Chris Amirault

Settling into the list, I think, due to several factors, including getting a few bottles from someone who wants them served at Thanksgiving. That means that the excellent St. Feuillien brune reserve will wait for next year, or Christmas, or.... I also was unable to find many of the (helpful -- thanks!) suggestions here. So, we'll be having the Bellhaven Ale, Sierra Nevada Tumbler and NH Harvest, and the Rogue Smoke Ale, which was recommended by a salesperson and gets nice reviews over at BeerAdvocate. Will report back, perhaps with a tear in my eye about that St. F.

I tried the St. Feuillien brune reserve in my search for good Thanksgiving beers, and it's outstanding. Had I not come into possession of a few others as a gift (with the intention of them being served at the meal), that's what I'd be serving....

Excellent! You got guts, blogging during Thanksgiving week! So Hot Springs via West Tennessee? Say more!

Made a version of this last night with EP Angostura (no grapefruit bitters at the bar), Zirbenz, Cynar, and Appleton 12. I've never had the Scarlet Ibis so I don't know if the Appleton is appropriate, but I combined the other ingredients first and, from what we had behind the bar, it seemed like the best choice. Fascinating drink; definitely in the Rogue/Beta camp. Orange twist? Missed the grapefruit bitters for sure. Had the entire front and back talking....

It's terrific for this time of year, I'm finding, just for ideas/inspiration.

We have two of those stainless steel cylindrical cans that open with a foot pedal, and they are approaching the end of their usable lives. Sadly, when we've hit Target, Home Depot, and so on, we're not seeing too many new options out there. So what's available? I'm not talking about just cans that sit on the floor but ones that slide out from under the sink or from anywhere else. What do you have? What do you want?

Very interesting. What else are you planning to do with it?

Final menu, with a lot of prep done this weekend: ras al hanout spiced nuts curried root chips smoked roasted turkey with oranges and red onions turkey leg & thigh confit with thyme pecan, pancetta, and dried cherry stuffing cranberry sauce with orange, pineapple and ginger pickled mustard seeds mashed potatoes butternut squash purée Macomber turnip and parsnip batons with browned butter and pimento dram carrots with ginger, garlic, and preserved lemon brussel sprouts with white pepper, bacon, and sage fennel, parsley, lemon, and parmigiano reggiano salad corn bread rolls parker house rolls John, your mind map is inspiring; reminds me of my old StorySpace days.... I now use a big google doc with the whole mess (menu, lists, schedule) on it, plus Evernote for shopping lists (easier to negotiate than google docs on my Droid at the store).

Just got the spirits and syrup set for Regents Punch -- and dumped the leftover pineapple and syrup into the cranberry sauce, at the kindergartener's suggestion, to excellent effect. Good ol' New England frugality.

Thanks for the particulars, Borgstrom. I'm going to try this method for the big day....

Agree with Nick. You'll also build a sense of how long you like your pancetta cured; I tend to like it to go for as long as possible to develop the flavor.

Sigh. Ok, I'll try this: Were they añejo spirits?

Round two: 3:1 water:oats, some salt and sugar, and Zojirushi set to be done at 7a: perfect. Overnight cooking was ok but not great; later that evening (about 20 hours after they were originally cooked) they had gotten slimy. Best to get them into the fridge shortly after having been cooked if you want that toothy bite.

Proportions?

She's being mighty saucy, that one. [Austin Powers]Oh, behave![/Austin Powers]

I had to google "scouse." (Wikipedia link here.) Do you have a recipe for it?

When you're preparing a protein for the night's dinner you're unlikely to run out of room unless you've got a massive brood. However, I've been doing prep for later meals by packaging a slew of, say, chicken breasts, chili, or pork shoulder, and if that sort of do-ahead cooking is something you want to be able to do, I can see occasionally running into that upper limit.

Très raffiné...

I am a fan of rich, dark, salty puttanesca, and it is one of my absolute favorite foods. Personally, I think it just isn't puttanesca if you don't: sauté onions and garlic until just this side of brown; slide in a healthy dose of anchovies and sauté them until they break down; add some oil-cured or kalamata olives, a handful of capers, and a can of whole San Marzano tomatoes, lightly crushed with a wooden spoon and simmered until velvety and dark; and pump in a final glug of olive oil near service. Lightly sautéed tomatoes, no anchovies, little oil: that just ain't gonna do it for me.

In terms of baking? Absolutely.

Of course we should all be organized -- but the point here isn't whether one should or should not prep in an organized fashion. The point is that prepping and cooking in an organized fashion to reach a desired outcome cannot be quantified to the minute, particularly given the wide range of skills, available help, pre-processed ingredients, and so on. In addition, the estimates that publishers demand from cookbook authors are almost always lowered for the purposes of marketing.

Cooking and prep times have always been a crock, an artifact of an American "kitchen efficiency" ethos that rose throughout the middle of the 20th century. I wrote about this in a review of Sara Moulton's "Sara's Secrets" cookbook (click for full review): Kimball's refreshing BS call would be a lot easier to appreciate if Cook's Illustrated went all the way, using temperature to determine meat doneness, measuring using weight, not volume, and so on. ¡Viva la revolution!

I've definitely noticed some variability in the Cruzan line: a lot with the light and dark, less so with the blackstrap. I'll try to remember to compare the older bottle I have at home with the new one at work.

I'm sitting here in the orthodontist's waiting room while my daughter gets her braces checked, and I'm watching Martha Stewart "cook" on the Today Show. I happen to think that Martha Stewart isn't a baking dumbass, and her shows often include instruction that directly contradicts the instructions on this 5-minute segment. But it does make me wonder about all the bad cooking instruction that results when otherwise good cooks have to rush through or omit steps and instructions to fit within a tight segment, squeeze equipment onto camera-ready tables, and make other concessions to the tube. To wit, here's what Martha just taught us: Don't worry about measuring carefully, because baking doesn't require precision. Use bowls that are just barely big enough to hold the ingredients, and if stuff spills out, no big deal. There's no need to worry about combining ingredients such as eggs carefully; in fact, you can just dump them from shell to bowl, stir a few times, and you're good to go. What other harebrained tips do TV cooks, intentionally or otherwise, teach their adoring public?

100?!? Yikes. I will never complain about the paltry dozen to twenty that show up at my house.