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When America thinks of girl scouts, they think of one thing: Girl Scout cookies. Every year, at the beginning of the year, millions cookies are sold all around the world. Every year we wait in anticipation to see if there are any new kinds of Girl Scout cookies. These cookies have created frenzy throughout the world, that doesn't stop until the last box is sold.

There are fourteen different kinds that come out each year. Often times, there are new cookies that come out and test the waters. Usually these cookies have failed, but there have been a few successful stories. Here are a list and brief description of each:

1. Thin Mint: The most enduring and universally familiar.

2. Do-si-dos or Peanut Butter Sandwiches or Savannahs: a sandwich cookie

3. Trefoils or Classic Shortbread: These shortbread cookies are shaped like the Girl Scout Trefoil design.

4. Tagalongs: These round cookies with a cookie center are covered with chocolate, having under their swollen chocolate surface an inner layer of peanut butter

5. Samoas or Caramel deLites: These consist of a circular vanilla cookie about 2inch in diameter with a small hole in the center

6. Golden Yangles: a sugar free cookie

7. Lemon Coolers: A reduced-fat cookie

8. Lemon Pastry Cremes: Pastry style sandwich cookies with lemon creme in the middle.

9. Thanks-a-Lots: Crunchy fudge coated treats, these cookies are circular and are about 3.5 inches in diameter

10. All Abouts: A shortbread cookie with a layer of chocolate on the bottom and featuring related sayings on the top.

11. Cartwheels: A cinnamon-oatmeal reduced-fat variety

12. Caf Cookies: A gourmet style cookie, coated with cinnamon

13. Classic Creams: A sandwich cookie made in the same style as Oreos, only the top and bottom are different colors

14. Double Dutch: A chocolate cookie dough with chocolate chips

These cookies are all very tasteful and delightful, but more so than others. As of 2004, the favorites were:

• Thin Mints (25% of total sales)
• Samoas/Caramel deLites (19%)
• Tagalongs/Peanut Butter Patties 13%
• Do-si-dos/Peanut Butter Sandwich 11%
• Trefoils/Shortbread 9%

All though the rest are quite tasty, they just don't seem to make the cut. Whether you enjoy thin mints, samoas, of tagalongs, there are so many different kinds of girls scout cookies; you should definitely find a favorite.

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Do you think of lasagna as a sublime gourmet sensation or a stodgy, school food staple?

In Tuscany I've tasted exquisite layers of meltingly tender, fresh pasta fusing into a poem with creamy béchamel and a sparing distribution of rich ragù. This traditional meat sauce of central and northern Italy is made with finely minced beef and chicken livers or pancetta and simmered gently for hours until the flavours mellow. In spring the delicate pasta sheets have been layered with tender artichoke hearts, béchamel and ham, a marriage of delicate flavours to delight the most gourmet palate.

Lasagna (having replaced its plural e with a singular a) is however a dish that has left home and travelled the world. It has made it into the mainstream of microwave meals, supermarket suppers and been massacred in the process. Thick, stodgy sheets of pasta sandwich oozing quantities of sauce and bear little resemblance to their Italian forbears.

To taste the real Italian lasagne that I'm describing, you must take a gourmet trip to Italy, visit the hills of Tuscany or Emilia Romagna with its rich, butter-based cuisine and multitude of fine restaurants. In Ferrara, Bologna or Parma or any other of its beautiful cities, you will be able to appreciate the delicacy of flavour, the melting texture with which genuine Italian lasagne can delight the palate.

Here the lasagne is only a part of a leisurely meal. In autumn you might have started with an antipasto of Parma ham and ripe figs, tasted some fettuccini with truffles, then sampled the lasagne, leaving enough room for your main course of a bistecca ai funghi porcini, steak with fresh porcini mushrooms harvested from the wooded hills around you.

Lasagne is a dish designed for feasting - to make it properly is time consuming: rolling out your own freshly made pasta to make sheets that are thin enough not to be stodgy, boiling it briefly a few sheets at a time; making fresh meat sauce and allowing it three or four hours to simmer unhurriedly; stirring a béchamel sauce carefully so it doesn't burn; lastly assembling all the different components and layering them, judiciously spreading just the right amount of sauce for the pasta to absorb and have a bit left over; adding in freshly grated parmesan to get the balance of flavours just so; baking it all in the oven for just the right amount of time for the flavours to meld into a divine whole. It is a labour of love made at home for special occasions or ordered in a restaurant where you know they do it well.

If you want to try your hand at making an authentic lasagna from Emilia Romagna, seek guidance from Marcella Hazan. Her cook books are the best I know to help you reproduce the flavours of Northern Italy at home. I confess to not having the patience for making my own fresh pasta and so do without lasagne altogether at home. I'm just waiting for an opportunity to get back to Italy so that I can indulge in a gourmet holiday, feasting on lasagna, porcini mushrooms and truffles!

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Taffy is an old-fashioned candy which has been made in one form or another for centuries. That makes sense, because it combines two of the most basic possible flavors and ingredients: sugar, and fat (ideally butter, but all too often confectioners use vegetable oil).

It's not just as easy as mixing the sugar and butter together, though. They have to be boiled together, but that creates a thick, sticky mass. Once you get that mass of sugar and butter, it has to be pulled and stretched over and over again. A long time ago the mass would have to be manipulated manually, which could take hours and was very taxing. Now, though, taffy pullers use a taffy machine, which consists of three bars that spin around each other.

This contraption pulls the taffy automatically, which saves a lot of effort for the candy maker and certainly reduced the price and increased the output of taffy. You've probably seen these machines when walking past home made candy shops; they can actually be kind of hypnotic to watch.

There's a good chance that you have heard of salt water taffy. This is actually kind of a famous invention that came out of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Contrary to popular belief, salt water taffy does not actually contain any amount of salt water.

Many different stories purport to explain the origin of the name "salt water taffy." One popular (albeit unlikely) explanation is that one David Bradley, confectioner, had his whole store flooded as a result of a huge storm. In theory, his entire supply of ordinary taffy was soaked with ocean water. Naturally he was quite put out about the whole thing, because it meant that his stock was apparently ruined. However, when a customer came in to ask if he had any taffy for sale, he despondently replied that he had only "salt water taffy." The customer thought it sounded great, bought some, and loved. When the store owner's mother heard the name, she loved it, and it stuck. Or maybe not. It sounds a little unlikely, but it's a nice story.

Taffy nowadays is made from corn syrup, butter, and glycerin, though the most common brands you'll find in stores--like Airheads and Laffy Taffy--contain palm oil instead of butter.

Taffy is a largely American phenomenon. In other countries it is extremely rare to find anything called 'taffy,' although there are many similar candies, like Starburst, Chewits, and Now and Later, for example, which could perhaps go by the same name.

One very popular type of taffy is the Airhead. Let me tell you a cool trick that you can do with one of those. As you probably know, Airheads come in little cellophane paper sleeve things. Just pinch one end of that little sleeve deal (unopened of course) and start flapping the candy up and down. It sounds stupid, but try it. As you continue to repeat this motion, the Airhead will get smaller and smaller. As it gets smaller, you may want to move your hand down the wrapper so that you maintain some amount of tension between your fingers and the candy.

If you do that for a while, you'll end up with this little compounded, compacted sack-of-flour looking thing, because you've condensed the long, thin strip of taffy into something tiny and magical. Then you can just chomp on that mother and be happy, and David Bradly would be proud of you, so help him.

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