Cooking up another false writing scandal

Just on the heels of the false-memoirist Margaret B. Jones scandal, yet another example of the written word has been found false. But hold onto your blog commenting keyboards, friends, this false copy isn’t a from a memoir. It’s from a recipe.

What’s the world coming to that you can’t even trust a recipe?

The culprit: a recipe falsely attributed to a celebrity. That’s right. GoodHousekeeping Magazine had to do a mea culpa after posting a recipe in its mag, proclaiming it to be Conan O’Brien’s Irish Stew. The talk show host said he’s never made a stew, doesn’t cook, and was never contacted by the magazine to lend his name to the St. Patrick’s Day recipe.

For the record, O’Brien said he wasn’t mad at the magazine, and even demonstrated on his March 20 TV show how he could "Irish up" the stew recipe by adding booze, Lucky Charms cereal and a nice garnish of grated Irish Spring soap.

Dear reader, I give you my promise that every recipe in Janeology was actually cooked by a celebrity, eaten by a celebrity or eaten while I watched a celebrity on TV.

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Karen Harrington is the author of Janeology, a mystery with a unique emphasis on genetic inheritance that Booklist calls "fascinating...as much a character study as a legal thriller."