This is Breakfast

My cookbook got a link from Protein Wisdom today. Apparently a guy named Dan Collins is blogging over there. I haven’t kept up with Jeff’s business. Hope he’s writing books. Thanks, Dan. And I got a typically flattering link from Cold Fury. Thanks, sort of.

If you want proof that the book works, click the “Death by Fork” link to your left, and your modem will fry as about 10,000 entries spew out in your browsers. But here’s a little evidence that ought to be persuasive. This is breakfast.

I realize this is not a good thing for a fat person–or anyone–to eat for breakfast, but blueberries are only cheap for a short time, and damn it, I wanted cheesecake. It’s as good as it looks. Actually, it’s much better. That’s a big fork and a big saucer, and they make the slice look small. I used a 10″ pan, and that slice is about 2 1/2″ tall. It’s rich and sweet and cold and heavy, the way a cheesecake should be. Light, airy cheesecake is an abomination. I probably took in 800 calories when I ate that slice.

People are suggesting I put flexible unions on the pool pump. I appreciate that. Like I have said, no one in Miami can do anything right. The old pump was installed without unions, and every time it has needed work, PVC doodads have been spliced into the system, so it’s atrocious. I can see why the old timers used cast iron. This job would have been simple with iron pipes. I ought to splice them in now. Maybe I’ll do that. I am really tired of sawing, gluing, resawing, and regluing. And the PVC will be too short to put unions on, once I get done sawing.

A commenter who is apparently a contractor thinks I made a bad choice, doing the work myself. Well, I saved about $150 by bypassing the local blue collar genius who sells these pumps. I saved maybe a hundred bucks on labor. And so far I have spent a whopping $0 on PVC and materials. I had it all before I started. I estimate I will have to spend another five bucks to get the job done. It will be better than anything a professional has done here. In fact, it will solve leak problems a whole slew of greedy slackjaws caused. The only down side is that I have to spend some time working. Well, that’s the nature of life. If you want something, you work.

Some people think I do my own repairs because I’m cheap. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s called “responsibility.” And it’s only part of the reason. The biggest reason is that most tradesmen in Miami are chimpanzees. There is no union. There is no apprentice system. They cause problem after problem because they’re too unskilled or lazy to do things right, and I end up following behind them, doing the work they were supposed to do.

Very often, I am literally unable to find anyone to do a particular job right, at any price. In some parts of the country, you can still hire competent, honest people. Here, much of the time, it’s impossible.

And tradesmen charge too much. I know a plumber who wrote an estimate for three grand to remove forty feet of mostly above-ground cast iron drain pipe and replace it with PVC. Guess what the materials cost. If it’s more than a hundred dollars, I’ll kiss your rear end on national television. And it’s not skilled labor. Some plumbing takes training, but replacing drain lines is simple.

Here’s something tradesmen who aren’t busy enough should think about. Not everyone is supposed to be rich. If you didn’t complete your education and all you can do is lay bricks, you’re not supposed to have a six-figure income and a giant truck with six doors and a custom paint job. Once a homeowner has seen your three-thousand-dollar estimate for half a day’s unskilled work, learning how to do simple plumbing will not intimidate him. If you’re the homeowner, what’s the down side? You spend a hundred bucks on PVC (probably more like thirty), and maybe you spend fifty on a tool rental. So if you screw up, you’re out between $3000 and $3100. If you succeed, you’re out $100 or less. Someone help me understand why that’s not a good bet to make.

If you’re honest and competent and responsible, you’ll probably be busy every day, and you’ll be able to charge twice what the competition does. I haven’t met anyone who fits that description. Generally, my own work–with zero training and very little skill–is far better than what I get from professionals.

Northern Tool has a set of threading dies for $70. That is starting to sound like a very good deal. I have a dry cut saw. I have a vise. I don’t need a snapper. It will be easier to spend the money than suffer in the heat, scraping old PVC with sandpaper. Screw it. I’ll buy the tools. After that, I’ll make a pipe that screws into the pump. Then I’ll make one that screws into a threaded PVC fitting on the other side. I’ll join them to an elbow, after tightening the joints, with PVC cement. In the future, when a pump goes bad, I’ll cut out the elbow, unscrew the dead ends, throw them away, and make new parts in fifteen minutes. I don’t need this BS. I don’t need to spend my days waiting for boobs to show up and wreck things and leave me worse off than I was to begin with. Life is short. Let the plumbers starve. When I work, I do a good job, and I don’t cheat anyone. Why should I expect less from tradesmen?

If I were practicing law right now, I would get about three hundred dollars per hour. Plumbers often charge substantially more than that, when you break down their bills. That’s just stupid.

People have also suggested I cast a block for the pump to sit on, and that I put the bolts for the pump into the wet concrete. The problem I see here is that it will be impossible to take the bolts out and put new ones in. Someone else suggests casting lag shields in the block. But I don’t think they’ll have room to expand when I screw the bolts in. I think the best thing is to cast the block and use a hammer drill to make holes for the shields. It’s not a big deal. I have the drill, the bit, the shields, and the bolts. For that matter, I happen to have a bag of concrete. The only real work will be building the form. Lucky me; I have a table saw and a big piece of scrap wood.

Hey…I could weld a base up and bolt it to the floor. But it’s humid out there. Rust. Oh, well.

Anyway, I don’t regret cutting contractors out of my life whenever possible. It has been nothing but a blessing, and every one of you should be striving to do the same thing.

Why Cook It?

Just now, as I was eating raw cheesecake batter off a spatula, it occurred to me that cheesecake batter tastes a lot like Key lime pie. And the wheels started turning, and now I want to make a Key lime pie with cream cheese in it.

It won’t be an authentic Key lime pie. Those only contain condensed milk, juice, egg yolks, and maybe–if you’re kooky–some zest, salt, and/or vanilla. And real Conchs don’t cook their pies. Only pansies do that. Citrus juice kills salmonella. Look it up.

Conchs are people from the Keys.

I’m thinking I could make a mixture of sugar and cream cheese, and I could get it to the point where it’s as sweet as condensed milk, and I could substitute it for half of the condensed milk in the recipe.

While I was running errands, I did a victory tour at Barnes & Noble. They only had one copy of my book, so I did the natural thing.

Tonight the Marsala bottle caught my eye. Can you make a cheesecake that somehow includes Marsala? Cheesecake with zabaglione would be weird, but good. Shove some strawberries in it, and you’re ready to go.

You Take the Bad With the Good

Arrgh.

New pool pump. Guess who is about to install it? Here is some advice. Don’t even think about buying one of these at a bricks and mortar store. Store price? $379, plus tax. Internet? $239, plus very reasonable shipping.

I realize that local store owners have to make money, but it seems like anything related to a swimming pool automatically costs 50% more than it should, just as anything related to a boat or a pet bird costs more. The industry seems to attract small timers who don’t understand that quick nickels are better than slow dollars. I would have been thrilled to buy this locally, even at a small premium, but these people must be smoking crack, charging $379 without even checking to see what Ebay vendors charge.

Got a pool? Guess what? Your pump is probably too big. It turns out that 1.5″ pipe will only allow something like 44 gallons per minute. That usually means a pump with one horsepower or less. Yet many pool doofuses install giant pumps that suck huge amounts of electricity while laboring unsuccessfully to push water through undersized pipes. You waste electricity, and the pump wears out early.

More pool trivia: it’s probably cheaper to run a small pump all day than a big pump for eight hours. This is a very small pump, and I plan to run it 16 hours per day. It should do a better job than the old pump, for less money.

I’m getting incredible comments on the book. Thank you. This is exactly what I was hoping for, but it’s still an experience. I felt in my heart that this book was going to reach people, in a way that the others could not. That’s why I wanted to publish this one first. When you try to break into writing, you have to listen to marketing people and agents and experienced editors, and you can’t discount what they tell you. And in the end, you get to publish what they let you publish. Sometimes that’s a good thing. But I have had tremendous faith in Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook ever since the idea popped into my head. And I couldn’t get it to the market until I published those two other books.

It’s a miracle anyone bought the spam book. You have to wade through endless badly written 419 emails to get to the funny stuff. There was no way to avoid that; it’s the nature of the project. It’s worth it, if you’re a real reader. Most book buyers don’t fit that description. They want a quick scan and instant gratification. It’s not surprising that the caveman book was not a giant hit. The show that was supposed to put wind under its wings was killed by the thought police. And how many people just naturally gravitate to caveman books? Very few. This book, on the other hand, ought to have much more appeal. It’s easy to read, the recipes are actually good, and I think I did a creditable job with the humor.

People are putting up Amazon reviews and sending me emails. I am grateful for all of them. Don’t hesitate to ask for recipe clarification. It’s important to me that people succeed with this stuff. One of my pet peeves with professional cooks is that all they care about is making money; they don’t care whether the food they tell you how to prepare is any good. I care. I want people to cook this stuff and say, “Holy cow, this is unbelievable. That was eleven dollars and one cent well spent.” I don’t have a staff of underpaid minions writing my recipes for me. I don’t take credit for things written by faceless underlings, without checking to see if the recipes are good. Other cookbook writers and food personalities do those things as a matter of course. You can tell when you try their awful recipes.

Don’t forget, I have a P.O. box where you can send copies for autographing. With return postage and a suitable envelope, mind you. I plan to check the box once a week. I tried to get a post office box that was more convenient, but it was impossible. They have removed the parking lot at the Coconut Grove P.O. That means I have to cross US 1 and go through a bunch of lights and park in the hood, so I won’t be going every day.

You can send the other books if you want.

I’m going to try to get that cheesecake made today. I don’t see how I can survive without it.

Keep the comments and emails coming, and if you really want to help, email people and tell them about the book. This is the kind of book people like giving to fat men as a gift; you probably know someone who is perfectly suited to it.

Thanks again. I’m out.

Blogger in Town

I now have brownies in the oven. Fausta, of Fausta’s Blog, is in town, and she invited me to have dinner with her family. Fausta was kind enough to interview me last year for her Blogtalkradio podcast. We somehow managed to score over 700 listeners. I offered to bring brownies, and she accepted, and then it turned out she couldn’t eat the damned things. But her family will like them.

I doubt I’ll have any brownies. I rarely indulge. But I bought three pints of blueberries, and tomorrow there will be cheesecake. God help me. I could not stop myself.

I rented a new P.O. box, in case anyone wants to send me copies of Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook to autograph. SASE, please. Unless you want Marvin to have a new toy. I don’t really care which book you send. I’ll autograph the others, too. I have a feeling only one person will take me up on this, but so many people have asked, I had to give it a shot. Email me if you want the address.

The Post Office has a sign that says you can’t carry a weapon on the property. And that sign is way inside the building, so you have to be inside to see it. That’s government wisdom for you. It should say, “If you can read this, you have just committed a felony.”

I Want to Rub it in my Hair

I hate to write anything today, because a new blog entry will bump that magnificent cheesecake photo off the top of the page. Wait, I know how to avoid that.

A commenter says he prefers his food to be imperfect-looking, because it suggests it’s intended to be eaten. I sort of agree. I have never understood the “presentation” fetish. I can understand trying to make food look reasonably good, but as far as I’m concerned, all tasty food looks good.

I think food that is too perfect can be off-putting. Food is a lot like women. The most attractive women aren’t the perfect ones. The most attractive women have a lot of good features, plus one or two things that make them look “possible.” If a woman looks so great you know you have no shot, she tends to become invisible.

I now have three reviews up on Amazon, and I only had to write one of them. A reader named Jennifer put one up. Thanks, Jennifer! Nothing looks worse than a book with no reviews. My publisher is trying to get the old book removed, and they want to move the old reviews to the new book’s page. I hope they succeed.

I wish I had had time to fix all the problems with the book. The cornbread recipe is wrong. It says 2/3 of a cup of milk, and the actual figure is 1 1/2. Also, as I’ve said, there are some jokes that go over the top. Some people will think I’m a jerk, and it will be hard to blame them. Maybe I’ll eventually get an opportunity to make a few more edits.

Humor is like alcohol. When you’re a creative person and jokes are coming to you, it becomes intoxicating, and your judgment becomes impaired. If I were married, I could show my writing to my wife. Then if I found myself sleeping on the couch, I’d know I had to do some editing. But I’m on my own, so I make mistakes. That’s life.

One of the peculiar things about my sense of humor is that I often write things that don’t reflect my feelings at all. A lot of my jokes actually contradict what I feel. It’s hard to explain that to people who think every joke is based in real sentiment.

I want to thank Sondra. She always comes through for me. She’s putting up a free ad for my book.

Man, I need a cheesecake. That picture is killing me.

Get the Defibrillator

You know what season it is? CHEESECAKE SEASON. Blueberries are cheap right now, and I think it’s time for me to bake a blueberry cheesecake.

Here’s one I made last year. I wish I knew how to make them pretty.

I know you won’t believe me (except for Keith, who has had my recipe for a long time), but this is the best cheesecake imaginable. A big, heavy cheesecake with none of that bitter vegetable-grease aftertaste. You will weep with pleasure.

Assuming you buy my book. Otherwise, you’re screwed.

Works with any berry. Doesn’t have to be blueberry.

Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook got a nice plug over at Dyspepsia Generation. Thanks for the help, Tim! Also, Emperor Misha sent me a ton of readers, even though I have neglected him shamefully. Thanks, Misha. Here’s Ellison’s take: PUTTING THE “DIE” IN “DIET.” Thanks, Ellison. And it goes without saying that Moxie gave me a free Blogad!

I don’t know who else is linking to me, but when I find out, I’ll mention it here.

The press release, oddly, seems to be having an effect. Ordinarily, you just assume it’s $80 down the toilet. But it’s bringing people to my other site, albeit in small numbers.

If any of you feel like putting up Amazon or Barnes & Noble reviews, I’ll be eternally grateful. Sparrow already put one up. Thank you, dear.

I can always use more links. People linked to me before the book was released, and that was very kind of them. But the links have a much bigger effect when folks know the book is already out.

And now it’s time for a break. Yesterday was Meat Day, and I completely ignored it. This is the day every week when I get my Winn-Dixie email ad.

Hmm…it’s pretty weak. They have ground chuck for $1.99 a pound, and turkey drumsticks at $1.39 a pound.

One of my favorite manly lunch items is a drumstick with stuffing. You salt and season a drumstick–poultry seasoning should be okay–and you pile stuffing next to it on some sort of baking pan. Then you roast it. The grease in the drumstick comes out and permeates the stuffing. I suppose there is no reason why you couldn’t use Stove Top if you were in a hurry. Turkey drumsticks are wonderful. When you hold one in your hand, you feel like Henry VIII.

They have whole chickens for 79¢ per pound. That’s a bright spot in a difficult meat week.

It Hurts to Sit on One

You truly will not believe this. It’s like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie. A major retail company has contacted me about selling my book. I can’t tell you what kind of company, but I can tell you that you will derive endless amusement from it, if it pans out. This is the craziest thing that has ever happened to me.

Details will follow, as I become aware of them.

More

Whoops. I may have my companies confused. This may be a different outfit with a similar name. Still, the potential for amusement is there.

Even More

I spoke too soon! I now think this is a scam. When you upload a press release on Prweb, which is what I used because I’m a low-budget operation, scammers will pick it up and offer you what they claim are amazing promotion deals.

Here’s what someone on a forum has to say about these people:

I received a call from someone at the ______ wanting to sell my product. They will develop marketing; the tv comercial and the internet ads to sell. But they want a substantial investment from me upfront for all of this and they will certianly make money as well on the mark up. Is this legit? Anyone out there heard of this Company?

When my press release went out, the first response I got was from some outfit claiming it could list my book on “THREE TOP LITERARY SITES.” Whatever that means. I have no idea what the pitch was. I deleted the emails immediately. I’m not stupid.

If you’re trying to get PR for a product or book or something, learn from my mistakes. PR people are not in the business of promotion. They are in the business of lining their pockets. That’s their primary goal. They’re in the business of ripping off gullible people who have dreams and need exposure. If they help you, great, but it’s incidental. Be extremely careful whom you trust. Big-time firms with proven reputations may do great work for you. And you’ll know they’re for real, because it will be hard to get them to accept you as a client. Other than that, steer clear.

The first and most important PR job a PR firm does is the job of selling itself to you. Think about that.

I’m virtually positive that the firm I hired last year shopped me around to a network of losers and cronies, for the purpose of helping them, not me. For example, they booked me on a podcast no one has ever heard of. They booked me on a show at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday, claiming the host sold a lot of books. Come on. Who turns on the radio at 7:30 on a Sunday? Nobody. I might as well have been interviewed on Mars.

I found that I was able to get better PR on my own, free of charge, than these “professionals” got for me. I got interviews they couldn’t–or at least didn’t–get me. Easily. They claim a lot of well-known pundits as clients. All I can say is, famous people are suckers, too.

There is a simple way to determine whether someone who expresses interest in promoting your product is for real. If they want even a penny from you, up front, and you’ve never heard of them, they’re crooks or losers. Period.

The world is cruel to dreamers. I’m sure a lot of people borrow and beg to pay for worthless promotion. There is a special place in hell for someone who takes advantage of a person who is just starting out and who is desperate for help from any quarter.

How to Pimp, Painlessly

If you want to help my book, here’s what you do. Don’t buy fifty copies and lose your home. Just mention the book to other people. Maybe send an email to friends who might enjoy it. You can link to the Amazon page or this press release: CLICK.

Unfortunately, the Amazon page stinks. We’re trying to fix it. And we’re trying to get rid of the old book’s page and move the reviews to the new page.

Rank was 2324 last time I looked. Thanks again.

Here’s a question. Let’s say Home Depot has a product you want, and you go to the local store, and it costs X. Then you go online, and the same product is 0.9 times X. With free shipping. So you save, gas, time, shipping charges, and aggravation.

How does Home Depot expect to get people into its stores if they do that?

Thanks to You

I want to thank all the people who are placing orders for the Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man – The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. You drove it from 400,000-something to 3330 on Amazon today. That doesn’t mean I’m getting rich, but it means people are buying. Thank you for supporting my work. I’m happy when people show up to read my work for nothing, so imagine how I feel when I see that people are willing to pay.

Even if the book does well, the rank will surely dip and rise a few times, so you can’t read too much into it.

I always feel like I haven’t done enough for my readers. There are things in the book I wish I had been able to rewrite. Always remember, I’m happy to clarify or correct anything you don’t understand.

I don’t know if I’ll get any support from bloggers on this book; they may feel like they already pushed it in 2004. Of course, that was a vastly inferior book. If enough people bug me, I’m willing to set up a PO box so you can send your copies to be signed. I did that last time, after being asked to, and only one person sent a book! I don’t care; I can blow another 68 bucks and see what happens.

The next month or so should tell the tale. If it sells, it sells. If not, I may have to quit writing and become a mediator. I don’t want to sue people any more; that’s the one thing I’m sure of. I have plenty of confidence in my product, but in this world, that’s not the only factor that determines whether writers succeed. Really bad writers do well, and good writers starve. You have to find a way to let enough people know about your book to create a groundswell.

I’ll try to make the next book cleaner and less mean. In the meantime, do me a favor and overlook the passages that bother you.

“What’s Your Hourly Rate on a Front-End Loader?”

Yesterday Sondra was saying mean things about her sister, who is supposedly enjoying the high life on welfare. I felt I had to comment. Here is the exchange:

Is your sister hot?

comment by Steve H. Graham on 06/24 at 04:29 PM

If you like your women 6’1” and 300 pounds.

comment by Headmistress Sondrak on 06/24 at 04:32 PM

Deuce…deuce and a quarter.

comment by Steve H. Graham on 06/24 at 04:37 PM

Hold on while I rent a pallet jack.

comment by Steve H. Graham on 06/24 at 04:45 PM

Anyway, Sondra apparently felt bad, because she put this recipe up for her sister to enjoy. CLICK.

Price Increase

Amazon noticed that people were buying my book, so they started jacking up the price. Sorry about that. I don’t know of a cheaper way to get it. You can get a discount by buying from the publisher, but that kills the cheap or free shipping. Thanks again for the support.

Kind of a busy day today. Back when time permits.

The Food Apocalypse Arrives

NOTE: CLICK “DEATH BY FORK” LINK IN LEFT SIDEBAR FOR MORE INFO.

It occurs to me that I have readers now who may not know much about my cookbook. So I thought I should tell you a little about it.

I can’t remember when I had the idea. It was probably in the Nineties. A little voice in my head told me to write the world’s unhealthiest cookbook and call it “Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man.” I coined that phrase, regardless of where you may have seen it since. I thought people were getting too damned self-righteous and contentious about food. People actually get angry when you talk about meat and lard and eggs and so on, and that’s insane. A person who can get angry about the food another person eats is a controlling person with no sense of boundaries. It’s nobody’s damn business what you eat.

Aside from that, the Food Nazis are attacking our culture. We accumulated a lot of food knowledge over the centuries, and these self-appointed dictators are erasing it from our memory. Want to know the real way to make a fried egg? You fry bacon in a cast iron skillet and fry the egg in the grease. Want to know what kind of shortening real biscuits are made with? Bacon grease. Or lard. The best pie crusts are made with lard. The best fries are cooked in beef fat. People have forgotten things like that, because of the damn Food Nazis. There are many dishes that simply can’t be made well without unhealthy ingredients. There is no such thing as a good, healthy cheesecake. There is no such thing as a good, healthy brownie. There is CRAP which people PRETEND is good. But it’s not.

I get sick of hearing people who don’t know what good food is, perpetuating the tired, transparent lie that you can cook just as well with healthy ingredients. And it irritates me that they’ve managed to get their awful vegetable grease and lowfat milk and so on into products like ice cream and cookies, which exist solely to taste good. It’s like putting a Prius engine in a Ferrari. It does not work.

Obviously, you shouldn’t eat fattening food every day. But what if you do? Isn’t that your right? Of course it is. You have a right to eat what you like. What you don’t have a right to do is to tell other people what they can put in their bodies. It’s a horrifying encroachment on a person’s most basic rights. Today they tell you you can’t drive an SUV or own a gun or eat a pizza. Tomorrow, they tell you which books you can read.

Once in a while, just for the experience, you should eat really good food, and sometimes that means food that’s loaded with fat or sugar or white flour or salt. And I can help you do that.

Even though all this is true, the food isn’t really the point of the book. The point was to have an excuse to write humor essays. I really let loose. I had a ball. I wrote a macaroni and cheese recipe in the voice of Hunter S. Thompson. I wrote doughnut recipes in the voices of Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly. I wrote a French fry recipe in the voice of Christopher Walken. Here’s a taste.

Soon we’re in Steve’s living room, and I’m sipping my Campari—which is a little strong, but I say nothing, because Christopher Walken is a gracious guest—while a couple of my boys hold Steve’s head under the water of his fifty-gallon fish tank.

Steve has tetras. Tetras and those other little—what do you call them?—dwarf cichlids. Little pansy fish that don’t even fight. I realize it is a matter of taste, but me, I always went for the heavy artillery. Oscars. Piranha. Small sharks. Some people feed their carnivorous fish goldfish. I fed mine Yorkies.

I cannot abide a small defiant dog that looks like a Slinky.

I give him a few minutes of that—in, out, gasp for breath, in, out, gasp for breath—while I check out his CD collection. I’m an LP man myself. Gotta have vinyl. Gotta. But he has some good stuff there. Hot Fives and Sevens, remastered. Sweet. Needs a little Bobby Vinton, of course, but maybe his tastes haven’t matured to the extent where he can fully appreciate the subtleties of “My Little Neon Rose.”

When the time is right, I have my boys pull his head out and sit him on the sofa and get him a towel and some Bosco. He has Bosco in his cupboard. I respect that. That bought him some points. I’m a Bosco man myself. Some guys like Ovaltine. That’s okay, I guess. I shot a guy in the face for drinking Ovaltine. Once. But I was young. Full of hormones. Exuberant. I would never do that now. Today I would be satisfied with slamming his head on the counter a couple times.

So I sit next to Steve and put my arm around him, and I ask if the Bosco is to his liking. And of course, it is. I showed my boys the right way to mix it. None of that business with the dark smear around the bottom of the glass, with spoon marks in it. The key to a good Bosco is thoroughness. The KEY, amigo.

I have a rule. If I see streaks of undissolved syrup in my Bosco, I got to snap somebody’s pinky toe. I don’t care whose. Finding the culpable toe is not my department. They can draw straws if they want. But somebody’s toe is going to snap. When they hear that snapping sound, it really drives the message home. Call it a mnemonic device. Snap two or three pinky toes at one shot, and you’ll be drinking well-mixed Bosco for a good five years before you have to snap another one.

“Steve,” I said, “it’s not that I don’t like your work. Truly, I am nothing if not a patron of the arts. Especially my first true love, which is the dance. I think you know my history.” And I got up and gave him my best Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Lovely man, Bojangles. Got that monicker because he ate a lot of fried chicken. I prefer Popeye’s. But let’s not reopen that can of Pandora’s worms.

That’s the kind of thing I wrote. I’m thrilled with it. This is what I wanted to publish, back when I was only able to sell the Nigerian spam book and the caveman book. I wrote those books because I had to. I wrote this one because I wanted to.

If you bought the self-published version of this book, I thank you, but I have to tell you, you still need the big-time version. It’s longer. It has more recipes. The recipes are better. And the writing is better. The first version doesn’t compare.

I hope you’ll give it a try. I believe in this book more than I believed in anything I put on bookstore shelves in the past.

Just for reference purposes, I’ll close with a list of the chapters.

Chapter 1 – Ribs
Chapter 2 – How to Smoke Your [Boston] Butt
Chapter 3 – BBQ Beans, Texas Toast, & the Inevitable Blazing Saddles Reference
Chapter 4 – Breakfast as a Mind-Altering Drug
Chapter 5 – Chicken-Fried Rib Eye on a Huge Biscuit
Chapter 6 – Grease Burgers
Chapter 7 – Cornbread and Navy Beans
Chapter 8 – Turducken: Flight of the Hindenbird
Chapter 9 – Aged Prime Steak Cooked on a Propane Griddle
Chapter 10 – Champagne Chicken With Fettuccine in Cream Sauce
Chapter 11 – Smoked Pork and Andouille Jambalaya
Chapter 12 – Pizzeria-Style Baked Ziti With Sausage
Chapter 13 – Stuffed Hog With Apricot Glaze
Chapter 14 – Unauthentic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Chili
Chapter 15 – Super-Giant Fried Patacon Tacos
Chapter 16 – Deep-Fried Chinese-Style Honey-Garlic Chicken
Chapter 17 – Rotis and Jamaican-Style Goat Curry
Chapter 18 – Doro Wat – Ethiopian Chicken Stew
Chapter 19 – Hash Brown Casserole with Cheddar and Sour Cream
Chapter 20 – Dreadfully Fattening Macaroni and Cheese
Chapter 21 – Twice-Fried Fries Cooked in Beef Fat
Chapter 22 – Perfect 10-Minute Street Pizza
Chapter 23 – Peach Cobbler
Chapter 24 – Yeast-Raised Fried Doughnuts With Coconut/Banana Sauce
Chapter 25 – Coconut Flan
Chapter 26 – 540-Calorie Brownies
Chapter 27 – Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Hot Fudge Dessert/PMS Remedy
Chapter 28 – Blueberry Butter Cheesecake
Chapter 29 – Baklava With Cheesecake Filling
Chapter 30 – Red Lager and Room-Temperature Brewed Ale
Chapter 31 – Five Greasy Pieces: Quick Recipes for the Hopeless

Bon appetit.

You Need Many Copies

I bought a new low-profile jack because my old one won’t fit under the car. I came home from Northern Tool, looked at my comments, and saw two people suggesting I put something under the tires to raise the car. Now I feel like a complete moron. But I can take that jack back.

In other news, THE COOKBOOK IS OFFICIALLY SHIPPING. So if you’ve been putting off buying it, the wait is over. I hope you enjoy it. It’s a thousand times better than the first one.

Back Off, Mortals

I’m still having emotional aftershocks from the prime rib. I just realized: I am now capable of cooking the finest meal in the universe. Prime rib, the perfect baked potato, homebrewed ale, and BLUEBERRY CHEESECAKE. Four-thousand-dollar prostitutes have nothing on me. The pleasure I can create puts their sorry efforts in the shade. This qualifies me for superhero status. No human should have powers like these.

Blueberries are in season right now. So cheap. So close.

NO.

Someone stop me.