I'm sure you have some of those useful repair books which are so popular, with titles such as How to Repair Appliances; or that popular best seller, How to Repair Briggs and Stratton Engines; or my favorite, How to Repair a Mechanical Heart, all of which are available on amazon.

But I just obtained a very useful one, How to Repair Food. After all, what do you do when your food is overcooked, under cooked, stale, burned, lumpy, salty, peppery, bland, too spicy, frozen, mushy, too dry, too wet, flat, tough, too thick, too thin, wilted, fatty, collapsed, curdled or stuck together?

Just looking through it provided me with great advice. For example, what do you do when your batter has bubbles. First, I have to admit I never before worried about bubbles in my batter. But now I know it is a serious problem which the government has kept secret from us. Here is what the book advises:

"Put the batter in a pan. Hold the pan about six inches above the floor. Drop it. Do this three or four times, or until the people from downstairs come up to complain, whichever occurs first. The bubbles will go away and so, if you are lucky, so will the people from downstairs."

and

"When green onions start wilting, you can revive them by replanting them. Simply stick the root end in the ground, and it will take root and grow healthy again. This does not, alas, work with most other things, including human beings."

Of course, the entire book is not like this, as most entries are simply good advice without the levity. Obviously, this book belongs on every good cook's shelf. I bet Fannie Farmer wished she had this. Unfortunately, it was not published until 1987, but it is a revised edition of The Something-Went-Wrong-What-Do-I-Do-Now-Cookbook published in 1970.

It is an excellent work, which I think is attributed to the fact one of the authors is male.

As I post this, there are three copies available on PBS. So hurry!

I knew a guy who grew turnip greens in his bathroom. He cut about an inch off the top of a turnip and put it in a shallow pan of water and it would grow greens out of the top. He had to put the pan in his bathroom because he had a small apt and the bathroom window was the only one that had any light from the sun.