In the crazy quilt that is my life now, my step-daughter and I were comparing notes about her girl twins as we fed the girls in our laps. She thinks they smell like French fries. I think they smell like like pepperoni pizza. We are not crazy.

It’s some strange amalgam of their formula, their skin, their hair, their sweat…I don’t know. I just know they make me irrisistably hungry. I don’t even like pepperoni and they make me hungry. I sit with Evie or Lilly in my lap and I zone out as they pull-pull-pull on the ergonomically correct, anti-gas- producing, brightly pastelled contemporary bottles.  They zone out and I zone out and I wake up fantasizing Pizza Hut.

I take a tiny little starfish of a hand in my hand and I start nibbling and that sloppy Joker-from-Batman smile breaks out on the little face and then I blow on a kobocha pumpkin-size round of stomach and I get a laugh and I want to just keep going. My Daddy used to say, “I’m going to just eat you up” in his seductive Southern way. I know what he meant now.

It seems a little weird, even embarrassing, but it shouldn’t be.

Of course, everything in a food writer’s life would lead her inevitably back to eats — even her grandbabies.