When I lived in Spain, I wrote a poem called “La vida en la flanera” or “Life in the Flan Pan.” I sumbitted it for a contest for Americans writing poetry in Spanish, and I didn’t win. The guy who did win wrote a poem called “La Bonita Espana” (Beautiful Spain) or something like that and though it was not avant garde in the least he won the sweatshirt.

The moral is obviously: people who wear sweatshirts write bad literature.

All of this is immaterial. In Spain, we ate flan from the grocery store. And that was fine. Because homemade flan tastes like bland, tough eggs, and is gross.

Nevertheless sometimes I attempt to make it, especially on Thursdays when we speak Spanish in the house.

I never know at what stage something is going to go wrong with the things I cook. Needless to say, flan has never gone right in my kitchen.

In this case, it is that instead of caramel, I succeeded in making hard candy, which in addition to being nearly impossible to remove from the pan, tasted burnt.