There is a delicious frisson of Catholic-style guilt in that classic New Year's resolution to eat better: I'm still working through the Christmas candy. I've made it to the Giant Bar.

The Giant Bar is not actually as intimidating as one might suppose, given that the yellow wrapper was designed to evoke some dim genetic fear of tigers. You don't eat the milk chocolate with almonds, the milk chocolate with almonds eats you! Symbolically, of course - what is actually supposed to happen is that you are consumed by gluttony, gobble the whole thing down at once without even pausing for a drink of milk, and expire in glee.

Which is why I'm grateful to the Transportation Security Authority at the Quad Cities regional airport. They smashed the Giant Bar into tiny and completely non-threatening portions. Hoorah!

A wine-snobbery technique I'd never heard of: put Vegemite in a glass of cheap sparkling wine. Via Professor Bainbridge.

If we believe the L.A. Times food section, cardamom is the new black and can be indiscriminately used in place of cinnamon.

A story about cardamom in holiday baking that doesn't mention Scandinavia until the fourth paragraph ought not to be trusted, but I occasionally have faith in the basic human urges that produce wacky food trends. I put cardamom on my candied yams. It wasn't a complete disaster, but the cardamom somehow managed to bowl over both yam and nutmeg flavors on the way across my tongue. It was like getting Vegas-style blinky Christmas lights when you were expecting a small arrangement of evergreen boughs.

I suppose the moral of the story is to use a measuring spoon. Meh.

I'm still not sure if the turkeys marinated in MSG were enough to make up for the lack of turducken. MSG is a superlatively delicious taste enhancement, but in comparing deep-fried MSG turkeys and oven-roasted turducken, one is led down this seductive path of MSG-enhanced turducken stuffed into a pig and pit roasted for three days as the next step in ultimate gratitude. There are obvious logistical obstacles.

Acquiring a kitchen with multiple ovens and a pit roast is the most compelling argument yet for a) working to become wealthy or b) going to chef school. But this is not about unfulfilled aspirations, it is about belatedly listing some trivial items that make me happy, as per tradition:

• Hanging pots
• Mugs with handles large enough to put all for fingers through to the knuckle
• Socks that are technically dirty, but not too dirty to wear again if you don't need to feel respectable on a Sunday afternoon
• All-purpose sewing machine needles
• Clouds

"Respect the art of pie" wrote Susan Bright. I wonder what she'd think of the diner in Iowa City I read about in the paper that tosses pie in a blender and calls it a "pie shake." No time to bake pie. No time to sit down and eat it properly with a cold glass of milk.
--Pascale le Draoulec, American Pie

Eighteen years I lived in that town. Eighteen years, and it takes some uppity woman from Santa Monica to tell me about pie shakes at the Hamburg Inn. An uppity woman on a pie quest to assimilate her French heritage and sort out her relationships. Who visits Iowa and fails to have pie, and then tosses off the Hamburg Inn as an example of the world going to hell in a handbasket, with no pie.

The Hamburg Inn is a motherfucking bastion of tradition. It is the hometown diner of Iowa City, and one does not waltz into a paragraph, insult someone's hometown diner, and waltz out again with a twirl about "pie pace" and modern life. It's just not done, particularly if one has not actually visited the diner in question. It is not a frantic juice-bar nutrient shake type of diner (though they do hurry you a bit on weekends, when there's a line).

It's like insulting someone's Mom's pie. Worse, for me, as my own mother's pies are not particularly old-fashioned or authentic (Ms. le Draoulec writes 368 pages on pie, and not once does she mention the graham cracker crust!). Though I am embarassed to say that I've never actually had a pie shake at the Hamburg Inn, I have had drinks disappeared from my tab, probably before this woman bought her first-ever mixing bowl.

My culture's sacraments have been carelessly mocked by an outsider, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously, pie shakes will be on the agenda for Twinkletree. From there, I'll play the xenophobic belligerence by ear; maybe rustle up a posse of disgruntled Writer's Workshop dropouts. We'll bake a pie to end all pies, and put it in a blender for democracy, and write poetry about it. We'll take the publishers by storm (with meringue disguising our faces) and show them through slow force-feeding that the true meaning of "pie pace" can be felt even after the pie is chopped to bits.

Or we'll have a pie shake, drive home, and fall asleep on the couch while our posse bellies digest.

The L.A. Times Food section gets in on the electoral action with the election-night party plans of the losers. A surprising number of candidates are teetotallers, including even the ones running on a platform of "Drink Butt Monkey Beer" - there goes that ad campaign. Quite frankly, I don't see how a teetotaller can appropriately govern a state with so much wine production... so it's a good thing they're all going to lose.

1. It's obviously the greatest food product ever invented, but deep-fried macaroni and cheese on a stick isn't as tasty as you might expect. The texture compares unfavorably to traditional deep-fried mozarella cheese sticks as well.
2. Neil Stephenson wants to nucleate a "Metaweb" around his new novel, so he's started a wiki. It's either ambitious or pretentious, but it's probably more pretentious than ambitious (though I haven't read the book yet - Peter is still hogging it):

   ...I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. [...] The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.
   
   We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started.

   The idea of organizing general knowledge around a novel - any novel - seems rather like my way of arranging bookshelves: it promotes serendipity at best, and disorientation at worst. So as a huge fan of serendipity, I must suppress my dislike of bullshit internet pseudo-librarians and support the effort. Reluctantly.

   But if I had to pick a novel (make that "work of literature") upon which to crystallize the accumulated wisdom of mankind, it almost certainly would not be Quicksilver (but then, I haven't read it yet). It might be Sophie's World. Like any proper nerd I'd be tempted to use The Hitchhiker's Guide, and like any proper Anglophone, Shakespeare. Then I'd come to my senses and pick out something by Borges... what about all y'all?
   
   [link via BoingBoing]

I didn't know how long these corn dogs had been in the freezer before I put them in the oven. Their insides taste like burnt motor oil and have the texture of a dense acoustic foam. Their outsides remind me of used condoms lying along the road, not for any particular reason but for overall yuckitude. Physically, the outside layer is crumbly brown drywall, or perhaps a piece of femur that has been cracked open and gnawed on before being left to some freeze-thaw cycles and a drought - but it tastes like margarine.

I made some watermelon popsicles last week, and finally opened one up today - all kinds of tasty! After reading some unknown internet recipe that suggested adding a cinnamon stick to the boiling sugar syrup, I decided to dump in a random amount of cinnamon powder. The overall effect is almost certainly more cinnamon than God ever intended - rather like a watermelon-based horchata. Mmm.

The popsicle molds (don't know where they came from) have an exceptionally clever catch-basin at the bottom, to gather up drips. You can drink the melting remnants from a straw. I'd insist that such devices be installed on all disposable popsicle sticks, but it would ruin countless little-kid crafts, so I won't.

My bag of discount yams came with two mystery roots - or perhaps it's more accurate to say one and a half mystery roots.

What are these things, and how do I eat them?