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Now, keep in mind my granny grew up poor with a huge family during the Great Depression. She's thrifty, and never throws anything away. Ever. She used to have a dog that I'm pretty sure subsisted entirely on leftover biscuits and gravy. When I was a kid and decided to start a stamp collection, Granny disappeared to her attic, returning with vases filled with several decades-worth of cancelled postage stamps. I had a collection in a day. Kind of takes the fun out of it, really.

"I just couldn't get that brittle to set," she said while we behaved like sugar-covered peanut-starved coyotes. "I left it for several hours and it was still liquid by the time I went to bed. But then I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. So I got up, dug it out of the trash, washed the peanuts and remade it."

We stopped the feeding frenzy.

"We're eating peanuts that have been in the trash?"

"Well, I washed them. They're just fine!"

And for the next hour, my family brutally teased a sweet, candy-making old lady for being so damn cheap that she couldn't sleep over $3-worth of discarded peanuts, which she later fed to her family.

Think about that the next time you try to swipe a handful of Granny's awesome holiday party mix.

A few hours later, my mom and I were back at her house, confident in our cooking abilities, knowing we would never, ever feed anyone discarded and washed peanuts.

Now, Granny is the sweetest person in the world and would wish no harm on anyone. But Granny is also a very devout Pentecostal. While I'm sure she would never ask God to unleash His wrath on anyone, I'm not convinced that, if God witnessed anyone making jabs at one of his finer followers that He wouldn't do a little manipulation. This is the only possible explaination for why I used butter-flavored Crisco in my rum balls and my English toffee. My butter toffee. Repeatedly. The rum balls had the texture of boozy mothballs, and I spent hours making toffee, waiting for it to set, watching it burn to the black tar that fills my soul, throwing it out, and starting over.

In the meantime, my mom had approximately 274 batches of dinner rolls fail to rise.

About six hours into this cooking melee, I left the house for real butter, and so I could weep in the car and while walking the aisles of the grocery store. When I returned home, I looked through the window in the back door before entering the kitchen, and immediately started backing away from what I witnessed.

The cabinet doors under the sink were flung open. The bottom half of my dad's body stuck out of the doors, surrounded by heaps of tools. My mom came running to the door to let me in, and I shook my head in horror.

I'm not going back into that culinary house of terror! You can't make me!

Dad was taking the pipes apart to retrieve a towel, which had been snatched from my mom's hands by the garbage disposal. "Next time it's your hand," it growled.

"My God! The authorities need to get over here and rope this unholy place off with police tape before we all die!" I wailed. And then I proceeded to make batch #492 of my English fucking toffee, because 1) I finally had real butter, 2) I'm tenacious, and 3) I'm an idiot.

Even with the real butter, something went horribly wrong and my golden toffee turned black. I didn't give a shit. I dumped it onto my now-stale pecans, tossed a handful of chocolate chips in their general directions, and took my ass to bed.

The next morning, I walked into the kitchen to find my mom standing at the work island, perfectly-sliced rectangles of toffee on a plate before her smiling face. "My toffee! It's perfect! Christmas miracle!" I squealed.

"Well, not quite. Yours never set up," she said. "I made this batch and it looks pretty good, don't you think? Have some."

I bit into the candy, and it was heaven. Sweet, buttery, tooth-shatteringly perfect.

"I didn't realize you had more pecans," I said. "I thought we only had the half a cup I used last night."

"Well, no, we didn't have more pecans. I, uh ... "

Oh lord, no.

"I rinsed your toffee goo off the pecans and reused them. But they never went into the trash can! I swear!"

I continued eating. "You know, the only part of this that gives me any hope at all is the fact that, at least you washed a slightly more expensive nut. When my turn comes to wash nuts, there's a chance it'll be something classy, like cashews. Or maybe macadamias, if I work really hard and marry well."

It was five years later, and they were really pricey locally-grown black walnuts from a botched batch of cookies that never got baked.

Shut up. They rocked.