Manolo for the Big Girl Fashion, Lifestyle, and Humor for the Plus Sized Woman.

Take a look at that baby. Sometime in the next couple weeks, it’s going to be mine.

When I was just a wee little child, knee-high to something even shorter than a grasshopper, I learned to cook on a gas stove. I grew up cooking on that gas stove. When Mr. Twistie and I were getting married and looking for an apartment, a gas stove was probably the single most important feature to me.

Then Mr. Twistie’s mother died and we moved into the house where he grew up. Mr. Twistie’s mother would only cook on electric. In fact, the stove in the house when she died was one Mr. Twistie and I bought her as a Christmas gift a couple years earlier, and it was electric. It was also bottom of the line because we were flat broke. Scraping up the money to get her a new stove meant we had to eat at her house regularly because it left us with no grocery money for the next month and change. Getting her a good new stove might have bankrupted us.

When we moved into this house, there was no money for anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, and the stove was in perfectly good shape, so I started learning to cook on an electric stove at the age of thirty-eight.

Ten years later, I still am not good at working an electric stove and the thing is very nearly officially dead. Only three of the burners still work, and they’re slower than a narcoleptic  snail on Quaaludes to heat up. I love to cook, but I’m starting to avoid doing it because using that stove is such a pain in the lower digestive tract.

All this is about to turn around in a big way! Mr. Twistie has finally agreed that we need a new stove Right Now, and that after all those years of me putting up with the electric stove he is now willing to face his fear of gas stoves.

He’s even found a contractor to come in and get the gas line already in place in the kitchen into safe working order again.

And so I have spent most of the past week researching stoves and dreaming dreamy dreams of having rapid heat control at my fingertips once more.

None of this is meant to belittle electric stoves of good quality or the people who love them. I freely admit that had I had access to a better quality electric stove it wouldn’t have been nearly as miserable an experience for me. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who prefers electric should absolutely have it. It’s just I’m a dyed-in-the-wool gas girl when it comes to cooking. I understand how it works. I trust the visible flame… despite the fact that I’m usually so phobic about fire that I literally cannot light a match without going into full-fledged hysterical panic attacks. Weird, but it’s my quirk and I’m used to it.

Oh, and the model I’ve fallen (potentially) in love with up there? Is made by a company called Bosch. Funnily enough, it’s only in part because of the opportunity to name my stove Hieronymous.

You know what? Everyone wants to talk about fat. Everyone wants to talk about how people overindulge in food. Let’s take a moment to talk about one of the dirtiest little secrets in America: nearly one quarter of all children in this country go to bed hungry most nights.

Think about that for a moment. One in four.

And I’m not talking about eating disorders here, though they are important to talk about. No, I’m talking about poverty. I’m talking about lack of access to food. I’m talking food deserts, here, people.

What is a food desert? I’m glad you asked! The USDA released a map last week that explains and illustrates just this thing.

How does the USDA define a food desert? In simplest terms (you can get more details here) it’s an area where at least 500 people and/or 33% of the people in a given area have to travel more than one mile to reach a supermarket or large grocery store (the range is expanded to ten miles in rural settings).

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I love to cook. You may have guessed that from some of my writings.

I also love to be fed in restaurants. What? Everyone likes a break now and then, too.

When it comes to eating well, there are plenty of approaches to take. Different bodies perform better on different schedules, different amounts of food, different combinations of nutrients, and different ways of getting that food down the hatch, as it were.

Oh, yes, and different people have different levels of interest in making the food themselves.

You know, I bet there were even days when Paul Child came home after a hard day only to find Julia with her feet propped up on the coffee table announcing that dinner would be arriving in a pizza box or Chinese take out cartons in a few minutes.

What? I do that sometimes.

Most days my approach to cooking is to come up with a vague outline of what the evening meal will be when I’m standing in front of the butcher’s counter at my local grocery store or in front of the fridge at home. Then I start cooking. Things come together as I put them in the pan or the pot. Once in a while I start with an actual recipe, usually when trying out a new food I’ve never cooked before, but most days it’s pretty seat of the pants.

If, however, I know someone is coming over for dinner on a specific date, I approach the event with military precision. I have my cookbooks out days in advance, make grocery lists, determine a timeline, make certain I have considered every possible aspect of creating the meal from budget to oven space to food issues.

There are other people I know who plan every meal they cook carefully – and cook every meal three hundred sixty-five days a year, and people who have to go through and dust their stoves periodically because they just don’t cook for themselves. They eat out or order in pretty much every single day. I’ve known people who cook huge batches of stuff that they store in single (or family) sized meal containers until they need them, and people who can’t plan dinner until well after they’ve eaten lunch.

The thing is, there is no one approach to getting food into your body… and that’s okay. If it fits your budget and makes you happy (or at least contented) the majority of the time, then that’s the approach for you.

Any number of things may influence what works for you, and some of them will change over time. Your budget, schedule, cooking facilities, access to foodstuffs, equipment, physical and/or emotional condition, level of cooking knowledge, and personal preferences will all factor in to your decisions.

We all eat. If we don’t, our bodies and minds cannot function. We will die. It really is that simple. Whatever way we choose to get enough food into our bodies to function well is completely valid.

So how about all of you out there in Big Girl land? Do you cook most days? Are you famous for your call to the Chinese take out? Do you plan meals in advance or trust to instinct and the last minute? Could you store important documents in your broiler because you so seldom use it? Do you fondle your food processor when nobody is looking?

There is no right or wrong answer. There is no grade lurking in the corner. There’s just how people feed themselves. And as long as you’re getting sufficient food into yourself on a regular basis, it’s all good.

PS: I don’t fondle my food processor… but I have been known to gently goose my KitchenAide stand mixer, even in mixed company. I’m in love with it and I don’t care who knows. So there.