Nobody knows what they weigh, apparently: “In a new study, nearly 25 percent of overweight and obese women rated themselves as normal or even underweight, while a good chunk of female participants who were normal or underweight reported practicing dieting behaviors, some of them unhealthy, to peel off the pounds. Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston said that both body-size skews — people oblivious to their excess weight, and people who mistakenly think they’re fat — are cause for concern.”

In praise of Penn Station: “The city beneath our city is a delightfully ill-lighted, incomprehensibly organized, low-ceilinged, viewless labyrinth. Harried people surge through its concourses and tunnels in perpendicular lines, mean salmon in puffy coats going always upstream. Soldiers with combat weapons lurk outside the city’s most unhygienic group lavatories. There is nowhere to sit. The ‘talking kiosk’ that serves the visually impaired has been heckling Long Island Rail Road customers with chirping for so long that we have begun to associate birdsong with the most terrible things.”

A long time ago I was married to this nice Jewish boy whose Grandma Lottie’s cooking was so poisonous that her own son would stop at the nearest McDonald’s before every visit and desperately mow something — anything — down before risking his neck over there.

Tiny, ancient, clueless, amiable Grandma Lottie was a shapeless wee dumpling of a woman who had had everything removed that it is possible for a person to have removed and still remain halfway viable — breasts, gall bladders, lady parts, you name it. If you picked her up and shook her she would have rattled, but she was in fairly good nick really, except for a bad case of arthritis which obliged her to “drive” one of those Lark wheelchair-mopeds around in order to do her errands and things. Her skills with the Lark were along the lines of her kitchen ones, I regret to say. She once plowed the thing into the only pole in a huge empty parking lot, and both Lark and Grandma toppled right over onto the pavement. At which news we laughed uproariously (in private) and then felt really bad when it turned out she’d gotten a black eye from the fall. She would giggle over that kind of mishap herself, though; she was a good egg.

One Thanksgiving, Grandma Lottie served us turkey. This arrived at table mysteriously pre-sliced and immured in a slab of congealed gravy of a lurid yellow hue, and was handed round in a silence heavy with fear. There was a large group of us, each eyeing his plate with the gravest doubts, none willing to be the first to plunge in. Nervous conversation and a few garrulous toasts staved off the moment but eventually it had to be faced, and forks were raised. It was like eating a morsel of wet cardboard encased in bouillon-cube pudding.

“Lottie,” gasped a daughter-in-law in agony. “How did you get the turkey to taste like this?!”

Lottie beamed with pride.

“Welllllll,” she simpered. “I bake the turkey and slice it the night before, and then I leave it overnight to dry.”

We all gaped.

“That way, it can soak up the gravy!”

That’s not why I divorced her grandson, though. Oh boy. Terrific mess there, but nothing at all to do with cooking, or with his really lovely family.

Anyway, now that you know a few of Grandma Lottie’s Thanksgiving secrets, let’s move on to my aunt Carmen’s. She is mostly called just Tia, or if you are one of our American in-laws, the Teaster. Tia has lived in the same house in East Long Beach, California, for the last forty-five years or so (another triumph of the super-olds, who decades ago made their last mortgage payment.) The neighborhood has always been kind of dicey, so one day I idly invented this family myth about the Teaster being a dope peddler, because you know how these old ladies always seem to be awash in money, and handing out such sumptuous presents at every baby shower? Wherever does she get it all? I was thinking. And what a perfect cover, because nobody would suspect this tidy, ladylike little Cuban woman of so much as incorrectly sorting her recycling. She and my mom (her sister) are so charming that flight attendants give them bottles of wine to take home from the airplane, so bribing the cops would be a breeze. Plus, the alley behind her house, so convenient … it isn’t true, though, she isn’t really a dope peddler. I just like spinning yarns with my cousins at what, decades later, we still call “the children’s table.”

Visiting Tia is also fun because she’s completely addicted to every telenovela there is, for which my mom mocks her mercilessly, but of course my mom watches them with her too when she’s there, which is to say constantly. And why not; watching telenovelas with Tia is a laff riot, because the plots of those things are so insane they make Dynasty look like The Brothers Karamazov. The villains, most of them ferociously painted women, are more broadly drawn than characters in an English panto. “Dios mío, that Estrella!” we cackle. “Haha, she totally poisoned her sister!” “Claro que si.” “Oh boy, she’s dead now.” Half the time they’re not dead, of course.

Tia is 85 years old and still makes a fine Thanksgiving dinner for a big crowd every year; a stuffed turkey, the Cuban rice and bean dish congri, and also ham, candied yams, this and that. For dessert, a lovely pumpkin flan. The ingredients for this sound, I admit, a little weird! But it’s really nice, and not hard to make. You must make it the day before, though, so that it sets up properly and the caramel liquefies enough to unmold — the flan should be served quite cold — and serve it with plain whipped cream.

Pumpkin Flan a la Teaster

For the Flan:

An amount of pumpkin roughly the volume of a small cantaloupe
Half a vanilla bean
One can of Eagle Brand Condensed milk
2 eggs
1½ cups half and half
2 T cornstarch
A splash of Grand Marnier

For the Caramel:

1C sugar
¼ C water
a splash of Grand Marnier
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 325F.

Poach the pumpkin in simmering water, to which you have added the vanilla bean, for about twenty minutes, or until it’s quite tender but not too mushy. Tia puts a stick of cinnamon in the water, but I don’t. Either way!

Meanwhile, prepare the caramel. In a heavy pan (I use an iron one,) mix the sugar and water. Cook over a brisk flame, stirring once in a while, until it starts to turn amber. It will continue to darken in the pan after this point, so don’t leave it too too long. Off heat, whisk in the Grand Marnier and the salt. Once it’s a dark whisky color, more or less, pour a bit into each of six or eight little ramekins of 3½ to 4½ inches, swirling to coat the insides (doesn’t have to go too far up the sides, really).

Drain the pumpkin and process or blend the pulp, together with the innards of the vanilla bean and a bit of the poaching liquid — a scant half cup or so — until it’s very smooth. There should be about 1½ cups of pumpkin puree, or maybe a little over. Blend or process in the remaining ingredients until the whole thing is smooth and very silky; do this in batches if you need to and then just whisk everything together at the end. Strain the mixture through a medium-fine sieve and divide among the ramekins, which you’ve arranged in a roasting pan for the bain-marie. Carefully fill the pan with really hot water so that it comes about halfway up the sides of the ramekins, and pop the whole contraption in the oven. Start checking them after about 45 minutes; the sides should be totally set and the middles look just a tiny bit jiggly; a knife inserted in the center will come out clean. Remove from the oven, take the ramekins out of the pan one by one and set them aside to cool. Once they’ve cooled down to room temperature, cover them with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator overnight.

When you’re ready to serve, unmold the flans onto a flat serving plate; the caramel sort of melts overnight into a thin sauce. If you’ve overdone it on the caramel, you might need to pour a bit off. In that case, transfer each flan to a fresh plate with a thin spatula and pour the caramel on again, or dot the caramel around it 90s style. Add a generous blob of freshly whipped cream, and serve at once, to wild acclaim.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

“I have been reading Doonesbury for most of my life. At the age of 12, my understanding of the immediate post-Watergate era was largely shaped by the Doonesbury compilations I would read while standing unobtrusively in the aisles of University Book and Supply in Iowa City, Iowa.” Except for the Iowa part, this is also true of me. I suspect it may be true for a fair number of you as well. In any event, this is a nice appreciation of Garry Trudeau’s 40-year career by cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

Man, that is one feisty rat! Look at that sucker! Pop, pop, pop! You get ’em, Ratty! Related: Good lord, this day.

“An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.”

Your youth was even more poisonous than you remember:

Following the recall of nearly 12 million Shrek glasses over the summer because of toxic levels of brain-damaging, cancer-causing lead and cadmium, the Associated Press has discovered that pretty much every decorative drinking glass ever made carries the same risk, dating back to nearly 50 years ago. A specially commissioned laboratory test of 35 separate drinking glasses made between the late 1960s and this year — including those with enamel designs of Superman, Batman, and characters from The Wizard Of Oz — found that all of them exceeded federal limits on lead in children’s products by up to 1,000 times, many of these coming from glasses given out as part of various fast-food promotions over the years.

I guess the upside is you don’t need to run the tap anymore, because you are pretty much full of lead already. [Via]

“I think of myself as a fiction writer. I’m real interested in fiction, and all elements of fiction. Fiction’s more important to me. So I’m also I think more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I’m any good or not, or I’m on the wrong track or not. Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, it’s not that I didn’t care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, I’ll try this. I’m not an expert at it. I don’t pretend to be. It’s not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me.”
 — Awl pal Tom Scocca, away on some rich person cruise, provides the transcript to a recently rediscovered interview he did with David Foster Wallace back in 1998.

by Christian Brown

I used to be really afraid of making pies. Like phobia-level afraid of it. (And tape worms. But the pie thing too.) Pie is something that is hard to get to come correct and everyone has different expectations and on top of that it’s not exactly the fastest thing to make, and that alone is pretty fucking horrifying. What if it comes out wet? What if the crust is tough? What if you forget to cut slits in it and turns into an apple and cinnamon sugar bomb and your grandmother cuts into it on Thanksgiving Day and her face is scoured off by a wall of searing hot apples fountaining into the air?

Shut up and sit down. I’m not gonna lie: pie is not fast. We’re not talking about putting a steak in a pan. But it’s not hard. Pour yourself a drink, no ice allowed if it’s scotch. This recipe was passed on to me by my mother, and if she heard you were drinking scotch with rocks she’d write me out of her will for even knowing you.

The number one important lesson is that everyone loves home-made dessert. Doesn’t matter how bad you fuck it up! I made a four-layer Italian wedding cake for my own birthday in college and the top two layers split in twain and fell to the sides in a frostinglanche. And NOBODY CARED. They were all, “Holy shit, your cake didn’t come from a box? I didn’t know that was an option!” So no matter what, if you attempt this pie, you’re golden. Put something in a pie-tin shaped container out on a table at Thanksgiving and people will eat it all and will compliment you forever. They’ll give you the key to the city. You are going to be a dessert hero!

Feeling cocky? Good. That’s how you should feel when you’re baking: like you have just made love to a beautiful lady or man or ladyman, and it is the next morning and you know that anything is possible. Being afraid when you bake is like being afraid when wrestling a bear: the pie will smell your fear and will lunge at your throat. If it will help your attitude, go make love to someone beautiful and come back. I’ll wait.

All confident? Then let’s go…. to the liquor cabinet.

The secret to good pie dough is vodka. Get some out. It should be chilled, so if it’s not throw that bottle in the freezer and come back later. (Why isn’t your vodka in the freezer? Did you leave it under your pillow again?) Start by learning how to stop being a wuss and make a pie crust. That recipe is basically right. (BASICALLY.) Mostly his recipe lacks excuses to drink, so: replace about half the water with an equal amount of vodka.

SCIENCE CORNER: The vodka makes the dough flakier by evaporating as the dough cooks. The flavor disappears, so your family won’t know that you can’t even bake a fucking pie without booze being involved. (If your family members cannot cook without alcohol [hi mom!] then maybe serve the pie with a shot of tequila?) The vodka also provides an excuse to have an open bottle in the kitchen without needing to explain why there are no mixers around.

OK choose your own pieventure time: are you a nervous person? Do you read the safety manual on an airplane? Do you have time to kill? If so: pre-bake that pie crust. It’ll guarantee that your pie does not come out with a soggy/raw bottom, and it is EASY. Preheat that oven to like 425, and put something in your pie tin on top of the crust to keep it from rising into the air like a flock of crows and flying out of your apartment. They sell pie weights, but who the fuck owns them? [Ed. Note: Umm, THOSE OF US WHO KNOW HOW TO MAKE PIES? Sorry! Carry on.] Not me. I have in the past used: Dry beans! Rice! Coins! Think heavy and dry. Put down foil first, though, or your pie will taste like nickels. After ten minutes, yank the foil and the nickels and turn the heat down to 375. In ten more minutes, tug that shit out and it will be GOLDEN and DELICIOUS LOOKING. Don’t be fooled into eating it by how great it looks! It’s just a crust! That’s like eating just the frosting packet in the toaster streudel bag!

OK I waited till you made pie dough to tell you the bad news: apple pie involves a lot. Of fucking. Apples. You can try to find pre-sliced apples, or maybe try posting on Craigslist to get someone else to do it for you, but failing that you need to take like a pound of apples and peel them and core them and slice them. Maybe have friends help. Maybe do it while you watch a Wings marathon. Just make sure there aren’t any seeds in the slices or they will grow in your grandmother’s stomach and she’ll turn into a tree, right at the table in front of the whole family. How embarrassing!

Once you’ve got those apples ready, you are DONE WITH THE HARD PART. Set that oven to 350 and put those apples in your crust. Mix a cup of sugar, 3 tablespoons of flour and maybe a few pinches of cinnamon and nutmeg if you want to be able to brag about putting nutmeg in your pie. Watch out for nutmeg psychosis. Pour about a third of a cup of orange juice onto your apples, less if you have a fear of wet pie fillings. The orange juice makes a big difference! This is the “original recipe” version but pretty much any citrus will work! Make it your own! Who cares! Other things I’ve added before: ginger, bourbon, brown sugar, cloves.

(You may find that baking will lead you down a road of megalomania. “If I can bake a pie”, you’ll say, “I can do anything!” This is entirely 100% true. If you’re good enough at baking, you’ll be able to rob banks and the police won’t touch you. Forget it Jake, it’s Pietown.)

Dust your flour/sugar/etc. mixture over your filling and cut up a quarter stick of butter into pea sized bits and sprinkle them over your apples like pixie dust. Usually I’m pretty impatient at this point and just throw them all at once, but seriously pay attention or you’ll end up with seven slices of apple pie and one slice of butter pie. (Although, again: would anyone eating a slice of butter pie be unhappy? No. This is a matter of principle, not of making delicious pie.)

ALMOST DONE: Put that lid of dough on your pie (a pie, like a lady, is uncivilized if it goes to Thanksgiving dinner topless) and if you are feeling fancy brush on some evaporated milk and sprinkle it with sugar. Cut some slits in it, too, because pie bombs are something you can never be too careful about. Make sure you pinch the edge of your pie dough all around the rim so it doesn’t come off in the oven leaving your pie with a little yarmulke of dough in the middle.

Put it in the oven! THERE. Pie ACCOMPLISHED. It is not hard, it is just a little time consuming. And speaking of hard and time consuming, consider doing this in front of your significant other: pie gets mad ass. Seriously. Nobody is unimpressed by a homemade pie, including all sorts of attractive ladies and men. Your pie will bake for 40 or 45 minutes (until it looks delicious) so I would use this opportunity to go back to the bedroom and work off those calories you’ll be eating later. Bring it to your friends’ house/grandmother’s/soup kitchen and impress the shit out of your friends/family/homeless people. Although knowing them, they’ll probably be too drunk to be impressed. Tell them how great it was when they’re all hungover the day after Thanksgiving and they’ll believe you.

Christian Brown is thankful for Mary HK Choi, long-form reporting and scotch.

This is actually a helpful guide to the whole “hedge funds are being raided by the FBI in some unclear investigation of ‘insider trading’” thing.