(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.

Pie bird. It’s a fact that when you’re baking a pie with a top crust, you do need to vent the top so the steam can escape. If you don’t, then your pie explodes and you’ve got a horrible job cleaning up your oven. The idea with the pie bird is that you lay your bottom crust into the pan, sit the bird in the middle, put in the filling and then lay the top crust over the bird, allowing it to pierce the center. As the pie bakes, the steam escapes through the throat of the bird.

Okay, some of these little buggers are really cute, but I can’t see any point in using them. I’ve been baking pies for forty two years now, and simply cutting a couple small slits in the top crust with a kitchen knife has never yet let me down. My filling fills the entire center of the pie, and I don’t have to worry about cleaning that fiddly little bird at the end.

Deep Fryer. Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy the heck out of deep fried foods. But no, I’m not going to cook them at home. Casa Twistie has very poor air circulation, and anything that gets fried – let alone deeply! – hangs in the air for days afterward. I don’t want to deal with the hassle of disposing properly of the used fat. And frankly, when Mama Twistie made her amazing tempura… she used a very deep pot and a kitchen thermometer and it worked just fine.

Pressure cooker. Not only do I have limited counter space available, this is basically a really fast way of steaming food. I have the time to do it with an ordinary pot and steamer insert. Also, I’ve watched too many pressure cooker disasters on Top Chef and Iron Chef. These buggers actually scare me a bit. Maybe when people aren’t under the pressure of a Quickfire Challenge they’re perfectly safe… but I’m not taking the chance. It just doesn’t seem worth the money or the counter real estate for my life.

Electric griddle. Again, there’s no place to put it. Besides, my beautiful stove, Algy, came with an included cast iron griddle that fits perfectly over that center oval burner. I don’t need to double what I’ve already got with something that will add to my electricity bill.

We all have different priorities. I have no need for a crock pot since I work from home and have the time to tend a stew in an ordinary pot on the stovetop. But for someone who goes out to work or spends more time running around chasing after her kids, it can be a real life saver. A deep fryer doesn’t fit into my world, but for another cook, it may be as necessary as air.

None of this is meant to dissuade you from something you have a real, serious use for in your life. It’s all about figuring out what does and doesn’t make sense in the life you lead. When you see lists of ‘must have’ items, always consider whether you as an individual must have it or not.

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.

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.

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!

All of the films I’m going to recommend today are available through Netflix. I’ll also point out those you can get from Amazon.

Gunless stars Paul Gross as a wild west gunslinger who, on the run from a not very talented lynch mob and bounty hunter Callum Keith Rennie, finds himself in a tiny Canadian hamlet where nobody owns a pistol. The humor is very tongue-in-cheek, and a talented cast gives the wry script everything they’ve got. This is a film with few if any axes to grind, a slightly elastic take on history, and lots of heart. Turn off your mind and just enjoy it. Oh, and make sure you stick around for the credits. They’re liberally laced with outtakes that will leave you giggling.

In November of 1924, William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, set sail with a glittering cast of celebrities to celebrate the birthday of Thomas H. Ince, film producer. Before the weekend was over, Ince was dead. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but no autopsy was performed, nobody on the ship was interviewed by police, and Hollywood being Hollywood even then, rumors began flying. The most popular rumor of what had happened was that Hearst accidentally shot Ince mistaking him for Charlie Chaplin and believing Chaplin was having an affair with his (Hearst’s) mistress Marion Davies.

The important part of all this is not whether the rumors or the official reports contain more truth, but the fact that Peter Bogdanovich put together one of the most amazing casts in recent film history to tell the tale of the rumor and called it The Cat’s Meow. Who’s in that cast? Well, let’s start with Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin, Joanna Lumley as Elinor Glyn, and Cary Elwes as Thomas Ince… and then continue with a smattering of Kirstin Dunst as Marion Davies, Edward Herrmann as Hearst, and Jennifer Tilley as Luella Parsons. What more do you need? Check it out. It’s a brilliant film.

For those who like their humor on the dark and bitter side, Children of the Revolution is a great choice. A devoted Australian Communist, Judy Davis, meets with her hero: Josef Stalin (played with great humor by F. Murray Abraham). Later she turns out to be pregnant, but will not tell anyone who the father of her son really is. She’s pretty sure she knows, though.

Is Joe really Stalin’s son? Maybe, maybe not. But through this darkly humorous mockumentary, Joe grows in political power. Is he the scariest thing in the film? Again… not necessarily. Standout performances by Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush as the man she marries but never really appreciates, Sam Niell as a double… possibly triple… maybe even quadruple agent working for… somebody or possibly everybody, and Richard Roxburgh as Joe make the trip well worthwhile. If you enjoyed The Ruling Class, you’ll probably like this one, too.

What do you do when you live in a tiny town with zero opportunities, your ex has married somebody so rich he can put a basketball court in your kid’s room, and you’re down to your last dime? Well, if you’re Jeff Bridges in The Amateurs, you convince all your friends to help you make a porn movie and make a fortune.

With a cast lead by Bridges, William Fitchner, Tim Blake Nelson, Glenne Headley, and Lauren Graham, it’s hard to go too far wrong. Add in a clever and surprisingly sweet script for such a raunchy concept, and you’re golden. In  big surprise to me, Ted Danson turned in one of my favorite performances in the film.

I remember years ago seeing a novel in a bookstore that I didn’t buy despite the intriguing title largely because I was low on funds at the time. It was entitled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Little did I know it was eventually made into a buddy road trip movie called Smoke Signals and billed as the first feature film produced, written, directed, and acted by Native Americans.

Smoke Signals tells the story of Victor Joseph’s (Adam Beach) trip to gather the remains of his father with his friend Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams). As is usually the case with road trip films, the point isn’t the destination but the journey. The journey includes meditations on identity, honor, guilt, heroism, unresolved anger, and forgiveness. There’s a lot of humor, a bit of rage, and tremendous tenderness along the way.

The biggest downside? Now I absolutely have to try my hand at making fry bread.

So what good films have you seen lately? What would you recommend to us all?

Well day-um!

In light of Miss Plummy’s diagnosis of cholera, of all things(!) I find myself wondering what bizarre ailments other folks have found themselves to have.

My weirdest? Well, about three or four years ago, I had a cold that lingered, and lingered, and lingered… and lingered. Eventually I broke down and went to a doctor only to discover that what I had thought was a cold was actually pertussis, otherwise known as whooping cough. Whooping cough! I’d never even known anyone who had had whooping cough! I thought it was nearly mythic by that point. Little did I know it was on the rise.

Now I see PSAs on TV all the time reminding adults to get the pertussis vaccine.

Still, that ain’t nothing to cholera. The closest I’ve ever gotten to knowing anyone who had that was when I read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett as a child. The heroine, Mary, loses both her parents to cholera in India and is shipped off back to England and her reclusive uncle… and, well, I enjoyed it when I was ten. It still appeals to the part of me that goes back once in a blue moon to re-read Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter.

But back to surprising illnesses.

What is the most surprising diagnosis you’ve ever gotten? Had you ever known anyone who had suffered from the same thing?

And Plummy? Feel better soonest.

Okay, I know Joan Crawford isn’t up for Mother of the Century, and I’m down with that.

Still.

Last week Liz asked me to share my thoughts about the recent study that claimed to link autism to maternal obesity, and I don’t even have to go very far in depth with the study to have an opinion. There are a lot of people out there who have taken the study apart, pointed out that what was found was a weak correlative link rather than any sort of causal mechanics, and questioned every possible aspect of the study.

I’m not going to deal with the specifics of this particular study. Do a Google search, find an article or three.

What I’m going to discuss here today is not one single study that may or may not hold a clue to one potential health question… or may be a steaming pile of cassowary refuse.

What I want to talk about today is the assumption that when something is ‘wrong’ with a child, it’s the mother’s fault.

Don’t try to tell me this isn’t the case. Henry VIII used it in his second divorce, claiming – among other things – that Anne Boleyn ‘practiced not to have a son.’ After all, at that time it was assumed that since the baby comes out of the mother, she’s in complete control of things like the placement of its genitalia.

Turns out, that wasn’t so much the case.

More recently, one of my own brothers gleefully (it really is the only word for it) informed me that I’m left-handed because of a birth defect, so it’s all Mom’s fault. Funny, I have two perfectly normal hands, and I don’t consider myself in any way damaged because I’m a southpaw. And of course most mothers don’t go into the delivery room thinking to themselves ‘hmmm… I bet if I really try, I could give this kid a birth defect! I’m gonna go for it!’ But he’d heard some blurb somewhere about a theory that left-handedness isn’t just a thing that happens sometimes like blue eyes (which I also have) or red hair or a natural gift for a particular sport, but an actual problem that occurs when there’s severe trauma in the birth canal.

Then again, like so many, he’s always looking for a way to blame Mom for whatever ills there are in the world… he’s just really into blaming one specific mom.

As for autism, well, some of us are old enough to remember Bruno Bettelheim’s ‘refrigerator mother’ theory that autism occurs because the mother withholds affection from her baby.

Yeah, not so much, it turns out. The mothers of children on the autism spectrum vary widely in their parenting styles, emotional natures, and available parenting time. In fact, they vary just as much in those things as the mothers of children born with blue eyes or red hair or a dominant left hand. Oh, and so do their fathers. You know, those other parents who contribute half the genetic material and are sometimes also present in the home? Those guys whose genetic contribution – against all assumed logic of centuries – determines the gender of the child?

It’s just possible that – as unlikely as it seems to many researching the question – the determination of whether a child turns out to have some degree of autism might lie with the male of the species. It may well not, but I’d be interested to see just one study focus on what daddy brings to that particular table. You know, to see whether there’s any possibility.

Mommy blame? We’re soaking in it. I love the Law&Order franchise on television, but I’m constantly amazed at how often they manage to find incest and a guilty mother at the bottom of case after case after case. But I’m also watching with a critical hat on. How many others simply watch and don’t ever sit down to think about the messages being fed them? And advertisements for tutoring programs for kids always seem to feature the distraught mother who cannot make her child learn better… never the father. Never a teacher, male or female.

It takes two people (and sometimes more) to make a baby. Each one brings some genetic and/or environmental factor to the making of that child. Every child comes into contact with a lot of different people along the road of life, each of whom may well contribute something for good or for ill.

Let’s stop assuming the mother is responsible for everything from the complete genetic profile of the child to its eventual prison record or lack thereof. Let’s stop assuming that the average mother more or less chooses – by agency or by ignorance – to make her children ‘abnormal’ in some way.

Because maybe – just maybe – if we remove the assumption of guilt, we can look more clearly at what’s going on and what really comes into play that creates the variations in life.

And maybe we can just let most of those variations simply exist without trying to erase entire populations.