Joe Squared pizza

This August marks my third anniversary of living in Baltimore. After five years in New York, the streets of Mount Vernon seemed positively pastoral. In place of modernist skyscrapers and mobile phone ads plastered to ever-present scaffolding, there were green parks, fountains and the muted melody of a flute being played by an open window. Instead of elbowing through crowds, I started strolling, looking at gorgeous antique houses that anybody, even me, could afford.  I would even say I found my Happy Place, although not using the Happy Detector the tourism department concocted.

If we made a Happy Map of our neighborhood for eating and drinking purposes, it could consist of:

1. Howard’s of Mount Vernon offers inexpensive, thoughtfully prepared salads, sandwiches and a few dynamite dinner plates like fish n’ chips. Even the salad dressings are made from scratch and served up with a friendly smile from people who know us by name (naturally, they live nearby and visit the same dog parks). We could eat here every day, and for a while, until we got a/c, we basically did. We sat with a bottle of white wine (BYOB until their liquor license comes through) with the blind Fox and ate grilled ham and cheese and the Howard’s Salad–strawberries, feta, walnuts and local veggies–for less than $15.

2. The scene last Thursday night at Dougherty’s Pub on West Chase: three Irish musicians on accordion and mandolin, a plaid-clad guitar player, and a pot-bellied retired cop bellied up to the bar. This is not a joke. The cop was bound for a security gig nearby and to avert boredom he swigged a few Michelob Ultras. While we ate spicy Maryland clam chowder, the officer and Brian yucked it up about the O’s miserable existence, the man’s 15 siblings and his wife’s new book on God and family. He’s hoping he can hang up his security cap on the book sales, but they’ve got a bunch of kids heading to college soon.

3. Please, there is no need to add to the accolades of the Brewer’s Art. They were anointed best bar in America by Esquire a few years back, and the Times recently dubbed the beer menu as “serious” as the tastemaker crowd. Needless to say we are very grateful for the strong Belgian-style ale they brew on site, because if I weren’t sipping on it two and a half years ago, I probably wouldn’t have  clumsily dropped my phone and had an excuse to talk to the cute boy nearby who was Brian.

4. If we’re talking about happy places in Baltimore, the topic of drug use is bound to come up. So yes, the Mount Royal Tavern would be considered a happy place for some. For others, it’s a place to drink cheap Natty Boh with men the cat dragged in, and a few brave MICA students. Natch, we may be moving opposite MRT to the Fitzgerald.

5. Be there or be Joe Squared? I’d pick the latter, since we are addicted to their pizza and good vibes alike. Bands play nightly and their well-curated rum selection spruces up cool mojitos (almost cool enough to forgot how hot it is sitting near their kitchen). The staff crack jokes and never seem fatigued by weekend crowds. But the real draw is their pizza, from its slightly charred, light crust to the locally sourced toppings like pesto, ricotta, margarita, Andouille sausage and herbs grown on their roof.

Midway through a muggy Maryland summer it dawned on me that under certain circumstances our dirty city could become a veritable Edan. Standing amidst 7-foot tall sunflowers, the wide leaves of squash plants, and tomato plants dripping with plump red fruit I realized Baltimore has untold natural resources in its rich soil, soaking rains and brow-beating summer sunshine.

While flies, bees and mosquitoes buzzed about my legs, I stood grinning at lavender, beets, peppers and purple blossoms. We had barely pulled a weed in months and the plot’s watering barrel was nearly empty.

Actually, I didn’t do much at all to make this tiny plot on Pratt Street blossom. The digging, hoeing, planting, and weeding was done by a dogged group of 10 kids ages 5 to 11: The Wolfe Street Academy Garden Club (Baltimore’s other untold resources: seriously great kids).

In March, the plot–maybe 11 feet by 20 feet in size –was covered in weeds, recovering from being flattened by months of snowfall. Broken bottles, cigarette butts, and rocks littered the plot. Where three row houses were bulldozed in the 1980s, glass still glittered through many layers of dirt.

The boys helped Marissa, a nursing student with a green thumb, to dig furrows to demarcate planting areas from walking areas, which we would later fill with mulch. Marissa discovered the idea to create furrows while gardening at East Baltimore’s Participation Park, which offers free classes on growing things. Later I learned from a man at Participation Park –gardening to a thumping reggae beat from his truck–how to sift rocks and debris out of soil using screens.

With light, sifted soil–like baking flour, soil is most rich when it isn’t packed and littered with lumps–we started planting at Pratt Street.

Scarlet, a whip-smart 10-year old, was in charge. She carefully placed seeds of squash, mixed lettuce and beets in the soil under 1/4 inch of soil, as the packet instructed. She carefully wrote the names of what we had planted sideways on wooden chopsticks and stuck them in the ground. Day-dreamy Adriana and mischievous Christian came with watering cans to moisten the soil. The kids had learned from a med student/plant wizard named Sean about how seeds come to sprout. They just need water and soil, so they put some of that in the bottom of plastic water bottles and took them home to place on their window sills. A week later, the kids returned, jubilant to see tiny sunflower and watermelon seedlings coming up from the dirt encased in plastic.

We had some hiccups along the way. The tomato seeds did nothing in the ground. The beets and watermelon seeds disappeared into the dirt never to emerge. I was worried. What good is a Maryland garden without tomatoes? Then we had a breakthrough: A friend of a friend from the Wyman dog park had three dozen tomato plants, of different breeds, that he wanted to off-load. We took 10 — exchanged them for strawberries we had picked up at Baugher’s.

As for the beets and watermelon seeds that had refused to materialize as seedlings, Sean started them inside and when they were small but stubborn green plants we put them on the last free furrow.

Meanwhile, the lettuce had come up. It waved in varied shapes and sizes, pale green in the late spring sun. It was like the salad bar at Whole Food with all the arugula and radicchio. The sunflowers that the kids planted–we admonished them over and over at the beginning not to step on them– were a foot taller every week until they towered over the kids, who played among their thick stalks like children in a deep forest. They painted ladybugs and Mexican flags on stones to decorate the garden, a project developed by a creative teacher named Lizzie.

Fast-forward to July. We’d been having the routine near-tropical Chesapeake rain storms, and lots of muggy sun. Everything had sprouted up and over–the neat rows of green seedlings had become a jungle of rough leaves, whizzing insects and crawling beetles. A summer school crop of 2nd graders were not afraid. They watered the roots of the watermelon plant, it’s tentacles sprawling out into the lavender and rosemary on the garden’s end. They spotted the pollinators of the garden: Bees, ants, lady bugs, and flies. They went

crazy for roly polly bugs, walking back to class carefully with a pillbug crawling across their palms.

While some of the original garden club had broken up for summer, this new group (with a couple holdovers) got to taste the tomatoes and zucchini they had planted. Cherry tomatoes, in their tiny firm roundness, were foreign and suspicious. They could be plopped like marbles into mouths, and spat right out. They could be squashed between small fingers.  Eww! Later, we cut them in half. Then: Delicious! Zucchini was also a hit. Even kale was gobbled up when it had nice olive oil dressing on it, a coup orchestrated by Molly, a policy student who has run school garden clubs in Detroit.

The vast majority of kids in this Upper Fell’s Point neighborhood grow up in poor households. Parents may be forced to leave the country with no notice to return home to Central America or Mexico. Many parents speak no English at all. But dirt and bugs are a combination that, regardless of demographic status, are a surefire hit with the pre-pre-teen set.

Liz, an energetic Hopkins medicine student who concocted the idea of starting a garden club at Wolfe Street, knew that the benefits of longterm garden and healthy eating projects are manifold. Research has demonstrated that they can help children shed excess weight and also improve concentration and learning at school. The Food for Life school plan, developed by Antonia Demas, help children grow vegetables and understand nutrition. After eating new healthy dishes, a student called Willie said he could, ”just feel my brain thinking better.” He and his friends realized that vegetables don’t have to be “nasty.”

The Wolfe Street kids loved getting outside and exploring the garden from a bug’s eye view. Unfortunately my tenure with the club has ended but I hope the club continues to explore the outdoors and try new foods.

A passerby moarns Stephen Pitcairn

Summer is the drippiest of love-fests in Baltimore. There was Artscape, of course, then came a sweatstorm of art-rock at Whartscape, the monthly baby and dog parade at First Thursdays and weekly dose of sno-balls and popcorn at AVAM’s oldster movies. All: colorful, boozy, laidback, and mostly free.

But lately, my buzz has been way harshed by the sober truth of summer in the other Baltimore. Earlier this year, and it was probably not a coincidence that there were two feet of snow on the ground, The City Paper marveled that murders were way down.

After six days without a murder, there was one homicide this week. As of March 15, there have been 14 fewer murders in 2010 than on the same date in 2009. This is a decrease of 32 percent.

With the mercury, Baltimore’s murder rate shot back up to 8 in one week in May, starting with a fatal shooting of a 16-year old boy near the H.L. Mencken House in west Baltimore. This past week, the 7 murders included Stephen Pitcairn, a promising 23-year old research aid at Hopkins who was stabbed after handing over his wallet to experienced criminals in Charles Village. He died lying on the pavement holding the hand of a stranger, a neighbor who called the police. The frankly random nature of the killing has been stunning.

I also got robbed when I was 23. I was also returning home at night. It was 5am in Harlem, New York City–way stupid and not at all comparable to a young man deciding to walk the short mile home from Penn Station to Charles Village. A man took my wallet, after threatening to kill me. But when I gave him my wallet, that was the end of it (until the police caught him 30 minutes later). Needing cash fast–people can understand that, even if they don’t agree with the tactics (an understatement). We were shocked to learn of the duo that got the cash they wanted, and needless took a young life.

The shock hasn’t ebbed in the past week as daily stories splashing across the Sun’s front page have pointed to the long and horrifically violent criminal record of the killers, who were reportedly “hunting to rob someone.” The record shows that they had most recently robbed and assulted someone in April, but when witnesses refused to testify, they apparently could not be imprisoned. It’s no wonder, considering the serious and deadly threats and intimidation of potential witnesses to Baltimore crimes. Just two days ago, a 21 year-old murder witness to a separate homicide from last weekend was shot dead east of Station North.

A tree on St. Paul and 26th street has become a memorial to Stephen, who met his killers while phoning his mother in Florida to say good night. Friends and neighbors have left photos, cards, notes, even a birthday cake with pink icing–he was to turn 24 on Wednesday. Someone left him Twizzlers and oysters on the half shell in a cooler, with cocktail sauce.

Perhaps drug trade-fueled shootings have become white noise for locals. Why else would the Sun barely mention the bodies that fall nearly every day in neighborhoods west, east and south? The young men have mothers, sisters, girlfriends who mourn, while strangers think, I’m safe, the barrel won’t tilt toward me.

But it might. Walking home at night in groups–never alone–we nosily argue about who is most to blame. The Baltimore Police Department, cries one person — they sit back and watch people break the law, on their cell phones. The justice system, someone points out, is full of cracks and these people slid right through. Who defends these people, anyway? It’s the lawyers! What about the people? How do they put up with these bandits roaming the streets?

A letter writer to the Sun wonders about the spirits of Baltimore, that underlie the development of late.

beneath it all there is a seething monster, an amorphous, angry force which raises its frightening head and claims as its victims the Stephen Pitcairns and Zach Sowers of our city. What would we hear if we could quiet that force, if we could quell that monster? We might hear the cries of all the bereaved mothers, of a bereft mother in Florida who had to endure the most unthinkable of all horrors, the sound of her own son being murdered.

What are we to do but wonder, who are these men? They wander the streets at night, walking slowly in white t-shirts and shorts, like shades, floating back and forth in the summer night: Endless streams, alone, as if they are visions from purgatory wandering forever.

One of them put a rock through my car window yesterday as it sat on Baltimore’s Park Avenue. A squat police officer knocked on my door this afternoon to point this out (I hadn’t driven today so hadn’t yet noticed). “Is that your car?” Yeah, why? “Someone broke in.” Hmm, ok. He looked disappointed, like I’d missed my cue to go nuts about my broken window. I left him for a minute to put a load of clothes in the wash, then came out to check it out. A small rock was on the floor on the passenger side. A couple walked by and expressed their sympathy. The officer explained that windows of three or four cars in a row had been shattered.  Nothing was taken from the car — the window was intact, shattered, so the rock-thrower hadn’t meant to rob me (of scratched David Bowie cds, because that’s all they would have gotten). No, it was just anger, or boredom, or what? What possesses someone to slam small rocks through the windows of their neighbors’ cars?

I was on my way somewhere and asked the officer if  I could leave my window like that. I really didn’t care about the Bowie CD, or the dog hair-covered blanket in the trunk. He looked at me quizzically. “A homeless person might come in and sleep, or someone might through a cigarette in,” he pointed out, while reluctantly writing up the incident.

My neighbors and my landlord stood outside shaking their heads. Really, it was the least surprising thing. On the crime map for Mt Vernon, there are a constellation of red stars showing “larceny from vehicle” incidents in the past 2 weeks. We are fortunate that the red crosses indicating murder are not visible, at least in the past half-month. I’ll take a rock through the window any day. I don’t want to lose a friend because he crossed the street too late.

Amazing riff on Monopoly about Speculation in Central Baltimore by a student called Cary at MICA

Artscape was the usual blur of thousands of sweaty strangers moving like a sticky stream of molasses up and down sun-baked streets. People drank giant strawberry daiquiris out of foot-long plastic cups a la Senior Frogs, expensive iced lemonade, or milk from sippy cups, in the case of the babies (babies love Artscape). Oozing rather than easing down the road were fashion-forward teens, “art cars” freaks, adorable independent artists hawking irresistibly cool knick knacks, and fearless mohawked boys biking against all odds through this mess of humanity.

We have posted photos below of the crowd which was eclectic and peace-loving. It was a great weekend for Baltimore.

One neat addition to the festival this year was a kind of trade fair in the garage opposite the Charles Theatre, featuring community projects like a Center for a Livable Future-affiliated food dessert study and a mural project inspired by the history of Baltimore.  Also in the garage was a table of artwork exploring current events.

“Baltimore is still a frontier,” said a MICA graduate showing off her contribution to Artscape, a jigsaw puzzle depicting Baltimore, its pieces composed of neighborhoods and parks. She described what it was like to spend four years in a city changing rapidly. The “Central Baltimore Game of Speculation”, created by another MICA grad named Cary, was inspired by the wildly fluxuating rent and real estate climate around Baltimore, specifically near MICA.

“We were told to never set foot on North Avenue when I arrived as a freshman even at midday” she said behind thick black-rimmed glasses. “This year at orientation, they told them that’s where they should go at night to hang out.” The speculators have pounced on local real estate, raising rents, but buildings still loom abandoned and gutted along the Avenue.

Parasols were essential companions to ward off the torrid summer sun

Participatory art: Baltimore, described as "smelly" "homicide" "inertia" and "real"

Smoothies blended with people power

DIY cartoon wall by Penn Station (a table was set up for aspiring graphic artists)

This is much cooler than those plastic upside down tomato pots from 7-11

Babies sported cool hats

Pellinore Press cards

Cooling in the rain tent by Wale

Marissa Molinaro glassware

Dancing at Charles and Mt. Royal (beatboxing in background)

Art cars invade Charles Street once again

Listening to Wale shaded by sculpture above Mount Royal Station

Dance off at Charles Street and Mount Royal

Straw hats, striped hair

The city looks ready to tackle the vacants with some new legislation slapping fines on negligent landlords. In the meantime, creative Charm City citizens like the H&H building artists become inspired by the richness of Baltimore history. Using urban life as a muse, they have taken to empty walls, lots, buildings and trails to tell stories. Here are several neat projects we’ve noted in the past couple of days.

During the 25th annual Sowebo Arts Festival this past Sunday, MICA graduate and longtime Baltimore resident Michael Owen was busy on a ladder painting four silhouetted hands that spell LOVE onto a wall opposite Hollins Market. The mural is to be one of 20–two are up elsewhere in Baltimore–in Charm City to inspire acts of kindness and love between residents. Some say it’s cheesy, but we loved the mural’s simple, graphic appeal, which is markedly different than the colorful back-to-Africa motifs on most city murals. In fact, we bought a t-shirt to support future mural-paintings (you could say, “I put in for the right pinky tip”).

Tis the time to get outside, and where better to escape cement and sunbaked tar than the Gwynns Falls Trail, a 15 mile trail through southwest Baltimore. There is a new audio history tour of the trail courtesy of historian Ed Orser and audio artist Steve Bradley. More than a dozen conservationists and historians discuss subjects like the 1926 report by the Olmsted Brothers on Baltimore Parks, the “mill race” section of the trail, and a trolley tax.

On June 19, NPR hosts of tomorrow will present audio histories of Baltimore in conjunction with the Remington Youth Community Radio project (RYCR).  RYCR is two-year old project of the Greater Remington Improvement Organization that teaches kids to record and edit radio programs. While learning new skills, kids get to see their neighborhood from a different perspective. Deandre Jones said (per program director Beth Barbush) “I want something positive out of myself. I love interviewing people. I want to be on the news and make my grandma proud.” See pictures of the kids, 9 to 17 years old, recording the stories here and listen to recordings here.

We listened to a short interview with a Remington resident who talks about his experience founding a community garden where there was a vacant lot. He takes satisfaction in growing his own food, and also in the fact that the space has been reclaimed: “Less of a dumping ground now -it is a space that was unused.”

Here is the flier for their event. Visitors to Remington can listen to the youth radio pieces, record their own community story, participate in an audio visual neighborhood walking tour, and interview residents themselves.

Height With Friends special mega-set featuring Mickey Free, Emily Slaughter, Gavin Riley, Travis Allen, Brendan Richmond, Liz Aeby, Pam Kurowski and Rob Dowler of Nuclear Power Pants.

The Stop the Baltimore Beverage Tax web site bills itself as “a coalition of concerned citizens, businesses and community organizations that oppose placing a new tax on beverages on the backs of hardworking families.” What the site doesn’t say is that it is funded by the American Beverage Association, which has launched a fierce advocacy campaign to stop this from going through.

The ABA’s radio ads warn that the tax would lead to thousands of lost jobs. Facebook groups repeatedly post Mayor Rawlings-Blake’s email address encouraging supporters to argue this claim. But who are the American Beverage Association? The ABA is led by Pepsi and Coke and their bottlers. “This is lobbying,” local BAL11 reporter Jayne Miller reminds viewers in this clip, where they panned the camera across a room with men sitting in huddles. According to OpenSecrets.org, the ABA has spent millions in 2010 alone to lobby aggressively against just these kind of taxes, which are cropping up on legislators’ wish list across many recession-battered counties.

The bill would exempt milk and 2-liter soda: That last exception seems to have been written in for poor families so that they should not be deprived of an opportunity to purchase soda in mass quantities for their families. This is a reminder of how ubiquitous carbonated sugary drinks are in our diet.

Soda is the single greatest source of sugar in the diets of Americans, whose tipping scales and souring obesity rates in the past 20 years reflect diets increasingly flooded with excess calories. New York City has mounted an information campaign to remind people that soda is liquid sugar. They remind people that soda that used to be sold in 6 oz bottles is now sold at many stores only in 20 ounce plastic bottles.

Policy makers are taking a second look at soda taxes, ahem, beverage taxes, to entice people to consume less. You don’t have to have a PhD to understand the link here. You just have to listen to people who aren’t being paid off by Coke and Pepsi. As a PBS article recounts, parents know very well that children drink too much soda.

When researchers from the HSC Foundation, a non-profit health care system for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, asked a focus group of black and Latino parents how they could best encourage healthy eating habits, one of their responses was blunt: “Stop drinking soda.”

To quote a letter writer to the Baltimore Sun, the opposition to the beverage tax is disingenuous. With a four-cent hike, the notion that individuals would think twice before purchasing a few drinks in a bar or restaurant is dubious. Say you like to drink liberally and pour back 4 sodas. Your dining companions are really not impressed and you feel a sticky lining of corn syrup slosh around inside your stomach. Your elevated blood glucose levels threaten to make you resistant to insulin, leading to obesity and diabetes. Right now, you feel a pounding headache from sugar and caffeine overload coming on. But the four cent tax added up to $.16, which is not going to break the bank. Actually, a recent survey showed that small taxes like the one proposed in Baltimore do not really affect consumption.

The letter writer points out that families affected would be better served by drinking tap water. Often, bottled water and tap water are one and the same thing. Our demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil each year, producing gobs of plastic debris that will take 400-1000 years to degrade.

I think Four Cents Makes Sense.

It seems others are feeling similarly wistful for the Clinton years when we unknowingly trashed the planet and beat icebergs back driving SUVs and rocking out to alternative schlock like Live.  Here, just 5 signs we are totally in charge of the culture ship and steering it back into time.

5. The artistic directors of Urban Outfitters has outfitted the Millennials in grunge-era plaid, imitation thrift store t-shirts and Rolling Stones-inspired t-shirts because we still haven’t gotten over seeing Mick Jagger sing Brown Sugar at RFK in 1994. Actually, no one has gotten over seeing Mick Jagger sing Brown Sugar, and that’s how they are selling a Super Deluxe edition of Exile on Main Street for upwards of $100.

4. The DC101 Chili Cook-Off this past weekend featured STP and Alice in Chains. DC101′s site helpfully reminds youngsters that Scott Weiland’s band saw 1992 album Core go to 8x platinum (that was before iTunes and the death of record stores, kids). Alice in Chains’s singer Layne Stanley overdosed on heroin in 2002, but amazingly the rest of the AIC/STP band members are here with us to rock today.

3. Holy crap, it’s another HFStival. Sam Sessa from The Baltimore Sun described the lineup aptly, writing, “Looks like it’s 1997 again.” Sadly, the decaying RFK stadium won’t be host to the wizened thirty-something oldsters coming back for another bump of Third Eye Blind, which in 1999 treated a packed RFK to a poppy rendition of their ultra-dark hit Semi-Charmed Life. Sex And Candy will be in the air, thanks to Marcy Playground, and the boy scout-like Presidents of the United States will offer listeners Peaches. And Everclear, another survivor of heavy 90s drug use, will sing of their beloved Heroin Girl. Smashing Pumpkins won’t play this festival but you can download their newest songs, Teargarden, online.

2. Google devoted its home page to Pac-Man, which for thirty-somethings is basically synonymous with smearing pepperoni pizza across the arcade of Chuck E. Cheese during Jennifer or Jessica’s birthday party. Pac-Man turned 30 on Saturday (buy her a beer if you see her) so the Google home page isn’t featuring the site anymore, but you can always view it here. Here are tips on how to play.

1. Republicans are angry again. With another Democrat in the White House, they feel unrepresented and have become “the Party of No.” Some of them feel that the administration has unfairly pressed BP to pay for its gigantic oil spill. This “attack on business” is being called “really un-American”. The Contract with (or On, per Bill Clinton) America too confused business with America. The culture lords are having a good laugh at their mishaps.

We are sitting wondering where our country went. Steer this boat back to shore and to 2010!

We perked up (being a bit foggy-brained this Friday morning) at this bit of the Chop’s post:

… the New York Times is looking down its nose at us again. They seem to see Baltimore as little more than a source for so-so regional cuisine, a great inspiration for campy Broadway musicals, and a crummy baseball team for the sweeping.

This time around they’re making us out to be a bungling, artless money-pit who is stuck in the Schmoke era and wants to copy Manhattan. We really, really wish the Times would mind their own fucking business a little more, and publish these cheap, quickie drive-by stories about Baltimore a little less.

And they include links to said (sad) articles which do tend to be reported via a helicopter ride in and out of Baltimore (would a Times reporter deign to take Bolt?). However, I would argue that the Times review of that Eastern Shore-inspired Greenwich village restaurant made it sounds pretentious, bland and overpriced, which is reason for a poor review: Maryland, especially in context of Manhattan’s West Village, is none of those things.

The Times story on Howard Street included photography that seemed to my mind wistful for when New York had down-at-the-heels blocks unseen by the city’s upwardly mobile denizens. There was a time when Avenue C, and greater Alphabet City, was filled with hobos huddled over trashcan fires. Now it’s overrun by slumming i-bankers and their publicist girlfriends, teetering in heels over the uneven city blocks to reach Brazilian cocktails at places called Esparanto.

We don’t mess with heels much in Charm City. Our city sidewalks are covered in glittering glass and cratered like the moon surface.

The references to Snoop, Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in uppity restaurant reviews reveal a fixation on Baltimore’s authenticity. New Yorkers were glued to The Wire–my cousin called me out of the blue to brag that he spotted Omar at a party in Brooklyn.

We eat at Werner’s, the wood-paneled power-lunch restaurant where Tommy Carcetti and Mayor Royce met, the greasy spoon that serves hot turkey sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy with not a trace of irony.

The Chop points out that artists are busy creating and showing their stuff, and gives some ideas for weekend viewing.

Who, bar a lactose phobe, could shun a mascarpone  cheese and chocolate chip sweet?