Bad Home Cooking

The original Bad Home Cook: Peg Bracken

Do you believe in reincarnation? I sort of do. I like the idea of bad guys returning for another life led as a lobster destined to live his last trapped in a restaurant tank. A lot more satisfying than ever-lasting hell and damnation with some guy in a red suit and a pitchfork.

I can't say I feel the same way about dopplegangers: the idea that we all have a double, another us, running around somewhere on the planet on our dime. It's a fun idea, sure. But then how do you explain Peg Bracken?

Ruth Eleanor "Peg" Bracken was an American humorist (1918-2007) most famous for her "I Hate to Cook Book," which has sold 3 million copies since it was first issued in 1960. In her disdain for all things domestic, she pre-dated Betty Friedan's seminal "The Feminine Mystique" by three years, choosing to wrap her uppity-woman subversiveness in light humor.

A snippet from the recipe for "Skid Row Strogenoff," from the "I Hate to Cook Book": Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

This is my kinda gal. The original Bad Home Cook.

Thanks be!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Bad Home Cook and family to you and yours!

We decided to order our Thanksgiving turkey and fixin's from Gelson's in Studio City. Thank God for that! Little chance of me fouling anything up.

Hope your Turkey Day was a fulfilling one.

How to Cook Your Life

A certain flamenco guitarist knows me all too well.

He found this movie trailer, and sent it to me. I love everything about it, from the music to the sentiment to the scenery. I MUST see this film. Unfortunately, the screening dates in L.A. are now behind me. Maybe it will come back soon? I let the universe decide.

Top ten crap dinners to make your kids

All the women's magazines say I should sit down every Sunday and plan a weekly menu. That's the best way to have a meal planned for every weekday dinner and be assured that I have all the necessary ingredients on hand. I would save time; no more running out to the store for the third time to buy one spice. No more staring into the pantry at 6 p.m. Tuesday with starving children clawing at my pants and realizing there was nothing to make (nothing they'd eat, anyway). I would save money as well, which is important these days. Anyone else notice that milk has gone up an entire dollar?

I can stand behind this idea. I support it full bore. It makes perfect sense to me. But it's never going to happen. I am simply too disorganized to sit down on a Sunday and write out a weekly menu. Such a task would cut too deeply into the time I spend staring into the middle distance, or checking my email, or painting my porch the wrong color. It smacks too much of June Cleaver. I can't bring myself to do it, even though I support it in theory.

It's in this spirit of resignation that I offer you my Top Ten Crap Dinners to Make Your Kids.

Igor, bring me the brain...CUPCAKES

October was an odd month. It was as if somebody dipped me in estrogen while I was sleeping. I became terribly, alarmingly family-minded and domestic. I went with my daughter on a Girl Scout camping trip (yeah yeah so I only lasted one night. It was the effort that's important here, yes?). I took the kids to visit my cousin and her family in leafy New Hampshire. I made their Halloween costumes. Actually sewed them, under the ever-patient, only slightly mocking eye of Audge. A Jawa robe and hood may look simple, my friends; it is anything but.

By Oct. 29 my brain was on housewife overload, coked up on the promise of delighting my children further and blind to the time/space continuum constraints bestowed upon me by the need to make rent. It was on that day I decided to make brain cupcakes for Halloween.