Some Serving Suggestions

Our delicious, deli-style pretzel bagels are best served toasted, slathered in butter and then cream cheese, and topped with scrambled eggs, smoked fish, flaky sea salt, and capers. Enjoy them off the kids’ plates as you load the dishwasher, since not one of your kids would go near the fish, or the capers, and they certainly don’t appreciate the fact that the cream cheese you got from Zabar’s is twice as expensive as the Philadelphia brand at the supermarket. In fact, they would probably prefer it if you just gave them cold cereal three times a day until they head off to college. Why do you even try?

An easy meal for one, when you are so exhausted that your bones ache with a nameless grief for something—your lost youth?—is just to eat a pound of fusilli pasta, raw and hard and crunchy, right out of the plastic bag, then drink some tap water from the faucet, then bite off a hunk of butter from the stick in the fridge and lie awake feeling the pain in your abdomen, wondering if it will all somehow turn into cooked pasta inside you.

Our chocolate babka is even better served warm. Each package is meant to serve fourteen people, so try to recall your multiplication tables as you eat the whole thing by yourself; we have listed the calorie count of a single serving, which is two hundred and forty. Enjoy multiplying that by fourteen, and then picture your elliptical machine and how many hours you’d need to spend on it to burn this babka off, which would be an eternity. Also, now that you have already eaten the whole thing, this seems like a good time to mention that, when we bake these monsters, we engineer them in a special way so that all the fat will go straight to your hips and stay there forever.

This Thai peanut-shrimp wok-toss is the kind of fun, ambitious meal that’s good to try any night you want to spice things up. Not that we suggest you eat this kind of thing, obviously. For one, it’s problematic, culturally. For another, there is the taste, which you can’t get out of your mouth for hours. Even the dog won’t touch this stuff. It tastes a little like WD-40. That’s because we don’t just make it with love and care and a little bit of colonial attitude: we also infuse it with a special ingredient—WD-40, which is not meant for human consumption.

EZ Bake crusts are perfect for those sunny mornings in the Maine cabin, when you get up early and pick berries and make a fresh crostata so that, when your lover, the rugged fisherman who is actually a genius sensitive poet who always wakes up with perfect breath, begins to stir, you can slide back into bed with a perfect tray of whatever you just baked. His hands are strong yet soft and probably don’t have fish scales on them or fish blood under his nails, and he definitely wouldn’t leave his underwear on the floor in the hall for, like, two weeks in some passive-aggressive standoff.

If you come home from another really bad date, and the room is spinning from the bourbon you had too much of, and you reach for your rice cakes, since it’s the only thing in the cabinet you can open in this state, and then you eat one, and it’s kind of wet and tastes funny and maybe is full of maggots because the bag says that this rice cake expired eleven years ago, please do not reflect on who you were eleven years ago when you bought them. Just find some more bourbon and take a deep pull on the bottle because, whatever maggots you encounter in life, your old friend bourbon will take care of the problem.