In Which We Attempt That Baked Icing

I'm not going to lie: the spice cake with the baked icing intrigued me, because "baked icing". I had never heard of such a thing. But I am a person that owns two copies of The Joy of Cooking, 1953 and 1975, so I pulled them out and sure enough, both editions had a baked icing recipe.

The Joy of Cooking, 1953

The Joy of Cooking, 1975

How about that language change around the addition of cocoa? In 1953, cocoa varies the flavor, but in 1975 it provides an exciting new taste!

I made Mrs. Wright's recipe more or less as written, and while it was okay, I don't think I'll do it again - mostly because it's hella sweet. The icing is interesting though - it's essentially a baked meringue topping, spread thinly and baked long enough that it's brittle. Also - it's fragile and a little tricky to get out of the pan - it would probably be best baked in a loose bottomed pan.

If you want to try it, here's a slightly tweaked version of Mrs. Wright's recipe. (I used butter and yogurt in place of shortening and soured milk, added ginger, and left off the nuts.)

SPICE CAKE WITH BAKED ICING

• 1/2 cup softened butter (1 stick) 
• 1 cup brown sugar 
• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk 
• 1 1/2 cups flour 
• 1/4 t. salt 
• 1/2 t. cinnamon 
• 1/2 t. ground ginger 
• 1/2 t. ground cloves 
• 1/2 cup yogurt (not greek)

Preheat oven to 350° F. Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and egg yolk; beat well. In a separate bowl, stir together all dry ingredients. Add flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg, alternately with the yogurt.

Spread into a greased & floured pan (1 8" square, or two loaf pans). Use a parchment sling, or a loose bottomed pan, if you want to be able to get the cake out of the pan in one piece.

• 1 egg white 
• pinch of salt 
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

Beat egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Mix in the salt and brown sugar. Gently spread this meringue on top of the batter. Bake 30-35 minutes. Cool on a rack for 10 minutes, and then gently move the cake to a serving plate.

Time For Dessert (part 3 of 3)

The last two of Mrs. Wright's recipe cards are for desserts that are a little off the beaten path. When was the last time you had a dessert with concord grades, or a baked icing? Indeed, when have you even heard of a baked icing?

If you've been around my blog for a while, you may remember a concord grape pie courtesy of a different neighbor, Ruth. Marian's Concord Grape Crunch isn't a pie - it's got an crust of oatmeal/butter/sugar pressed into a pan, spread with concord grape "filling", and topped with crumbles of the rest of the oatmeal/butter/sugar mix. Of course, true to form, there is no recipe for the filling - once agin, as in so many of Marian's recipes, one is just expected to know how to make a [fill in the blank]. This card's in someone else's handwriting, but I'm pretty sure it's not the next door neighbor Ruth's hand.

I confess that the part of this next and last recipe that attracted me was the "baked" icing. Reading the card, it's a pretty basic spice cake, but the last step before it goes in the oven is to make an egg white & brown sugar meringue, and spread that on top of the raw cake batter. I'm a little intrigued.

I also love the addendum with the instructions on how to sour milk.

I think March will be "make all the things" month.

Time For Dessert (part 2 of 3)

The next two desserts are both familiar and not particularly exotic: Pecan Tassies and a Lemon Loaf Cake. It is possible that I kept the card for the pecan tassies because of another neighbor who always made them (and who, together with her husband and 215 other people died in the crash of EgyptAir 990), but I don't know that Marian got this particular recipe from Sharon. Maybe, maybe not. If you've never had pecan tassies, they are a bit like tiny pecan pies, with a hint towards rugelach since they're made with a cream cheese dough.

There are a million recipes for lemon loaf cakes - and yet, this one spoke to me. Maybe because it's typed? With a pencil direction "For Mrs. Wright"? Maybe because it's got BUTTER (instead of the margarine in other of Marian's recipes - like the pecan tassies)? Maybe because of the precision of the recipe with its admonition to "not beat the eggs". Although, the oven temperature is merely given as "moderate", and when do you add the grated rind of one lemon which "furnishes the flavoring"? I might make this.

Time For Dessert (part 1 of 3)

In all the time that I knew Mrs. Wright, what I knew her for - kitchen-wise - was dessert. It is, therefore, no surprise to me that I kept six recipes for sweets (seven if you include the "dessert" in the jello post).

Today's installment of Mrs. Wright's recipes includes two. The first one confuses me, and I kind of want to send it to B. Dylan Hollis for his take. It includes cooked mashed potatoes, and peanut butter, but after you make a dough with the mashed potates, and smear the peanut butter on, and roll it up, what then? Is it done? Does it need further baking, chilling, anything? Peculiar.

Also it's on a larger than usual index card, which had to be folded to fit in the standard 3" x 5" box, and it's in someone else's handwriting. Where did it come from?

Mrs. Wright was terrific at pizzele. She and my mother would compare notes and my mother's were never as good as Marian's. This is another example of a recipe for someone who knows how to cook. No instructions whatsoever - just a list of ingredients. If you want to be picky, there are two verbs: melt and add. But the proof of pizzele is in the baking. (And I wonder what happened to my mother's pizzele iron...and Marian's for that matter.)

Never Olive Oil

Next up in the cavalcade of index cards: Dressings and Condiments.

Mrs. Wright's raw cranberry relish is much like my mother's - that is, raw cranberries and a whole orange, with some sugar - but it has the addition of a ground up apple or two. I might try that one day.

I think I kept the poppy seed dressing recipe solely for the admonition - in a different hand! - that the salad oil should never be olive oil. It sounds terribly sweet, what with twice as much sugar as vinegar. What would you dress with this? [Nothing. I can't imagine making this.]

And I know I kept the Tomato Conserve card because of the handwriting. Such a beautiful old hand, with the title leaning to the left, and the body copy leaning to the right. Also, this is a recipe meant to be canned, and sealed with hot paraffin. My grandmother, and several of the neighbors, used to can with paraffin, and I remember that satisfying pop when you gently rocked the paraffin off the top of the jam. And of course, you washed off the paraffin disk so it could be remelted and reused. Thrift! The Tomato Conserve, though. It sounds rather like a chutney - tomatoes, lemon, raisins, walnuts - but it lacks any seasoning, and might be kind of boring.

Mrs. Wright's Main Courses

As promised, here are some more of Mrs. Wright's recipe cards. I kept only a tiny handful that fall into the category of main courses - a pot roast, some meatballs, a chicken dish, and a thoroughly gross sounding recipe for tuna on biscuits.

Pot roast might be my favorite. This is clearly the recipe of someone who knows how to cook, and just needs an outline. There is no cooking time, there are no instructions. It's really just fling a piece of meat in the crockpot with a package of onion soup mix and bob's your uncle.

Buzzy's meatballs are similarly vague - do you sauté the meatballs, or cook them in the gravy? I guess you sauté them, because the gravy calls for "fat from the meat". And what makes them Swedish anyway? It's not like they've got lingonberry jam on the side. Like the pot roast recipe, this one's gonna be useless to anyone doesn't know how to cook. (And who is Buzzy??)

I would guess that the Chicken Oahu is Hawaiian in that it has pineapple. Interestingly, though, it's the sauce that's called "Oahu sauce" - and the pineapple isn't in the sauce. In short - you brown some chicken, cook it in the crockpot on a bed of stuffing cubes and pineapple, and then spoon an odd sauce over the top. The sauce is celery, onion and green pepper, simmered in a bit of water, and enriched with sour cream and cream of mushroom soup, and seasoned with a bit of soy sauce. To be honest, the whole thing sounds nasty.

But Tuna on Biscuits takes the cake for nasty. Hot tuna, in a milky sauce, with hard boiled eggs. Poor biscuits. What did they do to deserve that?

All About Jello

For years, really, like (counts on fingers) 18 years, I have had an envelope with a little stack of recipe cards in it. I move it from time to time, not wanting to throw the cards out, but not ready to *do* something with them. You see, they were part of a dumpster-dive haul when the lady across the street from my mom got moved to assisted living, and her house was emptied and sold and torn down and replaced with a shitty McMansion. Lots of the cards are in Marian's handwriting, but some aren't and one's typed and finally today I got them scanned.

Five are for jello or jello "salads". I mean, when was the last time you had jello salad or gelatinized anything?

First up - Cucumber Jello salad. It's definitely in the "not a dessert" category, what with the onion. I'm going to guess that you have to chill it again after you stir in the sour cream and cucumber "cut in tiny chunks"?

Next, another "not a dessert" jello: Tomato jello. Raspberry jello and a can of stewed tomatoes. I mean, I think that isn't a dessert - but what the hell is it? A side dish for a roast chicken? I wonder who Louise Reiss is (or more likely, was).

Moving on, we have two things called "salad" but both skew more towards dessert for me.

Jan's Salad is black cherry jello with fruit cocktail and frozen rasperries - with the option of chopped pecans or chopped apples.

And Fruited Nectar Salad mostly kind of sounds dessert-y - with ingredients like apricot nectar, mandarin oranges, seedless grapes and chopped apple. EXCEPT she's got a note to serve it with mayonnaise...so maybe it's not dessert after all.

Finally, we have Dessert. Just that - the card is titled dessert, the name of the recipe is dessert. It sounds a little like a lemon mousse - an egg yolk custard stirred into orange jello and then folded into beaten egg whites. Honestly, it doesn't sound too terrible. If I had some orange jello in the house, I might make it.

Still to come: meat, condiments & dressings, non-jello desserts.

I did it.

I am feeling reasonably chuffed because tonight I finished Adriene's 30 day FLOW journey - and the last practice was wordless. Yeah, I had to keep peeking at the screen, but yeah, I did it.*

Now, on to February.

*Cue: My Way

Two Truths And A Lie, musician edition

 Jeff Buckley stroked my cheek and told me I had beautiful skin. 

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Lou Reed gave me a scented candle. (Actually his first wife did, but yeah, I worked on something with him.)

26 Days Into A New Year

It’s almost the end of January, but it’s not too late to report on New Year’s Resolutions, is it? Although, maybe they aren’t really *new year* resolutions – because some are short term, and at least one began back in the summer.

1) Last summer, I started learning French in Duolingo – I have a 148 day streak. At this rate, I don’t think I’ll be fluent any time soon, but I like spending a few minutes a day working on my French.

2) A few years ago, my sister talked me into one of Adriene’s 30 day yoga journeys. I’m doing it again this year: FLOW. I missed one day a couple of weeks ago – but made it up by doing two a couple of days later. I missed another earlier this week – and I’ll make it up this weekend. Adriene’s yoga classes are on demand on YouTube, and are mostly about 20 minutes long. 20 minutes of not-difficult yoga before bed has helped me sleep better.

3) In a fit of madness, I signed up for tap dancing classes. It was a bit of synchronicity – someone in my office had spread out 57 pairs of tap shoes on the same day that someone on Facebook posted a link to a class in the town next to me at a time I could actually make. So I borrowed a pair of tap shoes, and I’m working on coordinated noise.

4) Right before the end of December, I saw a Facebook post about a slow read of War & Peace, so I’m doing that too. War & Peace is approximately 360 chapters (different editions are differently chaptered), so it’s a chapter a day for a year. There’s a guy who moderates; he provides a daily prompt for a reader chat, and a weekly sum up. And yesterday we finished book one/part one. 

Daily yoga, daily French, daily Tolstoy, weekly tap, and the daily puzzles* that I was already doing - all that adds up to a lot of regular tasks. But they are all enjoyable and maybe even rungs on a self-improvement ladder. Huh. I don't think I've ever done New Year's Resolutions before - but this year, not only have I done so, I've kept on keeping on. 

* So many puzzles:

• New York Times Crossword (daily in pen, on the train, and usually I follow it up by checking on how Rex felt about the puzzle)
• NYT Wordle (first thing in the morning, results texted to the kid, and occasionally shared more broadly if the grid of blocks is pleasing)
• NYT Connections (also in the morning)
• WAPO Keyword

Annals of Gardening: 5 May 2019

Hmm. The folder of draft posts coughed up this picture of a list from 5 May 2019 - yes, four years ago. What was I thinking?

• I believe I moved the nine bark, and it died where I put it. 
• The leucothoe is happy in its new home; it has more light than it used to, and a stone wall to droop over. It is not the best of shrubs, but I keep it because I dug it up at my mother's house rather a while ago. 
• I planted a ton of Carex pensylvanica, and none of it is still around. 
• The "lawn" is a perpetual disaster and there is a shady sloped area that just will not grow a goddamned thing. I'm ready to pebble it over. (It needs to be a walking path or I could fill it in with things that would be happy.) 
• Dumping/deploying pots happens every year. 

What's on your garden list for today?

Library books and ephemera

Need I tell you of the wonders of library books? Of course not, but I will. They are free (well, but for the modest sums folded into our taxes)! You don't need to give them house room when you are done! Sometimes other people have written bits in the margins (though they aren't supposed to). And sometimes people leave ephemera - a book mark, a ticket stub, a scrap of newspaer, or the checkout receipt if your library system is barcoded and computerized up to the hilt.

I can't remember why, but I recently took Amy Krouse Rosenthal's “Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life” out of my public library. It's lovely and heartbreaking and inspirational and funny. And its form - an encyclopedia, galloping alphabetically from entry to entry - is charmingly idiosyncratic.

Why heartbreaking? This book was published in 2005, and Rosenthal died in 2017 (at 51). In other words, she *had* died by the time I read this, but she didn't know how soon she was going to die, and how early.

DISTRACTION (p. 88)

I recognize that everything I do, from my work to going to the movies to raising children to vacuuming, might also be viewed as just one big distraction- Hey, look over here! And now, over here!-from belaboring the real issue at hand: One day I'm going to die. 

It's one thing to say "I'm going to die" - it's another to up and do it.

How funny? Nuns. Or maybe blue jeans. Or even conversations with strangers.

NUN (p. 149)

A friend sat next to a nun on a plane. He asked her what she missed most. "Wearing blue jeans," she replied.

Halfway through my reading, a prior borrower's checkout receipt fell out. It felt like the kind of random synchronicity that Rosenthal would have appreciated.

My curiosity was, of course, piqued. Usually the slips that fall out of library books are just for that single only solitary book - but here was a receipt with FOUR items on it. I looked them all up.

Besides the Rosenthal, the other items were:

• March, by Geraldine Brooks 
• The Apollo Murders: A Novel, by Chris Hadfield 
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams (DVD), a documentary by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave

I have a soft spot for murder mysteries (even if this one is about space), I recently finished one Geraldine Brooks book, a second of hers is on the to-be-read pile next to my bed, I am quite fond of Little Women, and while I am unlikely to watch a documentary on cave painting, I deeply appreciated the catholic range of the other borrower's library haul of November 2021. And I think Rosenthal would have liked this list as well.

In Which Some Oatmeal Cookies Lead To A Rabbit Hole

Every few weeks, I bake a batch of cookies and mail them off to the college kid. This morning, I was looking for a gingersnap/molasses cookie recipe in my mother's black book, but I got sidetracked by Lady Harlech's oatmeal cookies.

So I made them, with shortening even. After the dough was made, I realized that there is no salt in the recipe. So instead of squishing the cookies with a sugar-dipped glass, I seasoned the sugar with a bit of salt and cinnamon. The cookies were definitely too sweet, and sort of boring. If I try them again, I will use salted butter, and a half teaspoon of salt, and only a half a cup of white sugar. And then they won't be Lady Harlech's, they'll be mine.

Cookies aside though, I started wondering about Lady Harlech. The recipe was photocopied from somewhere, but I don't know where. Google turned up NOTHING tying Lady Harlech to any oatmeal cookies.

I detoured into ChatGPT for my own amusement, and it produced a semi-plausible bio:

Except that said bio doesn't actually track with other information I found about her - like: 

•  She married Lord Harlech in 1969. 
• I don't know where the Guiness bit came from, because her maiden name was Pamela Colin. 
• I think she was born in 1934.
• While she worked for Vogue, it was as a food editor. 
• And I think she's not dead.

The Wikipedia entry on her husband seems a whole lot more sound.

Eventually, I figured out that she published two cookbooks as Pamela Harlech. Both cookbooks (Feast Without Fuss and Practical Guide to Cooking, Entertaining, and Household Management) had been scanned into the Internet Archive, and while one contains an oatmeal cooky recipe, it's not this one.

WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Who Sits On Boards?

An article in the Times about a handful of states that are trying to legislate against ESG investing included this aside:

Keeping an eye on how climate change may affect a stock holding (or the place for a retirement home), or whether a board is made up mainly of white men from fancy colleges, is part of what anyone should consider when picking stocks.

I have teensy bits of money invested in a handful of places, and from time to time, I get proxy notices and an opportunity to vote for directors. I - without researching them - vote only for the women. It could be that I'm voting for horrible people with abhorrent opinions, but I also know that my vote is essentially meaningless and so I persist. Because boards shouldn't be only white men from fancy colleges.

Cracks

My day, two days ago, my Wednesday, was bookended by cracks.

Wednesday, 8:30 am

I am fascinated by the marking paint that touches nearly every bit of the train platform. It’s neon orange, pink, green, and it traces out the hairline cracks that snake hither and yon across the concrete. Presumably someone has a crack filling plan, but to my eye it looks like they should rip up the whole platform and start over.

Wednesday, 6:30pm

I missed my train and had 20+ minutes to kill so I went sightseeing through a bit of the new LIRR terminal at GCT. It’s very clean (still!) and doesn’t (yet!) have that Penn Station aroma of glazed donuts overlaid with beer. It also has some nice huge mosaics. This is a small section of Kiki Smith’s River Light.

At the north end of my train commute, the platform is in high disrepair. At the south end, new construction is enlivened with mosaics.

Cracks, undesired.

Cracks, desired.

There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.

Magpie on Magpies

Sometimes the universe conspires and magpies come at you from all sides. All three of these magpies came to me this past week.(Click the pix for more information.)

A friend sent a link to a podcast about a Japanese boy in an internment camp who befriended a magpie - or the magpie befriended him:

Another friend snapped a picture of a painting in a museum in Philadelphia, of a magpie eating cake:

And the New York Times had an article about very very clever magpies in Australia, helping other magpies:

I do like magpies. They are smart and charismatic and nicely graphic.

I Have Solved the Buttermilk Problem

You know how you buy a QUART of buttermilk because a recipe needs a little bit, and then the quart sits there in the fridge until it's over the hill and you throw it out, thereby wasting most of the quart? (And then you feel terrible because food waste is actually an enormous problem - the USDA estimates that more than 30% of the food supply gets wasted.)

I have figured it out, or - to be specific - I have found a way to buy one quart of buttermilk and use it all up in two recipes: Whole Grain Pancakes for breakfast, and Buttermilk Brined Chicken for dinner.

The recipe for the pancakes is something I adapted from the New York Times site; I changed up the flours a bit to reduce the carbohydrate load. They are very tender, and complexly flavored. We make up the whole batch and then I freeze what we don't eat for breakfast. They reheat well, in the toaster. In lieu of syrup, I usually blitz a handful of frozen strawberries in the microwave; they kind of fall apart and become a good syrup analog. Feel free to use maple syrup, if that's how you roll.

WHOLE GRAIN PANCAKES (makes about 14 good sized pancakes)

1 cup spelt (or whole wheat flour) 

3/4 cup almond meal 

1/2 cup cornmeal 

1/4 cup rolled oats 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1 teaspoon kosher salt 

1/2 teaspoon baking soda 

2 1/4 cups buttermilk 

3 eggs 

1/4 cup melted butter

 In a large bowl, mix together spelt, almond meal, cornmeal, oats, baking powder, salt and baking soda. In a medium bowl, mix together buttermilk, eggs, and melted butter. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture and stir gently until smooth. 

Heat up a griddle over medium heat. Add a little butter to the pan and let it melt. Using a 1/3 cup measure, pour batter onto griddle - make as many as you can at a time. Leave space for pancakes to spread. 

Cook until bubbles form and start to burst, about 3 minutes. Flip and cook until golden on the other side, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate as they finish, and serve immediately with butter and maple syrup or melted strawberries. 

Repeat with the remaining batter, until done. 

If you are going to freeze the excess, cool them on a baking rack. When cool, separate with waxed paper or parchment, and stack them into an airtight freezer container.

Once you've finished breakfast, you're going to want to brine the chicken. Back up. You've been roasting chicken for years. You shove a lemon or some herbs in the cavity, fling the bird in a cast iron skillet in a hot oven, and bob's your uncle. Roast chicken gets A LOT of ink, but it's not hard; it's just roast chicken. But. Brining your chicken in buttermilk? It's kind of magic. You think there's nothing new under the sun, and then you decide to make the quart of buttermilk come out even, and yeah. Do it.

Here's the thing: Samin Nosrat tells you to use 2 cups of buttermilk for one chicken in a gallon ziplock bag. BUT 1 3/4 cups is fine too, and 1 3/4 cups is what you have left after you're done making pancakes. Nosrat's recipe is divine and it's on her website. But you should get her book - Salt Fat Acid Heat - because it's good and useful and informative.

And there you have it. Two recipes, one quart of buttermilk, no science experiments with the leftover lurking in the back of the refrigerator.

My Crankiness Knows No Bounds, and Yet...

About a month ago, I posted a picture of an envelope on Facebook...

...with a comment: See that envelope? That's in the outgoing mail. Does it have a check in it? It does not. It has a note asking that they take me off of their list because of that ridiculous stunt with the five 1-cent stamps.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that Human Rights Watch has used this direct mail ploy; I wrote about it two years ago, on this very blog!

Today's mail included ANOTHER solicitation from Human Rights Watch. I opened it. (I always open the solicitations, it's like a busman's holiday - you have to check out what other non-profits are doing - and if they're really appealing I might even send them to my Development Department. And sometimes the March of Dimes sends you an actual dime - free money! I digress.)

I had to laugh. Instead of a bunch of live 1-cent stamps, it had printed images of stamp-like doodles.

Well played, Human Rights Watch, well played. (But no, don't put me back on your list.)

The Warmth Of A Quilt

The summer before I went to college, my mother and I made a patchwork quilt for my dorm room. It wasn’t fancy, just a log cabin pattern made of 2” x 6” strips made into 6” blocks. And it wasn’t actually quilted - it was tied through to the blue and white gingham backing with yarn at the intersections of the blocks. On one of the corner blocks, I embroidered my initials and the year.

That quilt cheerfully lived on my dorm bed for four years, but once I graduated, it got stored away at my mother’s house.

Years later, after my daughter moved from a crib to a bed, I pulled the quilt out of storage. It looked perfect in her room. But over time, small person shenanigans, coupled with the age of the quilt, meant that the fabric was springing holes at the drop of a hat. Periodically, I’d haul it off the bed and appliqué new patches in place - patching the patchwork - but eventually I put it away and bought a down comforter for her bed.

This past September, she went off to college - to my alma mater, as it happens. Her dorm room is on a corner, and her bed is hard up against the window, and it’s a little chilly. She told me she thought she needed another blanket - and the quilt popped into my head.

So we pulled it out, and carefully catalogued the fragile spots, and I taught her how to cut the strips, turn and iron the edges, wrestle the quilt into position in the sewing machine, and patch patch patch.

We rebound the edges, and she embroidered a strip with her initials and 2022. 

The quilt went back to school with her yesterday.

It is crudely made, as far as quilts go, but it is full of love - my mother's, mine, and now my daughter's. And I hope it keeps her warm for years to come.

Punch Line: Absence

An old family friend died today. They lived around the corner from us, and when we moved around the block, they lived down the street. 

My father first met Wally when he came around a corner and discovered a guy with a beat up Land Rover and a trailer ... and a boat that had fallen off the trailer into the street. They became fast friends - and remained friends for the next 50 years. 

 Wally was a musician, a raconteur, a delight. He loved to fish; here he is in the Deschutes, with his first steelhead, wearing an inimitable hat.

And he was an inveterate joke teller. Here's one: 

 A guy went to the doctor and said, Doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but every time I fart, it sounds like the word honda. 

That’s interesting. I've never heard of anything like that before. Do you think you could fart for me? says the doctor. 

The guy said okay and sure enough, the doctor heard honda. 

After several attempts to figure out what was wrong with the guy, the doctor ran out of ideas, so he sent him to all sorts of specialists, but none of them could figure out why the guy's farts sounded like honda. Finally, as a last resort, someone suggested that the guy see a dentist. 

After explaining the problem to the dentist, the dentist opened the guy's mouth and examined his teeth. The dentist said Aha! You have an abscessed tooth. 

The guy said Okay, but what has that got to do with my farts?

Don't you see? said the dentist, Abscess Makes The Fart Go Honda.

Wally, I hope you are telling your jokes to the angels.