So it's come to this, has it? The best-selling cookbook in America — sorry, scratch that — the best-selling book in America is a treatise on how to sneak pureed vegetables into food for children. I mean, please?

"Deceptively Delicious" by Jessica Seinfeld (Collins, $24.95) has hit No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list, showing that Americans really love their celebrity cookbooks. (Remember Oprah's chef's oven-fried chicken, anyone?)

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In case you don't know about this book: Seinfeld, the wife of the comedian, has discovered that she can get her three children named George, Elaine and Kramer (or whatever) to eat vegetables if she purees them and sneaks them into pancakes, mac and cheese and other yummy-mummy kid foods.

So now the annals of culinary literature include a recipe for Banana Pudding Pie made with instant pudding mix, a store-bought graham cracker crust and a half cup of yellow squash ooze. Mmm ... healthy.

I am disturbed on several levels. First, this is like sneaking a pill into a ball of raw hamburger for your dog. Children aren't dogs. If you present your kids with delicious vegetables, they will, after a few short years of sobbing and tantrums, finally decide to eat them. If you ask them to force down vile mush, they will fight you to the grave.

Second, who would ever want to be a guest at the Seinfeld house? After Jerry pours you a stiff gin and rutabaga, would you tense at the table, waiting to detect that cruciferous tang of cauliflower in the cake frosting? Any people who would lie to their own children about spinach in the brownies wouldn't stop there. They'd Febreze the bedsheets in the guest room rather than change them, and pour decaffeinated coffee in the morning after insisting that they ran out for a pound of high-test just for you.

Stop deceiving your children, Jessica, and just come clean.

Tandoori hot dogs?
I spent a few hours wandering through the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers when it came to Atlanta last month. Boy, are there a lot of ovens and dishwashers out there. One piece of equipment that did stand out was a tandoor from Wood Stone, a manufacturer of stone hearth pizza ovens. Like the hearths, this Indian-style pit oven was lined with ceramic rather than the traditional clay. You spear the foods on long, metal skewers and lower them into the oven, where they cook in the intense dry heat emanating from the sides. The tandoor looked elegant and familiar: I've seen it at Shout (where s'mores, among other dishes, come out of it) and the new restaurant Room in the Twelve Centennial Park, where the tandoor chef cooks chicken wings and hot dogs. I had to order the hot dog, and it was, well, as advertised. Will we be seeing more non-Indian tandoori food? Do we want to?

A fond farewell
I was so happy to rediscover the inimitable voice of humorist/cookbook author Peg Bracken after finding the "I Hate to Cook Book" in my mother-in-law's library, and then so sad to learn of her death on Oct. 20 at the age of 89. Bracken was known as a funny, pleasantly subversive writer who freed housewives in the 1960s to admit they'd rather use convenience foods if it kept them out of the kitchen. But I'd imagine she'll be remembered as the author who introduced trenchant social commentary to food writing. She may have hated to cook, but her recipe for good food writing is one that many follow, whether they know it or not.