Lagniappe: One of the happiest nights of my adult life

One rainy Sunday a few years ago, Isabel, Owen, and I decided to pass the afternoon by watching a DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring, that movie about hobbits and elves and Orcs that we'd been hearing about. One hundred and seventy-eight minutes later, during which we neither moved nor spoke, we looked at each other, eyes glazed. We walked straight to the car, drove to the video store, and rented The Two Towers and The Return of the King. It was getting on dusk when I pulled into the Kentucky Fried Chicken down the hill and bought dinner.

My kids were shocked. Happy, but shocked. What was going on with Mom? KFC? I wondered that myself. But we were hungry and the chicken was hot and we had five more hours of Viggo Mortensen to watch. Fifteen minutes after I pulled into the KFC, we were back on the sofa with the bucket on the coffee table, eating mediocre chicken and mashed potatoes and biscuits and watching The Two Towers. It was one of the happiest nights of my adult life and my children get dreamy and nostalgic talking about it.

[here we're skipping her description of making perfect fried chicken from a Thomas Keller recipe, which was eaten without comment by her family after hours of labor]

Soon I was left with plates of picked-over bones and a ravaged kitchen. One of these days I will forget the evening ever happened. I suspect Mark and our children already have. But that night we ate KFC on the sofa and watched The Two Towers? That, we will never forget.

Jennifer Reese; Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

This book is so entertaining. I appreciate the analysis of whether it is better to buy or make various standard food items — granola/make, Pop Tarts/buy — but I have never made anything from it. I have read it twice, however, because the author is just so darned entertaining. And honest.

Lagniappe: The Sex Life of Corn

Next time you pull a piece of silk from between your teeth while you're eating a fresh ear of corn, remember that you've just spat our a fallopian tube. Corn has a curious anatomy: the tassel at the top of the plant is the male flower; when mature, it produces two million to five million grains of pollen. The wind picks up those grains and moves them around.

The ear of corn is actually a cluster of female flowers. A young ear contains about a thousand ovules, each of which could become a kernel. Those ovules produce "silks" that run to the tip of the ear. If one of them catches a grain of pollen, the pollen will germinate and produce a tube that runs down the silk to the kernel. There the egg and pollen grain will meet at last. Once fertilized, that egg will swell into a plump kernel, which represents the next generation—or a bottle of bourbon, depending on your perspective.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

Okaaaaay. That next ear of corn is going to feel a little different when I eat it.

Lagniappe: Where Cinnamon Sticks Come From

No one knows where cinnamon sticks come from. There is a bird called the cinnamon bird that gathers the fragrant twigs from some unknown location and builds its nest from them. To harvest the cinnamon, people attach weights to the tips of arrows and shoot the nests down.

That's not actually true, but it was Aristotle's best guess when he described cinnamon in his Historta Animalium in 350 BC. We have since located the source of cinnamon, relieving us of the necessity of shooting down the nests of mythical birds.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

I love educated guesses. This makes me remember that some of our best guesses today, often made by historians and scientists, are going to look laughable in the far future. (Sometimes in the near future.) I wonder which ones?

Lagniappe: A Little Splash of Water

Do not be timid about adding ice or a splash of water to a drink. It does not water down the drink; it improves it. Water actually loosens the hold that alcohol has on aromatic molecules, which heightens rather than dilutes the flavor.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

See, it isn't all just odd facts. Sometimes there's info that makes a difference in our lives. In mine anyway!

Lagniappe: Lightning Pear

Pears also contain a nonfermentable sugar called sorbitol, which adds sweetness but has one drawback: for people with sensitive systems, it acts as a laxative. one popular English pear variety, Blakeney Red, is also called Lightning Pear for the way it shoots through the system. This quirk has earned cider pears yet another folk saying: "Perry goes down like velvet, round like thunder, and out like lightning."

Amy Steward, The Drunken Botanist

This explains a lot about why my "morning after" a pear is a bit of a struggle.

Lagniappe: Which apples did dinosaurs prefer?

The DNA of apples is more complex than ours; a recent sequencing of the Golden Delicious genome uncovered fifty-seven thousand genes, more than twice as many as the twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand that humans possess. Our own genetic diversity ensures that our children will all be somewhat unique—never an exact copy of their parents but bearing some resemblance to the rest of the family. Apples display "extreme heterozygosity," meaning that they produce offspring that look nothing like their parents. Plant an apple seed, wait a few decades, and you'll get a tree bearing fruit that looks and tastes entirely different from its parent. In fact, the fruit from one seedling will be, genetically speaking, unlike any other apple ever grown, at any time, anywhere in the world.

Now consider the fact that apples have been around for fifty million to sixty-five million years, emerging right around the time dinosaurs went extinct and primates made their first appearance. for millions of years, the trees reproduced without any human interference, combining and recombining those intricately complex genes the way a gambler rolls dice. When primates—and later, early humans‚encountered a new apple tree and bit into its fruit, they never knew what they were going to get.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

I had no idea. Fascinating.

Lagniappe: Pechuga

There is one ingredient that can make mezcal different from whiskey or brandy: a dead chicken. Pechuga is a particularly rare and wonderful version of mezcal that includes wild local fruit added to the distillation for just a hint of sweetness, and a whole raw chicken breast, skinned and washed, hung in the still as the vapors pass over it. The chicken is supposed to balance the sweetness of the fruit. Whatever its purpose, it works: do not pass up an opportunity to taste pechuga mezcal.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

Crazy, but it actually makes me want to try it.

One owed something to one's ancestors

When my father had been extravagant, he used to say gaily in self-defense that "one owed something to one's ancestors." Certainly,if it had not been for several of his ancestors, he would not have owed so much to his contemporaries.

C.N. and A.M. Williamson, The Motor Maid

This light, fun book was one of my top reads of 2025. This bit gives you a sense of the humor throughout.

Christmas with Charles Dickens

The best sitting room at Manor Farm was a good, long, dark-paneled room with a high chimney-piece, and a capacious chimney, up which you could have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all. At the upper end of the room, seated in a shady bower of holly and evergreens, were the two best fiddlers, and the only harp, in all Muggleton. In all sorts of recesses, and on all kinds of brackets, stood massive old silver candlesticks with four branches each. The carpet was up, the candles burnt bright, the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, and merry voices and light-hearted laughter range through the room.

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Christmas with Washington Irving

 

It is, indeed, the season of regenerated feeling--the season for kindling, not merely the fire of hospitality in the hall, but the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Washington Irving, Old Christmas

The Old Dutch Masters and a Mexican Restaurant

A little lagniappe from my quote journal. Doesn't this paint a wonderful picture?

The old Dutch masters would have loved to perpetuate the interior of a Mexican restaurant, its patrons showing the cosmopolitan nature of the population of the State. A long, low-roofed room, with bare floor, an uncovered pine table, and hard bench, on which sit three noted politicians taking an evening lunch. ... Each has a steaming platter of chile con carne before him, and a plate of tamales in their hot moist wrappings of shuck. Behind them stands the Mexican host, tall, dark, dignified, and grave, yet watchful. ... Over them flicker the dim rays cast by an oil lamp, deepening the shadows, throwing half-lights into the obscurity of the corners. A tiny hairless Mexican dog sits motionless on the doorstep, while the sign—written in both English and Spanish—swings creakingly above his head. ... Only in the cities of Texas can be found that peculiar fusion of American civilization with Mexican life. ...

Lee C. Harby, "Texan Types and Contrast,"
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July 1890

via Robb Walsh, Texas Eats

Sinking as a hedonist into novels

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

Eudora Welty

Yes. Also Tolkien. And Dante. And Agatha Christie.

Clearly I've got a problem.

Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

"Our schools are orderly, sanitary places where students dwell in blissful ignorance of the chaos that awaits," West said. "Should our facilities be repaired? No, they must be razed to the ground and rebuilt in the image of the Cyclopean dwellings of the Elder Gods, the very geometry of which will drive them to be possessed by visions of the realms beyond." ...

"Charles sure likes to bang on that madness drum," fellow school board member Danielle Kolker said. "I'm not totally sold on his plan to let gibbering, half-formed creatures dripping with ichor feed off the flesh and fear of our students. But he is always on time to help set up for our spaghetti suppers, and his bake sale goods are among the most popular."

"I must admit, he's very convincing," Kolker added.

This excerpt is from one of my favorite of The Onion's pieces. I enjoy rereading it every year. Do go read it all.

Inhuman, Gelatinous, and Disembodied

Shall I say that the voice was deep, hollow, gelatinous, remote, unearthly, inhuman, disembodied?

H.P. Lovecraft, the Statement of Randolph Carter

Wow. And somehow I feel I know just how it sounded.

What a queer thing Life is!

What a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.

P.G. Wodehouse

This is just one of those inspired bits of incoherence that makes Wodehouse fans laugh and want more. Also, it's true.

Lagniappe: The Underground and the Death Star

The Underground works all day and all evening, which means the brave men and women in high-visibility orange who keep it running have to work all night. The depot is so full of people banging bits of metal together and scraping things to make sparks that if you squinted you'd swear they were about to launch a last desperate attack against the Death Star.

Ben Aaronovitch, The Furthest Station

I just love his turn of phrase and ability to evoke a mental image. Plus, he makes me laugh.

Lagniappe: Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.

Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

I've been rereading this series and especially enjoying the architectural comments and the details about police work that the author includes.

One of the most unexpected elements of P.C. Grant's character in the Rivers of London series is his continual disapproval of a lot of modern architecture. There's a reason that comes to light eventually but it is funny. And pretty accurate as far as I can tell.

Lagniappe: Never record anything ...

I rang her and left a message identifying myself and giving an impression of urgency without actually saying anything concrete. Never record anything you wouldn't want turning up on YouTube is my motto.

Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

If only more of us remembered this, the world would be a calmer place. More boring, sure. But definitely calmer.

Lagniappe: Planned Improvisation

She glanced back at where my dad ... was having a technical discussion with the rest of the band. Lots of hand gestures as he indicated where he wanted solos to come in during the set because, as my dad always says, while improvisation and spontaneity may be the hallmarks of great jazz, the hallmark of being a great player is ensuring the rest of the band is spontaneously improvising the way you want them to.

Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

Aha! I always suspected as much!

Lagniappe: A Copper Who Is a Wizard

"You're so boring," she said. "You'd think a copper who was a wizard would be more interesting. Harry Potter wasn't this boring. I bet Gandalf could drink you under the table."

Probably true, but I don't remember the bit where Hermione gets so wickedly drunk that Harry has to pull the broomstick over on Buckingham Palace Road just so she can be sick in the gutter.

Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

It goes on like that for a bit, but you get the point. Makes me laugh and that's it. Nothing deeper here to see. Move along now.