, Spanish rice and goulash.

I have to wonder how much of the jump came in recent years. This San Francisco Chronicle story from 2004 on "portion creep" notes that portion sizes were kicked up in the 1997 edition.

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We have so many fine chefs in our city, but I only think of one of them as "The Chef" -- that would be Dan Ahern of Impromptu, who was immortalized in print with that title a few years back by Shauna James. She's now Shauna James Ahern, so you can see it turned out well.

How well?

So well that Danny is leaving Impromptu to -- I can't believe I get to write this phrase with a straight face for once -- spend more time with his family, in the form of Shauna and their baby daughter, Lucy. He'll also have more time for the cookbook he and Shauna are collaborating on, titled "Dancing With The Chef."

Shauna calls it "a love story, in narrative cookbook form."

"It's about the love of food and the people in the Pacific Northwest who produce it, the love for the daily grinding work of a chef creating food for other people, and the love between that chef and his gluten-free food-writing wife. The book will contain 100 chef-tested recipes, all of them gluten-free, as well as chef techniques for how to become a more relaxed cook."

Full disclosure: I started considering Shauna and Danny as friends of mine after I wrote about her first book in the P-I last year. But I think most people who spend a couple of hours in their company wind up feeling that way.

I'm hoping for more tips in the new book like this guide from the blog a while back, on how to chop an onion. And I hope she wins the battle over whether to include directions on how to prep artichokes.

For the near future, Danny may pick up shifts at restaurants here and there, he may do some private cheffing ... but for the shorter term, Oct. 18 is the last day to find him at the Impromptu stove.

The plan after that? In Shauna's words:

"For the next three months, we're going to play with food, test all our recipes, develop some kick-ass gluten-free baked goods (pasta, focaccia, dinner rolls, multigrain waffles, etc.), and live in food together. We have big plans for how to step up the Web site, as well. We'll be parenting together. And Danny can look after Lucy for three or four hours a day and give me time to write. And then, in the evening, we can give her a bath, put her to bed, and have dinner together before midnight!"

That's a full -- and very satisfying -- plate.

When your fan base ranges from Grant Achatz of Alinea to the crew of Top Chef, when your cooking books are repeatedly referenced as "bibles," what's next? For Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, it was taking on that title for real, with a new book titled "The Flavor Bible." Don't think of it as a cookbook, it's something more like -- not a flavor dictionary, exactly, and not an encyclopedia. Maybe a thesaurus, plus the equivalent of a "friends" list on a culinary Facebook of ingredients.

The book is billed as an essential one for any kitchen library, but in some ways "it is not for everyone," Page acknowledged when the couple was in town last week for a Cooks and Books event. Why not? Because it doesn't have recipes. What the bulk of it offers, instead, are brief basics about the characters of a bazillion foods (open one random page and you'll get grits, grouper, and guavas, jump to another for sunchokes, Swedish cuisine, sweetbreads), along with the ingredients that they can best be paired with when cooking.

The lists of flavor affinities are augmented by commentaries and advice from chefs across the country. (Sage, for instance, lends "a masculine touch" to skate, says Eric Ripert of Le Bernadin.) The likes of Michel Richard and Daniel Boulud and Dan Barber weigh in from the other coast, local luminaries Jerry Traunfeld and Holly Smith represent our area.

Returning from the farmers market with a bunch of chervil, for instance, and wondering what the heck to do with it? The Flavor Bible warns you to use it fresh, not cooked. Its best companions would include eggs and egg dishes, or fish, or salads -- but there are more than four dozen suggestions.

To use this information, you need the confidence to cook without a recipe, one reason I suspect the couple's books are beloved by chefs. But Page and Dornenburg see a broader need for such a resource, as our society (thank you, Food Network) has seen a revival in basic cooking skills and creativity. Moreover, the variety and breadth of ingredients home cooks have available to them has exploded over the past decade. Past books, for instance, might have talked about "mushrooms." Now they talk about shitakes and boletes and matsutake and morels.

More than recipes, the couple thinks, what people need now is inspiration.

They put the book together by compiling a massive database over the course of eight years, deconstructing dishes from the menus of chefs they admired throughout the country. The part I found the most intriguing was their classification system for foods, particularly the concept of the "volume" of an ingredient, something like audibility on a stereo dial. It helped, bringing in these ideas, that their last book dealt with flavor pairings for drinks. "There's so much more of a vocabulary when it comes to wine than when it comes to food," Page said.

The chefs they interviewed for the book openly shared their secrets, said Page -- a nice nod to an overall "strong professional commitment in the culinary field to educate the next generation." The couple's previous books have wound up as required reading in culinary schools.

During the Seattle trip, their explorations included an event at The Corson Building, had lunch at Quinn's and dinner at Poppy. I had to ask what they thought of Poppy, and was glad to see it win kudos.

"We eat out a lot, and we tend to have very jaded palates," Page said, but what Traunfeld is doing is "extraordinary."

We had this conversation, by the way, at Trophy, not too far from their guest spot that morning on KUOW. Does chocolate cake pair well with chocolate frosting and chocolate sprinkles? The answer was a unanimous yes.

Instead of searching out the hot and hip this year, Gourmet magazine specialized in "grand American restaurants that have stood the test of time" for its annual restaurant edition, saying that "in times like these, you want a reminder that some things do last." The list of 20 legendary restaurants included Seattle's Maneki, which opened in 1904 and "continues to put the "home" in home-style cooking." Today's Maneki regulars, the mag said, are "young hipsters of every ethnic persuasion who know a good deal when they eat it."

It's been a good year for Maneki, which was also tagged as an American Classic by the James Beard Foundation. (Don't you wish you'd been there too?) Others who won the Gourmet honors included Galatoire's in New Orleans and The Oyster Bar in New York City. The mag only picked restaurants that opened before 1941, the year of Gourmet's debut.

It didn't seem possible that no-knead bread could get any easier, but Mark Bittman (who first brought Jim Lahey's recipe to the national stage) says he's done it. Today, he printed a recipe for "Speedy No-Knead Bread," rising in only 4.5 hours, rather than Lahey's 14 to 20 hours.

I knew Mr. Lahey wouldn't approve of this, because he believes that the best bread is fermented slowly, with a minimum of yeast. But my shortcut recipe here, which requires just four and a half hours' rising, if not quite as good as the original, can be done in an afternoon. I now make it regularly.

Bittman also tinkered with a no-knead version that uses whole grain flours.

What's next? Easy-Bake Oven No Knead Bread?

For a little more serious political news, the talented Tom Philpott at Grist looks at where John McCain and Barack Obama stand -- from the few specifics he can glean -- on agriculture and agribusiness. His conclusion: "Neither will likely push bold change unless forced to do so."

Cuppie the cupcake takes on the Katie Couric role in Cakespy's latest comic strip. Meet "Baked Alaska"!

For the rest of the strip, go here. And just think, if her friend Bakerella gets involved, people from both sides of the aisle could be eating actual versions of these for election night parties.

My husband apparently read this post on Ethan Stowell's recipes in Food and Wine, because he greeted me at the door with this pan of eggplant parmesan, which turned out to be fantastic. (Full disclosure: He also made the pork posole, but it was bland -- I keep thinking bone-in meat would have improved it.) The eggplant, though, was piquant and saucy, soft in all the right places and crisp where it counted. Cheesy, but not gloppy. I'm renaming it "The Spouse Pleaser."

"If eggplant parmesan in restaurants was like this, I'd order it in restaurants," my husband said. I'm guessing it's pretty good if it ever hits the menu here.

You could just click through to F&W, but I'll spare you the trouble. Save the energy for the recipe, which does take some time:

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Consumer Reports has a rating system for cereals, and tells us that "there is at least as much sugar in a serving of Kellogg's Honey Smacks and 10 other rated cereals as there is in a glazed doughnut from Dunkin' Donuts."

And that's not all. The look at 27 cereals marketed to kids found that:

"two cereals, Kellogg's Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp, are more than 50 percent sugar (by weight) and nine are at least 40 percent sugar. And that's not the only issue. Although Kellogg's Rice Krispies has only 4 grams of sugar per serving, it got only a Fair rating, largely because it is higher in sodium and has zero dietary fiber."

Cheerios topped the CR good list. The mag was also happy with Kix, Honey Nut Cheerios and Life. Note that most kids serve themselves more than the "serving size" as defined on the back of the box.

As with restaurant calorie counts, none of this is particularly surprising. All it makes me think is, next time I'm craving a donut for breakfast, maybe it won't seem so outrageous.

The list of contestants for the new season of Top Chef is out, and the Northwest was a shutout. I guess all we can hope for now is to wait for their full names and see if any at least used to call Seattle home, a la Zoi. You can flip through the contestant bios here to see if you know them or would want to know them -- the 17 newcomers include William Shatner's personal chef.