The least shocking news of 2012 broke this week, with deep South, deep-fat fryin’ down-home cooking guru Paula Deen admitting that she has type-2 diabetes, something the rags have been dishing on for years.

With signature recipes including Southern Fried Chicken, Cheese Biscuits, Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding and Paula’s Fried Butter Balls, as well as the admission in USA Today that she used to drink “sweet tea” from “… lunchtime … to bedtime,” I’m not sure how anybody – least of all, Paula, couldn’t have seen this coming.

Criticized heavily for promoting a fat- and sugar-laden diet – a diet which is linked to no shortage of health issues, from heart disease to obesity to diabetes – Deen famously once told Oprah, “I’m your cook, not your doctor,” and refuses even now to change her cooking show habits, insisting that she has always stressed moderation in eating.

Sure, Paula, and I’m sure that tobacco companies stress moderation in smoking. I hope Paula is ok, I really do, but the truth is, moderation would have put Paula out of business long ago. What does moderation constitute? Doing something 10% of the time? 25% of the time? I’m pretty sure that Paula would not stress moderation when it comes to people buying her heart-attack-waiting-to-happen recipe books, or the cooking implements she happily shills, which – the only real shocker here – does not include a signature deep fryer.

Also disturbing is the fact that Paula has kept the diagnosis close to her ample bosom for years, choosing only to come out of the deep fryer with her news as it coincides with her new appointment as spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that will be supplying Deen’s diabetes medication and implements. How quaint.

I am all for people taking responsibility for their own choices and for not playing the blame game when it comes to making the bad ones, but the critics have a point –Paula preaches a dangerous message to the throngs of the butter loving faithful.

It’s like Dr. Atkins developing heart disease, Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry’s) undergoing a quintuple (!) bypass, or the millionaire owner of Segway dying in a Segway accident – when you make your living dabbling in the unhealthy and stupid, it can eventually catch up with you.

It caught up with Deen, and as for the blame game, well, she has nobody to blame but herself.

Yes, I said it. Holidays. Christmas or Hannukkah or Kwaanza or whatever your particular flavour of end of year celebration might be, the season is nearly upon us. Already, you say? WTF? Wasn’t it July 1st last week? And how the hell am I going to get through this without losing my mind? The answer, ladies, is with as much slacking as possible, without (and this is the key part) your family *noticing* your slacktastic ways. Don’t worry, my friends. The Bad Moms Club is here with a guide to help you loaf your way through the holidays with almost nobody becoming the wiser. Just follow our handy tips and you might even come out the holidays happy.

1. Online shopping. Sure, you already know this one, but seriously, have you tried it? Go online tonight in your pyjamas with a glass of wine and surf Toys R Us or Chapters. Not only will you find stuff for everyone on your list, it’s often a lot cheaper than in store. And before you hit Complete Purchase, make sure you google for Discount or Coupons for your retailer – you can save a good chunk of change. Then, on December 10 or so, tell hubs/partner/whoever you’re going shopping, then head to the nearest wine bar for some R&R. They’ll never know the difference!

And for the epically lazy, like me, they’ll even wrap them. Who cares if none of the paper matches? This is the slacker’s guide, not the over-organized color-coordinated supermoms-guide.

2. Entertaining. This one is a cinch. Everyone loves frosty afternoons huddled around the tree sharing stories with friends. But your house is barely presentable to the board of health, let alone company. The solution? Just swindle as many invitations as you can over to everyone Else’s house, to the homes of people who are organized and have their places nicely decorated and have all the latest toys for Junior to destroy. Just memorize the following script: “gee, we really would love to see you over the holidays! Come on over! Just to let you know, though, my cat has developed severe stranger anxiety and pees in all my guests’ shoes. Also on their feet. But what day are you free? Let’s make plans!” And watch the invites to come to their house instead, no really it’s no problem, roll in. It’s a no-fail strategy.

3. Turkey dinner. This one is a total cinch. Instead of spending a pile of cash and hours of your own time slaving over a hot stove for the ungrateful cretins who will demolish the meal in seconds then leave you to clean up the mess, just call your local fancy hotel. They probably do a fancy turkey dinner with all the trimmings to go. No lie. Just place your order in advance then forget about it til the day, when you announce to your family that they must remain out of the kitchen the entire time you cook because you are practicing a new Solitary Cooking ritual from the Bohemian Monks. This ritual is a very spiritual and important one for you and must not be interrupted. Then lock the door and sit down on the floor with a coffee and a book for three hours til it’s time to pick dinner up. Sneak it in through the window, plunk it on serving plates, hide the evidence and announce the end of your ritual with a flourish. Tah-daaah! Dinnair is served!

With any luck, these tips will get you through the holidays almost entirely effort-free. Because, isn’t slacking the true spirit of the holidays? That’s what I thought. Now if you will excuse me, I have a silent Bohemian Monk ritual to attend to with a bottle of wine.

Dear Easter-Celebrating People Of Earth,

It is I, the humble dinner plate, and I have a complaint to take up with you, lo this week before Easter. I know that you are, at this very moment, plotting your Easter feasts, and you are, I know, drawing up grocery lists on which you are including things like ham and asparagus and green peas and potatoes. And I take issue with none of this, except for your insistence upon the inclusion of the potato.

Whatever, Potato. WHAT. EVER.

Are you not sick of the potato, People Of Earth? Have you not had your fill of what is, arguably, the most uninteresting foodstuff known to your kind? Why is it that you insist upon including this, this tuber in every celebratory meal? Mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving. Baked potatoes at summer barbecues. Potato chips at birthdays. Mashed potatoes again at Christmas. Potato pancakes at Passover. Scalloped potatoes at Easter. Potato, potato, potato, potato. I am sick of looking at its broad white underside. I am bored to tears of its starchy aroma. I can no longer bear the thud of it landing upon me, mashed or scalloped or diced, heavy and bland, unrelenting in its weighty blah-ness. Can you not place some other foodstuff upon my smooth surface? Can you not burden me with something more interesting? Can you not lay upon me something new? Something upon which the children and your great aunt Martha will not be compelled to put – shudder – ketchup?

Something soft and light and redolent of diverse aromas and flavors and colors, perhaps? Something like… stuffing? Stuffing is so light and so friendly. Stuffing brings color and variety to my surface. Stuffing invites so much more than butter or ketchup. Oh, to be warmed by the embrace of stuffing!

This is my plea to you, oh People Of Earth: put aside your potatoes. Turn your backs on all that is boring and bland and demanding of ketchup. Open your eyes to the beauty of foodstuffs that are not dug up from the ground. Free me – the humble dinner plate! – from the tyranny of tubers and the hegemony of hash browns! GIVE ME LIBERTY FROM POTATOES OR GIVE ME DEATH!

You can continue with the gravy, though. I love gravy.

Love,

Your Dinner Plate

*This important message from your dinner plate was not brought to you by stuffing. No, wait, it was. But it was Kraft Stove Top Stuffing Mix, and there’s really no conflict there, because Kraft Stove Top Stuffing Mix just helped Dinner Plate write this, because Dinner Plate is illiterate and also doesn’t have arms. It was a charitable act, you guys. This is all about literacy.

**Charitable, except for the part where they paid me to help. So.

***Stuffing really is very good, though. Have you ever added chopped water chesnuts to the mix? YUM. Your dinner plate loves that.

****Gravy doesn’t have a man in this game. She’s just watching from the sidelines, amused and confident. She knows that you all want her. She’s staying out of this.

*****You got something to say about this? You think Gravy really should weigh in here? Submit your own “boring” potato entries to the Un-Potato Campaign contest at Technorati for a chance to win a $100 American Express gift card. Full contest rules at: http://technorati.com/stovetop-unpotato-contest

I recently declared myself Chairmom of Virtual Kitchen Stadium Canada so that I could watch and learn from aspiring IronMom Chefs as they take select ingredients from Clover Leaf Foods and spin them – in five minutes or less! – into delicious meals. IronMom Chef Maria, IronMom Chef Caroline, IronMom Chef Amy, IronMom Chef Loukia and IronMom Chef Karen have been battling it out over the last two weeks and it has been AWESOME.

IronMom Chef Maria demonstrated her skills in Kitchen Stadium Bored Mommy; IronMom Chef Caroline demonstrated her skills in Kitchen Stadium Parent Club. (And then she did it again!) IronMom Chef Loukia showed us what she’s got in Kitchen Stadium LouLou’s Views.

AND NOW…

IronMom Chef Karen has made a run at the title with this dish. And this one!

IronMom Chef Amy shows us what she’s got over in her Kitchen Stadium.

Go check out what they’re doing, and vote for either one – or both – with a comment. (Voting gets you an opportunity to win a Clover Leaf prize basket! With cooking gear and a gift card and foodstuffs and YUM.) I’ll be judging the five IronMom Chefs on their finished product (well, the visual), whether they were able to stick to the time, and popularity of their dishes  – which is to say, YOUR votes, so get them in!

Food as art. Also, insanity.

Look, people, it’s an absurd world out there. Completely absurd. And every absurdity is being captured by the lens of reality TV.

Homeless men can get broadcasting jobs and free homes just by pitching a guy with a flipcam at a traffic light. Adult, seemingly sane women “compete” to marry a man who’s been sleeping with 16 other women right under their noses. People throw themselves in to mud pits and eat live insects for the remote chance of winning the jackpot.

Let’s face it. We are one network executive’s wet dream away from The Running Man.

The unfortunate truth is that there must be an audience for this stuff, otherwise why would every single television station in the world be churning out reality TV at the rate of 1,496 shows a minute?  And where there’s an audience, there’s also inevitably rabid fans, prepared to defend their chosen absurdity to the death.

So when a mom speaks out and says that, one, some of this reality TV is completely pointless, and two, some of the people on these pointless reality TV shows seem to be employed solely in order to be gratuitously nasty, and three, that said gratuitously nasty person’s hairdo could maybe use an upgrade of a decade or three, well, that mom who spoke out has a point.

But beware when you poke the Reality TV Beast, people. Because even gratuitously nasty headband cake people have a posse.  The Cake People Are Angry. pH3@r the Cake People.

And you know, normally when there’s people being crappy in comments I’d get all, we need to raise the level of discourse and oh, the humanity but god, people. It’s Cake. And gratuitous nasty. And Headbands. It’s got built-in absurdity. There’s just nowhere even to start. But boy, is it funny.

Still, backlash from Angel-Cake-Lovers or no, Bad Moms will persevere in pointing out the absurdity in Reality TV and everywhere, Cake Anger and everywhere else. Because really, if we don’t do it, who will?

So, this might not come as a surprise coming from the editor of a site that that has categories like ‘Bad Cookery’ and ‘Bad Housekeeping,’ but I’m a pretty bad homemaker. I’m an incompetent cook, and I hate housekeeping. Except for making coffee and soup and vacuuming. I kind of love vacuuming.

ANYWAY. I might be an incompetent cook, but I do have a well-honed eye for a) good food, and b) easy ways to get good food. The easiest way, of course, is to have one’s spouse or partner make it (or order it; I’m not fussy). The second easiest way is to learn from others who have mastered the art of making good food fast. Which is the whole point of this post, and of a few more to come.

I recently declared myself Chairmom of Virtual Kitchen Stadium Canada, so that I could watch and learn from aspiring IronMom Chefs as they take select ingredients from Clover Leaf Foods and spin them – in five minutes or less! – into delicious meals. IronMom Chef Maria, IronMom Chef Caroline, IronMom Chef Amy, IronMom Chef Loukia and IronMom Chef Karen are battling it out right this very minute!

WAIT… IronMom Chef Maria, IronMom Chef Caroline and IronMom Chef Loukia have already put down their spatulas!

IronMom Chef Maria demonstrated her skills in Kitchen Stadium Bored Mommy. Go check it out, and vote for her with a comment if you like what she’s done. (Voting gets you an opportunity to win a Clover Leaf prize basket!)

IronMom Chef Caroline demonstrated her skills in Kitchen Stadium Parent Club. And then she does it again! Go check it out, and vote for her with a comment if you like her work. (Yes! Another opportunity here to win a Clover Leaf prize basket!)

IronMom Chef Loukia showed us what she’s got in Kitchen Stadium LouLou’s Views.

Stay tuned for our other IronMom Chefs to complete their work. And if you’re so inspired – and want another shot at a big awesome prize basket – join in and see if you can make a delicious meal in under five minutes. Leave a comment with a link to a post about it or just with a description of what you did. YUM.

EAT IT / EAT IT / EAT IT / EAT IT / EAT IT.

WRONG ANSWER.

Sure, you should eat some of the leftover Halloween candy. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t pilfer a few of those Wunderbars and eat them for breakfast one or two or three days in a row (we don’t judge here, people.) But you can’t eat all of it – you SHOULDN’T eat all of it – and so you are probably, right this very minute, faced with the problem of WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THAT HALLOWEEN CANDY.

I have the solutions. Here are ten things that you can do with all that candy (yes, including the stuff that you took from your kids):

1.) Save that candy for putting in DIY piñatas (everybody loves pinatas! all the more when there are WUNDERBARS inside!)

2.) Save it for filling out birthday gift bags.

3.) Save to use for cookie ingredients and/or cupcake toppings. (Seriously: peanut butter cookies with broken pieces of Reese’s Pieces or Peanut Butter Cups? Would it be so awful if you died from that kind of awesome?)

4.) Mix it into ice cream (DIY Blizzards!)

5.) Use it to fill gaps in Christmas stockings (because Wunderbars are way better than candy canes and if your kids are little they won’t really notice the difference anyway.)

6.) Use it to decorate gingerbread houses. Just buy one of those gingerbread kits and discard the cheapo candy decoration that comes with, replace with Swedish Berries and Nibs and Reese’s Pieces and Wunderbars. I would fall in love with anyone who gave me a Wunderbar gingerbread house. I would probably kiss them.

7.) Use the leftover Halloween candy to fill your own DIY Advent calendars (you can stitch or use iron-on hemming tape to make your own really easily; stay tuned closer to the holidays.) (I cannot guarantee that God would approve of this, but whatever. I’m pretty sure that he expects this of me by now, anyway.)

8.) Save it for busting out at last minute coffee dates – instead of putting out biscuits or whatever other twee thing June Cleaver might have served with coffee, set out a plate of Coffee Crisps and Kit Kats (I assume that by now you have no Wunderbars left.)

9.) Save the chocolate bars for melting in fondues (dipping apple in melted Caramilk bars? HEAVEN) or melting and pouring over ice cream or melting and stirring into hot chocolate and dipping churros into.

10.) Save to use as garnish in creamy drinks (frozen Junior Mints in eggnog? Frozen Caramilk pieces in a Kahlua martini? Sure, you will have a terrible headache the next day, but come on: YUM.)

Save the chocolate candy in the freezer to make it last longer; the rest of it, stash it somewhere your kids can’t find it. And try to avoid dipping into it (too much.)

Got tips to add? Leave them in comments!

I’m thinking that if one were to try to render what childbirth looks like in baked goods, the result might not be as pretty – or, um, as appetizing – as this gingerbread depiction of what is usually scientifically described as teh lady parts, but I’m guessing one would have to use a lot more sprinkles.

Let’s maybe not think too hard about that.

No, really. This is SCIENCE:

Science! Always involving a lot more rainbow sprinkles than you’re expecting.

source

It’s been a while since I prepared a meal. And when I say it’s ‘been a while’ I mean I can’t remember the last time that I did.

Because, really? The kids don’t care. They would eat Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup every day, or Kraft Mac and Cheese.

And I follow behind them and eat their leftovers.

It’s a great system.

But then there’s my dad. For the last few months he’s been coming over regularly for dinner. And he grew up with a mother who prepared a home cooked meal every night–-from scratch-–and so the first time I announced it was chili dog night he looked like he’d just been kicked in the man sack.

What? You no like chili dogs, DAD?

So. Needless to say (and pretty much against my will) I’ve learned how to prepare a home cooked meal–-one that doesn’t involve a can or a box.

It’s hard, y’all.

Also? He likes a salad with dinner too. And most days I like a salad too. It makes me feel less dirty for eating a cheeseburger for lunch. Like I’m doing my body a favor by introducing it to green leafy non cheesy foods.

But the problem with lettuce and tomatoes and shit, is that you need to wash them.

Really? Who has the time?

So last night when he was over I *might* have skipped that step.

I was *sure* no one would notice. And when I say no one, I mean my dad.

But, he took the first bite and in mid chew, spit it back on his plate.

“This tastes like dirt.”

Oops.

“What do you mean?”

“The lettuce. It’s covered in dirt. Did you wash it?”

Me, acting offended: “Dude. You asked for a salad. You didn’t say *anything* about washing the lettuce.”

He rolled his eyes and shoved his plate to the side. “I think I’ll skip it tonight.”

You’re welcome.

Here’s the thing about getting a brand spanking new gas range for your kitchen: you will be so overwhelmed by the culinary possibilities offered by such a magnificent piece of cooking equipment that you will – despite having no talent for cooking – feel compelled to make things like garlic mashed potatoes at 10:48am in the morning.

And then, having eaten your potatoes, you will feel compelled to nap. And then your day will slip away from you like butter down the sides of hot smashed tubers.

I blame this guy:

I call him Fred. He’s a mashed potato pimp, and he’s not to be trusted. Which is not to say that I am not happy having him in my home – I am very happy to have him in my home, because he is handsome and capable and cooks things like mashed potatoes really, really efficiently – just that one really needs to keep one’s eye on him, lest one’s relationship with him causes one’s thighs to balloon.

Just sayin.’

Are you headed to the National Home Show in Toronto this weekend? Come find us there! We’ll be around – especially around the Whirlpool booth, learning about Fred’s friends and family – and we’d love to meet you!

Disclosure: Whirlpool gave me Fred. He was languishing in the Whirlpool Home For Lonely Appliances, and they thought that I might offer him a home and companionship. He’s settling in nicely.