When my friends, Lizzy McGlynn and Mark Reilly, got married, I gave them a copy of How to Cook Everything, but with this revised introduction glued into the front. I also wrote my own name over Mark Bittman's with a Sharpie™ where ever possible.

When I was a little girl, my father used to take me bear hunting. My father was an odd man in many ways--the first of which being that he was actually my mother. The second being that he couldn't fire a gun.

My father was, in the vernacular of today, a douchebag, but a douchebag with a great love of chemistry. He worked for 53 years as head chemist for Animex, developers of all the animals in Mexico. My father's landmark experiments led to the development a cow small enough to pack in carry-on luggage--making starvation on airplanes a thing of the past.

A typical scientist type, he possessed no traceable upper body strength. "A armless toddler could wrestle your father and whup his ass," my mother would joke, loudly, and often, at the dinner table as my father sobbed into his apron. His weakness prevented him from lifting, much less shooting, any kind of firearm. The strength required to use a bow and arrow was also quite beyond him. Even his one attempt (and subsequent miserable failure) to use a yo-yo caused him to urinate blood for weeks.

But despite his frailty, the thrill of bear hunting would not elude him. In a three-piece, wool pin-striped suit, white lab coat, and safety goggles, my father would sneak up on a bear--sleeping peacefully in a patch of fleeting sunlight, or picking ripe berries with its dexterous yet mighty paws--and throw hydrochloric acid in its face. The bear would inevitably reel and roar in pain as the smoking chemicals disintegrated its noble features.

I have yet to have to eat a meal as delicious as the mini bearloaves he and I would make that evening, under the stars, in the Betty Crocker EZ Bake we had brought along. It was there that I developed my love of cooking.

This gigantic volume is the result of a crystal meth bender (or a "mender") lasting 71 days, from which I awoke with an enormous back tattoo of the Partridge Family all having sex with each other, and no longer possessing the use of my lower lip. It's * complicated. *

But really this is the best cookbook ever. Everything is fantastic in it except the meatloaf. If you already have a copy, you'll have to give it to someone else because nobody will want this one now that I've defaced it. I thought about giving you two matching bathrobes--which would've been a much better gift, I know. But I just couldn't afford it. Shit, you know what I gave my mom for Xmas? A fucking box of wine. I'm such a loser.

But since I didn't make it to your wedding, I'd like to close this introduction with the toast I'd prepared for the occasion, "God, I'm so wasted. Anyway you two probably look really good having sex together.   So do it in front of the mirror whenever you can.   Videotape it!    Sell the copies!   Pay for this wedding! Be creative!   Fuck, aren't you two musicians or some shit!? This is some good ideas I'm giving you...for free!" [Jen falls off chair]

Anyhoo, I wish you two a lifetime of cooking together. And as soon as I learn to understand what the hell Mark is saying [note: Mark is Irish], we should all go bowling. On acid. Naked.

Jen Knox