(Image via Cookography, where you can find simple instructions for making yogurt on your stovetop)

When it comes to kitchen gadgets, I’m on them like Plummy on Spanish footballers. While some women dream of little Tiffany’s boxes, my heart races at the sight of the words Sur la Table. If in our travels we pass a kitchen-related shop, Mr. Twistie knows it’s time to go find someplace to kill at least an hour before he can drag me kicking and screaming out again. I own an ebleskiver pan. I use a mortar and pestle regularly. I have different sizes and shapes of whisk to use depending on the job. I have been known to gently pet both my KitchenAid stand mixer and my twelve-cup Cuisinart food processor.

And yet, there are certain gadgets out there that I cannot imagine myself using.

In light of yesterday’s conversation about yogurt makers (and I’m absolutely with Plummy on this one, I honestly don’t think it’s a necessary expense), I thought I would share with you kitchen gadgets that don’t fit into my life. Your mileage may – and very likely will! – vary dramatically.

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I think everyone who reads this blog on a semi-regular basis knows my feelings in general about homemade, handmade, and getting your hands into things being a big part of my personal philosophy of being superfantastic. I’m in favor, full stop.

But that doesn’t mean I’m a fanatic or that I don’t recognize that there are a lot of lives out there that don’t work the way mine does.

And so it is that I was glad to see a book like Make the Bread, Buy the Butter suddenly become not only a best seller, but a tiny sliver of a cultural phenomenon. There are things that are really, seriously better and usually less expensive when made by hand… and there are things where the hassle hugely outweighs any benefit to the average human being. Having someone come along and quantify which is which is kind of a cool idea.

In general, I think Jennifer Reese does a pretty good job of doing just that.

Note that I said ‘in general.’ After all, Jennifer Reese is one person with amusingly phrased opinions. Your mileage – like mine – may vary. In some cases wildly so.

It’s hard to argue with her assertion that buying eggs is cheaper, easier, and a lot less hassle with neighbors and local urban authorities than raising chickens in a backyard in the city. In fact, I think that could have gone without saying, though I certainly would have missed her colorful descriptions of her experiments in the matter.

On the other hand, her conclusion about chutney is that there’s no point in making or buying it because nobody in the world actually likes chutney. Again, her prose is highly entertaining, but I’ve got a brother with a two-jar a month chutney habit. He’s got a tamarind on his back, and I think he might well enjoy making his own. Reese describes making the Cordon Rose Banana Cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible as a frustratingly picky process that resulted in a mediocre cake that nobody could possibly enjoy. That’s the cake I throw together on a dull afternoon when overripe bananas go on desperation sale at my neighborhood grocery because it’s fast, easy, and extremely popular in my crowd. Also, her scones are wildly over-fussy (though I do understand she was trying to replicate an over-fussy scone from Starbucks), and she definitely over-complicates making vanilla extract.

Reese’s method for vanilla? Split the vanilla bean, scrape out the seeds, put bean pod and seeds in small glass bottle, carefully measure the vodka, pour it over the bean and seeds, shake, let sit to do its magic. My father’s method for vanilla? Split the bean not quite in two, put it in the bottle of vodka, allow to ripen.

My other complaint with this book? Endless tiny, wry jabs at weight. Over and over again she talks about how making something too often would result in her becoming hugely fat, which is – it goes without saying, but gets said anyway – a fate worse than the death it will result in with undue rapidity. I have a feeling if I went through the book with a highlighter and marked every anti-fat comment in it, it would begin to look like those scripts back in the day when I got the lead in the school play.

Still, those quibbles aside, this is a highly entertaining book with a lot of great, pithy advice in it. It’s brimful of instructions for making things that most people would never imagine it possible to make at home. Sure, we all know that we can buy pasta makers and that home baked bread is a possibility, even if we never try doing those things for ourselves. But how many of us seriously contemplate that it’s even possible to make our own Worscestershire sauce, let alone whether or not it’s worth the effort? When was the last time you considered making your own yogurt? Curing your own Canadian bacon?

Also, the book is refreshingly free from pseudo-spirituality of the kitchen and humorless political screeds. It’s about the practical, the fun of trying out new things, and the balancing act we all have to pull off everyday between the ideal and the reality of life.

I think Reese’s attitude is best summed up by this quote from the afterword:

“Almost everything is better when homemade. While this may have started off as an opinion (though I’m not sure it did), I would now state it confidently as fact. Almost everything. But not everything. Which makes me inordinately happy. Because I think it’s reassuring that you can walk into a supermarket and buy a bag of potato chips and a tub of rice pudding that are better than you can make at home.”

While I might personally put my rice pudding up against anything found in a tub at a grocery store, there are certainly other things that I find better – and even sometimes more satisfying – to buy than to make. If you’re looking to figure out which is which in your world, I highly recommend taking a good, long look at this book… and then deciding for yourself.

Whether you’re a mother, a mutha, or a daughter, let’s celebrate the beautiful circle of life. Rock on with your bad selves!

Ah, Mom’s famous… well, it might be almost anything from Duck a l’orange to ‘call to the Chinese take out.’

Most people assume that part of being a mother is being a really great cook. Funny thing, though, mothers are really just like people sometimes, and each individual one may be better at one thing than another. Some of them really aren’t good cooks. Some don’t have the time. Some don’t have the talent. Some can make fabulous meals out of nothing, and some still couldn’t produce something vaguely edible even if an army of professional chefs stood at her elbow instructing her. Still others are fine within a specific range, but not so good when they venture beyond the borders of what their mothers taught them.

My mother? Well, she was one of those women who have a real gift. The kitchen was her realm and all the foodstuffs within bowed to her will gladly. Sure, she had the occasional disaster, like that Thanksgiving when the cranberry jelly never really jelled. And her pie crust, well, let’s just say that from the time I made my first one, she never bothered to try making one for herself again. If she needed pie crust, she called me in.

But aside from those little wrinkles, yeah, I grew up with a mom whose cooking really rocked.

Still, there are particular dishes that I remember more fondly than others. Her potato salad spoiled me rotten. It involved vinegar in the potatoes, a top layer of sour cream, and decorative slices of hard boiled egg. It was bracing, yet decadent all at once. And at Thanksgiving she made this amazingly delicious cranberry sherbet that was served as a palate cleanser with the meal.

I only wish I had the recipes.

But more than her cooking, I remember spending time with her in the kitchen. From early childhood, I would post myself on a stool at the counter and chat with her while she cooked. Later, she taught me the basics of making a good meal. Sometimes we even worked in tandem. Hanging with Mom in the kitchen is quite possibly my favorite way to remember her.

What about your moms? Great cook or lousy? Did she teach you to cook? Was she an object lesson? Did you teach her? Any particular dishes – brilliant or terrifying – you want to tell us about?

As a child, I read a lot of science fiction novels. I watched a lot of science fiction TV shows and movies. I still dabble in the genre here and there. But there was one thing that kept striking me about those books I read and quite a few of the films I watched – particularly the sort that would go on to be ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but some better ones, too – was that there was no food.

In fact, there seemed to be an all-out war on eating. In most of the futuristic Utopian visions, food had been replaced with a handful of pills that magically provided all one’s nutritional needs with a swallow of water.

I get where the creators of those worlds were going with that idea. After all, if taking half a dozen pills every day means nobody ever has to starve to death again, well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Okay, I can’t argue that people starving is a good thing on any level, ever. I won’t attempt to say anything so hideously offensive to my entire world view. I’m against people dying of need in the midst of a world of plenty, period.

On the other hand, I’m firmly against throwing out babies with bath water, too. No point in wasting a perfectly good baby you just cleaned and everything.

A world with no actual food always struck me as far too extreme a solution.

Maybe that’s why I found myself so drawn over the years to the world of Star Trek. There’s food. People in some cases actually care about their food. Captain Kirk finally goes ballistic over that whole Tribble situation not when he sits on one in his Captain’s chair on the bridge, but when his order of a chicken sandwich and black coffee from the replicator comes out a plate and cup overflowing with Tribbles.

On Deep Space Nine, the appreciation for a basic human delight was everywhere. The Promenade Deck had not only a Replomat, but several speciality restaurants, as well. Most of the crew started their day with Klingon coffee, and the Captain was famous for his Aubergine stew.

I didn’t care for Voyager… but one line spoken by Captain Janeway has stuck with me over the years. There was a nebula to be explored, and any crew in their right minds nearly a hundred years from where they started would have said ‘the hell with an unexplored nebula!’ But then it was pointed out that this nebula might be a good source of a substance much like Earth coffee. I recognized that cry from the heart when Captain Janeway announced they were going in because: “There’s coffee in that nebula.”

No, those cheap novels I read all those years ago had it wrong. A handful of pills may one day be created that can stave off starvation and malnutrition. When that day comes, that will be great news for people living in the midst of disasters, whether natural or man made. A handful of pills is certainly better than starvation.

But for the rest of us? For the long term? Taking a few pills can never replace the delight of the first bite of a perfectly crisp apple. It can never stand in for the sense of community many of us derive from the Thanksgiving turkey. It won’t bring the comfort of Mom’s chicken noodle soup… or samosas… or empanadas… or whatever your Mom made that made you feel safe and loved.

There are many things I love in speculative fiction, and there are many ideas to be explored. But don’t try to take away one of the most powerful ways in which people bond. Don’t tell me it’s better to never really taste anything again.

For me, the lure of coffee in that nebula and aubergine stew with alien friends is far too powerful.

Heigh-ho, camperinos!

Last week I smacked you all across the kisser with this deathless image:

And you all came back swinging with six hilarious ripostes.

It wasn’t easy picking a winner this week, but in the end there can be but one. This week it’s the ever-pithy Rebekka for this nugget of parenting Truthiness:

And behind door number three we have what happens when mommy runs out of gin.

Congratulations, Rebekka! And thanks to everyone who played.

Hello everybody!

It’s time once again to play Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness!

You all know how this works. I find a photo that’s sitting up and begging for a good caption or, you know, a whole bunch of them. You provide said captions via the comments function. Next week I declare a winner and there is much rejoicing, yea.

This week’s image comes to you from the perils of parenting file and it looks a little like this:

Ready… set… snark!