At 17 years old I’d discovered my kitchen. Actually that isn’t exactly true. I’d discovered my kitchen during 5th grade when I took a mandatory Home Ec. class and practiced the magic of omelets and pigs in a blanket. Unfortunately, you can only pair so many pigs with blankets and omelet chasers before your family winces every time you approach the stove. Having not been taught cooking basics or how to read a recipe, I abandoned cooking until hormones drove me back into the kitchen in the hopes of getting laid. [Something Alison Hallett just happens to cover in our food issue].
Rekindling my love of cooking at 17 were a redhead (who later nearly ruined my life) and a cookbook for young people heading to college. The first thing I remember mastering from that book was sautéed chicken breasts. I made them for the redhead often and they were received with great acclaim. It was appropriate really—the redhead appreciated my breasts and therefore allowed me to appreciate hers. The girl is gone, but my love of cooking remains.
Recently, I’ve wondered what it would’ve been like if I’d grown up in the age of the internet, where discovering how to cook is as simple as logging on to Epicurious.com and finding a dish so easy you’d have to intentionally burn down the kitchen to fuck it up? And similarly, finding breasts to look at is a simple as turning on the computer.
Back when I was a kid (sometime around the Pleistocene, when the redheads were hot and the Mammoths were hotter), you either learned shit from your school, from your parents, from your friends (with varying results), or… from books. But one thing hasn’t changed: Before cracking the book, or logging on, you’ve got to want to learn.
- “Make me some chicken…”
Why am I babbling on about this? I’ll tell you. It’s my (naive, probably) hope that by giving away the new cookbook “Love at First Bite: the Unofficial Twilight Cookbook,” some young twi-hard will be inspired to find their kitchen and take a few blind fandom-fueled stabs at cooking. Perhaps some of those stabs will hit something deeper—a desire to keep cooking.
Maybe someone will crack this book and be changed forever. Maybe it will be a young man thinking “Wolf pack Waffles” will get him some tail (it probably wont). Maybe it will be a young woman, believing “Edward’s Cornflake Chicken” will bring her closer to the perpetually smouldering-eyed vampire (it probably will). Or, maybe, it will be a Blogtownie who just wants some more LOLS (it’s fucking guaranteed). I don’t care. I just want the crap off my desk.
Here’s the rule: In the comments below, give me one good reason you want to win the unofficial Twilight cookbook. I will pick a winner by the end of the week. [Oh, did I mention it also has cocktail recipes? Yeah. It does.]
Because I’m your boss, and I demand it.
I want this cookbook, and I hereby promise that I’ll make one or two of these recipes and bring the resulting products to the next official or un-official blogtown meetup.
I want this cookbook because I’m proud of you for not making a crude joke about “cocktails” and Robert Pattinson, and because I have a 16 year old sister, who’s pretty much the only person I know that could own this without it being “ironic” and/or totes creepy.
Wow. Just based on those three reasons, this is going to turn out to be a difficult decision.
Because this book will empower me to prepare quick & nutritious meals, as sustenance alternatives to the blood of local alt-weekly writers (particularly the well-fed ones).
I require this cookbook as a part of my grand strategy to destroy the patriarchy through co-optation of gender-politic-regressive materials. This book will be the lead deployment of a false-flag operation in which a special “Twihard” pot-luck (with enforced Stephanie Meyer style gender roles) event intended to engender additional ill-will toward heteronormativity. Exclusion of non-cisgendered people will be implicit via the requirement that “bellas” attend under the control of “edwards” who will control every aspect of their participation not directly related to food preparation and/or pouting.
Let’s make this happen. Let’s smash the patriarchy.
I desire said cookbook because right now I’m having a hard time imagining what goes into a cookbook when the Vampires from the Twilight universe can’t actually eat food! Seriously. What’s in it? Recipes for Boudin? I love cooking, and damn, now I’m curious…
@PAC: I’ll up the ante as well. You can pick which of these dumb recipes I make for the meet-up. Only caveat: I’m not making the booze-based ones; that’s not fair to me.
It doesn’t matter what any of you say. You can take the cookbook but it will never be yours. It is imprinted on me like Jacob on Bella. Go ahead, PAC, give it to someone else. It will just phase into a werewolf and come find me. You non-believers cannot stand in the way of supernatural true love!
i want this cookbook so that nobody else will cook from it, or open it, or read it
Like Edward, I wanted to cook for my wife to help her out, so I watched Food Network a lot. Now I have several recipes down pat, and my wife is happy when I cook. My wife is ahuge Twilight fan, and I’d like to learn some more recipes that she would enjoy. Please?
I’ll take it if it has a recipe for Bieber koolaid.
So who won?