Merry Christmas to all! Hope you have a lot of delicious treats in store over the long weekend.

You probably have an electric knife — heck, you might even be hauling it out to carve your Christmas ham or prime rib — but I bet you don’t have an electric fork.

Think you might need one? Check out my guest post today on The Kitchn, Apartment Therapy’s food site, for the story of my family’s silly holiday tradition.

Um, right here? In the BART station??

(seen on the concourse level at Glen Park…)

Edited to add: The Paramount Farms “Everybody’s Nuts” site is pretty amusing, too. Not as funny as the billboard, but obviously their ad agency is …nuts. In a good way. The little nut mascot is named Stach, and he even has a fanclub. (Could I make this stuff up? I think not.)

No embarrassing orthodontia tales here, although I certainly have them. And I suppose that this counts as more than six things for one blog, but:

Despite my savoir-faire with working kitchen jargon, I have only held one food-related job: at a bakery/bistro where I mostly sold pastries and made sandwiches. My signature move was to smear two spoonfuls of unprepared, clear-quill horseradish on a sandwich when the customer asked for said condiment…until someone complained. The owner asked me if I had ever actually tasted horseradish. I hadn’t.

I used to drink Karo corn syrup straight from the bottle. Hey, it was just a nip of courage now and again. I could have stopped anytime I wanted to.

I have an incredible capacity to eat exactly the same thing for breakfast every day for weeks at a time. Lunch, too.

I like Jager Bombs. I’m pretty sure that this and the Karo thing are somehow related.

By the age of 12, I had taken part in the following activities: butchering pigs and cows for family consumption, collecting maple sap (drinking my fair share) and boiling it down, milking cows, collecting fresh eggs (never killed a chicken, though), churning butter, making sausage, and pulling perfectly good baby vegetable plants out of the ground while claiming to have mistaken them for “weeds.”

Sandi at The WhistleStop Cafe (of Fried Green Tomatoes fame) has tagged us to share “six weird things” about ourselves with our readers. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am guessing you don’t care that I drive a 1966 Volvo, or that I had braces as an adult, or that I’m the oldest of ten grandchildren on my mother’s side… so let’s keep this food related, eh?

1. Cameron and I share a surprising number of food dislikes. Neither of us cares much for eggplant, squash, or sweet potatoes.
2. We have been known to drive an hour — and to plan our airport flight-arrival times — to eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant.
3. I’d rather have citrus or caramel desserts than chocolate, any day. I realize this makes me a traitor to my gender. (I don’t dislike chocolate, but I don’t crave it.)
4. One of my favorite things to do on vacation is visiting the local supermarket. Sure, farmers markets are great, but the grocery store is where you see what everyday middle-class food looks like.
5. My early food-related jobs included: breakfast waitress, bakery manager, drugstore soda fountain jerk (at the place shown in the photo above), pizza-delivery girl, and sundae-scooper. Waiting tables was undeniably the hardest work I have ever done, for the least amount of money. Jose Feliciano was one of my regulars, and he used to say corny stuff like “Sanka very much” when I would bring him refills of decaf.
6. We’ve never been to New Orleans. It was on the short-short list when Katrina hit…

Krispy Kreme‘s got a pumpkin spice cake doughnut on offer for the holidays, plus — so cute it’s almost scary — pumpkin-shaped raised glazed with ‘ittle Jack-o-Lantern faces (pictured at right) through the end of the month. Awww!

Hot on the heels of their “$6,000 combo meal” TV spot, the fast-food hucksters at KCE/Hardee’s (that’s Carl’s Jr. to us West Coasters) released a list of suggested wine pairings for their speciality sandwiches. Perhaps monsieur would care for a bottle of Peachy Canyon Incredible Red with his Jalapeño Thickburger?

Or perhaps a bottle of bubbly? Perrier’s launching a new campaign aimed at the younger set, going for that edgy thing in an attempt to ditch its Miami Vice-era aura.

I’m still reeling from their purchase of Sharffen Berger, so please forgive me if I don’t seem happy about Hershey’s buying up Oregon’s Dagoba Organic Chocolate.

News of the wierd: Until last week, the world’s largest curry house was located in West Yorkshire, of all places. Hard to imagine that it’s gone out of business, innit?

Another shocker: The Amish don’t want your flippin’ food stamps!

Valentyn Shtefano may be the toast of Uzhhorod, Ukraine, but upstaging a bride on her wedding day is bad form. After seeing this photograph, we wonder if Mr. Shtefano might one day wish he’d chosen a different venue for his food/fashion debut.

Click on the pic to see Viktoriya’s dress made out of cream puffs by her husband Valentyn, take a close look at her expression, and then come back and give us your best photo caption.

The Los Angeles Times — a serious newspaper, by all accounts — ran a story recently, profiling Charlie Boghosian, a purveyor of deep-fried everything. The wrapper of the story is a recap of all the fried goodies (and I use that term loosely) available for sale at the Los Angeles County Fair, including “deep-fried Twinkies, deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried avocados, deep-fried pickles, deep-fried olives … deep-fried macaroni and cheese, deep-fried spaghetti and deep-fried cosmopolitans…”

But Mr. Boghosian — a Christmas tree wholesaler when he’s not hardening arteries in the summertime — has a heart-stopping item that’s the real star of the piece.

This year, Boghosian’s new item is the Krispy Kreme Chicken and Swiss sandwich with a side of honey. Imagine a jelly doughnut hollowed out, cut in half and garnished with a fried chicken patty and slice of gooey Swiss cheese.

Boghosian says he came up with the idea one night while buying a dozen doughnuts for his staff at a Krispy Kreme with his manager, Jerald Smith, who said he had a hankering for a chicken sandwich instead.

“And then a light went on,” Smith said.

The reaction has exceeded Boghosian’s expectations. He sold nearly 1,000 of them his first weekend at the L.A. County Fair at $5.95 apiece.

The even scarier part? They tot up the calories on this puppy, and it’s about the same as a Big Mac, and about 200 below the Jumbo Jack with cheese.

Matey, don’ tell me ye din’t knows today were Talk Like a Pirate Day?? Avast!

In honor of this fair occasion, Drink o’ the Week be moving to Tuesday. We raise ye a fyne tipple from Sir Rrrrobert of Hess.

Jolly Roger
2 ounces dark rum
1 ounce orange juice
1/4 ounce Falernum (or simple syrup)
dash of bitters

Shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

This just in from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer… Starbucks’ original logo causes an uproar:

A Kent elementary school principal, according to a local TV station, asked teachers last week that if they were bringing their daily joe to school that they make sure they get a sleeve to cover the image of a topless mermaid on Starbucks cups.

The Seattle-based coffee giant, as part of its 35th anniversary, this month put its original logo with the bare-breasted mermaid on its cups in stores in Washington and Oregon.

Not that Kent is the most progressive of Northwest communities, but do they really think that elementary-school kids have never seen boobies before?

…melons.

(apologies to Depeche Mode)

C’mon, it’s Vegas… you didn’t expect a melon joke?