In the intervening 48 hours, I made Hot Latin Boy his first ever banana pudding.

He’d never had it before and by the low moaning sounds he’s been making –similar to the sounds my shar-pei makes when I rub his ears, I call it an eargasm– I can tell the pleasures of warm, homemade vanilla pudding (do you even need to ask whether there’s bourbon in it?) are new to him.

Over on the Facebook page, I pondered which is the greater sin: using a half of a Hershey’s bar when making a single s’more (excessive and ruins the whole delicate taste and texture ratio) or those miserly folks who only use one slice of banana per Nilla wafer in their banana pudding.

One reader seemed unclear as to the usage of the phrase “banana pudding”.

It is not the same thing as banana-flavored pudding.

Banana pudding is alternating layers of Nilla wafers and sliced ripe bananas drenched in warm homemade vanilla custard and let to chill. Some people top their pudding with meringue and others with whipped cream.

Some may use homemade ladyfingers as their cookie and some use Chessmen (though usually this is seen as embarrassingly bougie and most likely to be sign of a social climbing Methodist who wants to impress the Episcopalian Daughters of the King) but if it isn’t homemade pudding –and honestly there is no reason not to make your own custard, it takes five minutes and is infinitely superior to any boxed variety– it’s not banana pudding.

I don’t even have the strength to discuss Cool Whip as a topping.

Which brings me to my next point.

I don’t want to overgeneralize or make some sort of inflammatory logically indefensible assertion here, but it must be said:

I’m pretty sure people who don’t make their own mayonnaise don’t get into heaven, at least not on their first try.

Admittedly, this might not hold up to rigorous theological testing and Duke’s enthusiasts probably go to limbo instead of straight to the bottom floor. I haven’t really worked out all the details yet. Hmm, I wonder what Mayo Limbo would be like…probably a place where you can get shrimp and grits but they’re lumpy and made by some guy from Connecticut.

*shudder*

Anyway, the other day Twistie was talking about kitchen gadgets she didn’t need. I also have an aebelskiver pan, although I’ve never actually had aebelskiver as I was most likely vaccinated against it as a child.

Although I’ve been felled by the siren song of a completely useless gadget once or twice (I’m looking at you, bread machine) I tend to save my serious errors in judgment for outside the kitchen.

Still, one must look on the sunny side, so here is a list of five kitchen tools that more than earn their counter space.

Cuisinart Stick Blender

This thing sees near-daily service. Yesterday I used it to make agua sandia, a refreshing watermelon drink. I just cut the top off a seedless watermelon, removed a chunk from the middle and put the stick blender right in the melon and made two liters of delicious fresh watermelon juice in approximately two minutes. Blending soups right in the pot, making pesto, whizzing up smoothies or frozen umbrella drink and of course, making homemade mayonnaise. This is one of my solid gold gadget purchases and I’d buy one again in a heartbeat.

Kitchen Kettle Multi-Cooker

Unlike Twistie, I do love my deep fryer.

I rarely eat deep fried foods, but potato chips are so much better when homemade that storebought ones –excluding the divine Grandma Utz’s– just aren’t worth the caloric investment. Still, I’m not interested in one trick ponies, so it’s nice to know the Kitchen Kettle also serves as a rice and veggie steamer, pasta cooker and slow cooker, so it earns its place on my counter. I’m pretty sure it’d be great for popcorn too, but popcorn is an abomination unto the Lord and also gets stuck in my teeth, so I guess that will remain a mystery.

Enameled Aluminum Lemon Squeezer

Another tool that gets a daily workout here at Villa Plumcake is my lemon squeezer. The lime tree in my backyard assaults me with citrus on a near daily basis and very few things in Mexico are served without a final hit of lime, but even when I lived stateside my enamel-coated metal squeezer saw a lot of action, particularly around cocktail time.

BonJour Mini Butane Torch

Okay, a mini butane torch is just fun. I used it on my banana pudding and there’s always this frisson of excitement. It’s like a handgun, but slightly less likely to ruin your meringue.

It’s also useful, especially for those of us whose favorite dessert is crème brûlée but have yet to master the art of broiling sugar in the oven.

As much as I’d like to eat crème brûlée every day, my little blowtorch sees more action browning sugar atop grapefruit halves, roasting small peppers and tomatoes, toasting small quantities of spices or easily-burned nuts (pine nuts do wonderfully in this, giving you even less of an excuse to not make your own pesto) or giving that extra punch of crispy caramelization for whatever comes out of the kitchen. Necessary? Not really, but surprisingly useful and unsurprisingly fun.

Weighmax Electronic Kitchen Scale

I think I mentioned my hesitation buying a kitchen scale before.

To me they were always related to fad diets and gave me ugly flashbacks just thinking of them, but honestly, they’re damn handy and make using European recipes which usually give dry measurements in weight, not volume, a snap. Plus, if you’re baking in less-than-ideal circumstances or can’t understand why your famous layer cake sometimes comes out like heaven and other times like hockey pucks, measure your ingredients by weight. You’ll be glad you did.

(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.

Yesterday I spent much of the day at the American Consulate waiting for Hot Latin Boy to renew his tourist visa.

As such, I spent four hours people watching and wondering what sort of decision-making process would start out “What should I wear to my very important potentially life-changing government interview” and arrive at “shredded thigh jeans, shooties ordered from the back of Modern Streetwalker and a hickey the size of Gorbachev’s port wine stain.”

Baffling.

Anyway, it’s been a while, but since it’s time to resurrect the featurette and see What Miss Plumcake is…

Reading: “The Sunday Philosophy Club” by Alexander McCall Smith. Not quite as good as his more famous and thoroughly charming No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, but a pleasant, entertaining light read for people who don’t leave their brains behind when they go to the beach.

Watching: Mary and Max. An uncomfortable yet tender black comedy from the country who does it best: Australia. The story of a neglected Australian school girl and her middle-aged Asperger’s penpal from New York is somewhere between Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit) and Tim Burton, with the signature dark quirkiness of the best of Oz cinema . It’s not without flaws, but it’s worth a watch just for the blackboard at the Over-Eaters Anonymous meeting.

Hearing: La Bamba: Sones Jarochos from Veracruz. Like most Americans, I was only familiar with son jarocho via Ritchie Valens’ electric iteration of the oeuvre’s 800 pound gorilla, La Bamba; but last night Hot Latin Boy and I were treated to a more traditional setting of the Afro-Cuban influenced music of Mexico’s largest Atlantic port. Two scruffy young men in tight-brimmed fedoras called out verses while playing jaranas, small eight-stringed guitar-like instruments native to Veracruz, while a willowy woman –all shoulder blades and arrogance– stomped out a sort of flamenco percussion with her feet. I downloaded this album last night as a sort of primer course, and I’ve been listening to it nonstop.

Smelling: Poivre by Caron. Scandalously expensive, notoriously hard to get and heart-wrenchingly sublime, Caron’s 1954 ode to pepper and carnation is a masterpiece of composition, a savage dance contained within absolute restraint; it’s Stravinsky in a bottle. It’s the 1913 Sacre Printemps riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It’s magnificent and I’d trade my Birkin for an ounce of the original juice. Interestingly, I’m not the only one making symphonic comparisons. Read more about Poivre and its little sister Coup de Fouet, at Perfume Shrine.

Loving: Kay Unger Shimmer Bolero on Super Sale (sizes limited). Where the heck was this when I was going to six weddings a month and couldn’t find a damn dress with sleeves?

Hating: Candycornsayswhat? I can almost see a good dress in there somewhere, were it not afflicted with the dreaded shapelessness that Saks Fifth Avenue (among others) seems determined fat people want.

Wanting: Gourmet Sea Salt Sampler There’s nothing quite like a good dose of cholera to set one’s usually adventurous dining habits straight back to “just some buttered toast please” for another six weeks. I take my toast –and there’s been so much toast– buttered, with just the lightest imaginable sprinkling of salt. I’m a sucker for exotics, and although the local cheapo stuff is actually a surprisingly subtle, flaky sea salt, I’ve been having almost untoward fantasies about this sampler.

Buying: Almond Meal. A few weeks ago while fantasizing about my future life in Spain, I whipped up a simple orange and almond olive oil cake inspired by one I sampled at a dinner party thrown by a charming Iberian lawyer and his two equally charming (and equally Iberian too, I suppose) sons.  At least it would’ve been simple if I hadn’t had to grind the almonds by hand in my molcajete. The cake is right up my alley –a simple unfrosted round, bright with citrus, olive oil and ground nuts– so I invested in a large bag of raw almond meal. Now I add it to everything I bake. I love the texture, the nutty taste and hey, replacing a bit of wheat flour with almond meal increases the nutritional value and flavor profile at the same time. What’s not to love?

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.

When Mr. Twistie and I eat out, we have a few tried and true places we tend to go to. These are places that have good food at reasonable prices, and where we feel taken care of. In fact, the place where we breakfast every saturday morning is just two blocks from our home and everyone there knows our names, as well as what we’re going to drink with our meals (latte for me, iced tea for him). For the past two years I’ve even baked the proprietor’s birthday cake. She adores lemon pound cake.

So when we’re eating out, we usually are in very safe waters where we know what to expect.

For one reason and another, though, we’ve found ourselves going out to some less familiar places of late. Some have been fabulous. There was the little Brazilian place where the owner greeted us like family and the seafood risotto was a dream. Some have been… less fabulous, but at least not a horrible experience. And let’s face it, not every restaurant can blow me away with the food they produce.

Then there’s the phenomenon I’ve run across several times in the past few months that really gets under my skin.

At least six times in the past five months, I’ve wound up with a server who wants to bond over dieting while I’m trying to eat. With the menu, I get the server moaning low about how fat she is. Invariably, she’s a great deal thinner than I am. And then I get the knowing wink and nod about how I must hate how fat I am, too.

Then comes the talk about how she never exercises after work because she’s so ‘lazy.’ Seriously? If your job is waiting tables in a busy restaurant, you’re getting all the exercise your body actually needs just carrying those heavy trays and walking back and forth between the kitchen and every table in your station so many times in an eight-hour shift. Still, she wants me to agree that she’s lazy and unmotivated and obviously I know what that’s like, don’t I? Wink, wink.

Sure, the dessert menus will be offered, but almost with an apology, and certainly with an arch air of  ’I won’t tell the diet police what a pig you were if you don’t tell on me!’

The bizarre thing is I honestly think these servers (mostly, but not exclusively, women working in family style restaurants) believe this is a style of service that isn’t insulting, isn’t potentially harmful, and really makes us buddies.

They even continue to prattle on about the evils of eating after I say I make pointed comments that this isn’t something I wish to discuss. They do it when I’m wearing my scarlet fat necklace or my What You Can Tell About Fat People By Looking At Them graph tee shirt.

Has anyone else been running across this lately, or is it just me? If anyone else has run across this, have you found any way to head it off at the pass?

After all, I’m trying to eat.

Part of it is the joy of introducing people to your favorite foods. Hot Latin Boy has recently fallen for shrimp and grits, biscuits and gravy and gin and tonics, all in a big way and I couldn’t be more proud.

The other part is the comfort of the familiar.

Living in Texas I would never bother to make my own barbecue unless I wanted some Tennessee-style pulled pork because there’s no point in smoking your own brisket when half of God’s Own BBQ Joints are within a 40 minute drive.

(These are the four most famous pit stops in Lockhart, Texas; ground zero for great Texas bbq. I am and always shall be a Smitty’s girl)

In the spirit of friendship and smoked meat, I am throwing a Texas Independence Day party for a dozen or so of my Mexican friends on Saturday and the menu will feature a proper Texas brisket smoked for 12 hours, potato salad, cowboy beans, deviled eggs, homemade smushy white bread, pickled onions and, incongruously, Bananas Foster.

Bananas Foster? Isn’t that a New Orleans thing?

Yes. Yes it is.

Originally it was going to be the much more traditional banana puddings, complete with low rent Nilla wafers and luscious pillows of boozy whipped cream (ideally it would be my blue ribbon-winning brownie pecan pie, but I can’t find pecans here for love nor money), but I made the mistake of introducing the locals to the flambeed delight earlier this week. The response was so orgiastically enthusiastic, I worried for the sanctity of my tablecloth. Now I’m pretty sure if I ended the party Foster-less I’d quickly find myself in a new, short-lived career as a great white canape for great white sharks.

So what about you? If you were in a foreign land and asked to serve the food of your people, what would your menu be?

Many of you may have read this article from Yahoo Health that went up two days ago. It’s the sad tale of British teen Stacey Irvine who collapsed and was rushed to the hospital with severe breathing problems.

Turns out what was wrong with her was that since she was two years old – that’s fifteen years, folks – Irvine has subsisted on a diet of Chicken McNuggets meals. That’s pretty much it. Just incredibly processed, deep-fried chicken nuggets and fries, with an occasional slice of toast or handful of potato chips to mix things up. No leafy greens, no root veggies that aren’t fried potatoes, no fruit, no fish, no red meat, no pulses: nada else.

As a result, Irvine suffers from anemia and swollen veins in her tongue. Clearly what she was doing was not good for her health.

But what interests me is the fact that the article seems to focus on the badness of Chicken McNuggets as opposed to what was really wrong with Irvine’s diet: she was eating only one thing and had done so for fifteen years.

In many ways, what shocks me the most about this story isn’t that eating nothing but Chicken McNuggets is bad for you, but the fact that she managed to get along on that and so very little else for so freaking long.

Even proponents of fad diets based around a single food, such as grapefruit or cabbage soup, only recommend you stay on them for roughly a week at a time and then stop for at least a couple weeks. For my money, that’s a great big flashing red warning sign to stay away from that diet. After all, if it were healthy to eat nothing but grapefruit, you wouldn’t have to stop so quickly or give it as long a rest, would you?

In a more nuanced article at CBS News, it’s pointed out that even if what Irvine had been eating every day to the exclusion of all other foods had been something generally recognized as healthy, such as carrots, she would still be suffering ill effects on her health because no single food item can fulfill all of a person’s nutritional needs.

So if you like McNuggets, eat the freaking McNuggets. Just make sure you eat something else once in a while, too. And if you like carrots, eat the freaking carrots… and make sure you eat something else once in a while, too.

It’s not what food you eat that makes it unhealthy: it’s eating only one food.

Variety isn’t just the spice of life. It’s also good for you.

Every twice in a while dreams really do come true.

Remember way back in November when I wrote up a Christmas wish list? If not, I’ll give you a minute to go back and take another look. It’s okay. I’ll be right here.

Got it? Good.

Four of the five things on that list are still not within my grasp, but they will be one day. One of them, though…

Yes, Mr. Twistie got the hint and gave me the entire series of Pushing Daisies on Blu Ray!

Soooo… I guess the party’s at Casa Twistie, all you fellow Pushing Daisies fans!

Of course, between one thing and another it took us until yesterday to actually set up the Blu Ray player we bought three months ago (don’t ask). But yesterday at long last I was able once again to follow the adventures of the Pie Maker and the Girl Called Chuck.

What could possibly make me happier?

Well, there is one thing. I may not have gotten that Jacques Pepin megatome I wanted, but I did get another amazing cookbook I wanted for Christmas:

All About Roasting by Molly Stevens is an in-depth look at the art of roasting as well as a fabulous compendium of tasty recipes to test out your new skills. I’m  learning lots of new exciting things about roasting food, which delights me. But even if you don’t sit down and read about the whys and wherefores, the recipes are so delicious the book would still be well worth the list price of $35.00. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that you can get it right now at Cooking.com for a mere $23.09.

Trust me, the recipe for the roasted fennel, red onion, and orange salad is worth the price of admission alone! How do I know? I made it last night for dinner. Mr. Twistie was a little unsure about eating roasted orange peel at first, but once he tasted it he yummed it up.

I can’t wait to try out more recipes!

So yesterday was a wonderful day. I got to try out my two favorite Christmas presents, and they both made me tremendously happy.

What does all this mean?

Clearly it means the party is at Casa Twistie!

What’s making you feel like the party’s at your place today?