Keep this Man out of my Kitchen

(My thanks to Ernie, who pointed out this article in the December/January edition of WOOD magazine.)

The author is proposing that the woodworking aficionado fabricate a “simple serving accessory” which “holds your taco shells upright so you can put (and keep) the fixins where they belong.” This article is so wrong that I don’t know where to begin.

• Consider the materials. Cherry wood! Admittedly this is a project for scrapwood, but cherry is a bit over the top for holding tacos. When it is finished, it is to be sanded to 220 grit and finished with three coats of a food-safe topcoat. The dividers are to be angled at 15° from vertical and the edges bevelled. I don’t think there is much furniture in my house as fancy as that. And how did he calculate the average angle of a taco at 15°? Has he nothing better to do?


• Next, consider the math involved. The whole article looks like one of those questions on the GRE where you have trains rapidly approaching each other from different directions at different speeds while water is gurgling down the sinks in the bathrooms. I quote: “To make a longer divider, determine the length of the divider (B) blank by dividing the number of tacos to be held by 2, then multiplying by 41/4”. For example, the length of the jumbo taco holder blank equals 251/2” (12/2=6x41/4”=251/2”). Reader, forgive me, I can't figure out how to type fractions into Blogger. The author of the article did a better job with superscripts.


• Form! Function! Anyone who knows anything about serving tacos (and I am a veteran of many a taco dinner, including Andrew’s never to be forgotten sixth birthday when all these little boys wiped their greasy fingers on my brand new apple-green brocade dining room chairs) knows that the hard part is NOT filling them. Especially since taco shell manufacturers are ahead of the game and now make shells with flat bottoms. The hard part is passing around all those little bowls of shredded and diced lettuce, onion, tomatoes and cheese and keeping them moving so everyone can take a turn. Sir, you cannot imagine the mayhem if everything had to come to a stop in front of the person who was sitting with a container of rapidly cooling tacos in front of her while selecting her fixins.

Heaven only know what the author of this article would have us do with a wet burrito!