A fragrant, freaky looking fruit caught my eye at the health food store the other day. The cluster of waxy yellow tentacles beckoned, and, sucker that I am, I succumbed. "What is this thing?" I asked the guy working in the produce department.

"That's called ‘Buddha's Hand,'" he told me. "You use the zest like a lemon. It's good for aromatherapy, too."

Thinking it would look cool in the fruit bowl and smell good, too, I bought it, despite the fact that it was ridiculously expensive (OK, $10).

The gift - and sometimes curse - of living in the Google age is that if you search long and hard enough, you can find a recipe for just about anything, more or less.

With the Buddha's Hand, it was more a case of less. I found only three culinary applications for this pricey oddity:

1 use the zest to flavor vodka
2 candy the zest, as you would lemon peel
3 make Lembas

I rarely drink Vodka, and my candied zest consumption's pretty low as well. So that left the Lembas, "a special food made by the Elves" of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

According to Wikipedia, "the secret of lembas is closely guarded, and only on rare occasions is it given to non-Elves..." However, some diehard "Lord of the Rings" fans have devoted themselves to recreating Lembas and have thoughtfully provided recipes for the rest of the non-Elf population.

I found a recipe that actually sounded pretty tempting; I was willing to give it a shot. After all, I already had the ingredients in the house, even the orange flower water (well, OK, I didn't have semolina flour, but I was going to substitute soy flour, anyway...)

What I didn't have, though, is something called a Krumkake iron, which you apparently need in order to make these things right. Now, this is where I got kind of upset. What is a Krumkake iron and why have I never heard of it? I looked at the Nordicware Krumkake iron on Amazon and realized immediately that our kitchen will not be complete until we own one of these things.

The Buddha's Hand is pushing my acquisitive buttons; it's got me looking at vintage Krumkake irons on eBay and fantasizing about making lingonberry-filled krumkakes. The Buddha on my mantel, on the other hand, exudes that serenity that comes of renouncing material things. Do I listen to the Head, or the Hand?