"One January night in 1996 I dreamed that I jumped into a swimming pool filled with rice pudding (see recipe on page 315), where I swam with the grace of a porpoise. It's my favorite dessert-rice pudding that is, not porpoise. I love it so much that in 1991, in a restaurant in Madrid, I ordered four servings, and then a fifth for dessert. I ate them down without blinking, with the vague hope that that nostalgic dessert from my childhood would help me bear the anguish of seeing my daughter ill. Neither my soul nor my daughter improved, but rice pudding remains associated in my memory with spiritual comfort. There was nothing, however, elevating about the dream: I dived in, and that delicious creaminess caressed my skin, slipped into all the crevices of my body, filled my mouth. I awoke feeling happy and threw myself on my husband before the poor man realized what was happening to him. The next week I dreamed I was arranging a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla; I slathered on guacamole and salsa, rolled him up, and wolfed him down. That time I woke up in terror. A few days later, I dreamed...well, there's no point in going on with the list, it's enough to say that when I told my mother of these cruelties, she advised me to see a psychiatrist-or a cook. You're going to get fat, she added, and so I decided to confront the problem with the only solution I know for my obsessions: writing."-Isable Allende in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses
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