Lilija

Sweet potato tempura sushi! A takeout favorite. Sweet potato fries, and just recently, I found Utz sweet potato chips.

That's what I was talking about up there, I would par-bake them, then smoke them with the entree, and finish with butter and a sprinkle of barbecue rub.

Mm, another use, you guys have reminded me, I use them in place of meat in my black bean chili. Your favorite chili seasonings, plus black beans and chunks of sweet potato. Heavy on the chipotle. Changes the whole nature of the dish, in a very delicious way, and tastes great over brown rice. Also, a less soupy version of that same idea, but inside burritos. Camping, once, I made sweet potato hash with kielbasa and red bell peppers and onions. It was great, and inspired me to make a real recipe of it, after coming home.

Mm, Pumking is a personal favorite of mine. I had some Dogfish Head Raison De'Etre, and the raisins you mentioned reminded me, I bet this one would go great with the big turkey dinner. It's a complex raisiny molassesy sort of flavor, not too sweet, and a bit of spice, but it's not at all heavy.

Over the summer, I took to baking them, finishing on the smoker, for the last 20 minutes of whatever I was making, then fluff the insides with a ton of butter, and sprinkle it with barbecue rub. Which was usually salt, pepper, ground dried chilies, and a bit of brown sugar. Now, I keep a jar of the rub, just to eat with sweet potatoes.

I know you already settled on your list, but if anyone else comes through here looking for ideas, let me recommend Allagash Tripel. I was pleasantly surprised at the lightness of it, and thought it would go very well with a poultry dinner. I mean, it was light for a tripel, which is completely relative. It was a fairly high ABV, but completely drinkable, not boozy, a little dry, lemony and spicy, and played well with the food we were eating.

Can we just go ahead and amend this "Sandra Lee on anything" please?

And, uh...just who would I have to hire to get it all there for me, ready and waiting, for when I walk in the door after work? The point is...setting it out, chopping it up, getting the pot and filling it with water, setting it to boil, find the correct herbs/pans, all takes time. And then..warmed plates? Shock chilling? Really? Total. Fantasy. Hell yeah I can whip a structured multi course meal for four on the table in less than a half hour, if someone did all this for me already.

It's a bunch of veggies on a board. As lovely as they are, I think it's a stretch. A marketing inspired stretch. But then, people have been making "vegetarian meatloaf" which I can barely say with a straight face, for years, so...*shrug*

Oh, I think they're on to something. It takes me about 30 seconds to peel a potato, and maybe that long to cube it. Hand that same potato to my husband...and *I* can go watch The Office, before he gets done. It's entirely subjective. I ignore times. I know my own windows for things. 20 minutes to make that halibut? Sure if your ingredients are easy to find, partially unwrapped, in little bowls diced up already, sitting there gleaming on your almost empty fridge top shelf, or lined up on your counter ready for action. For the rest of us? Well, it will take me at least ten minutes to find the damn wasabi powder.

Mm, Meat Pie (which I am making on Saturday, along with steak fries and a salad, for a beer tasting). Chicken and Dumplings. Anything gravyish ladled over egg noodles. Thick lentil and or squash soups. Dal. Beans and greens, southern, Italian, Indian, Southern Italian and Indian, whatever, the combination, with some kind of pork is one of our staple winter meals, with rice, cornbread, something. Spicy soupy things.

I like serving it around 4:30-5, at my house. We're late dinner people, normally eating at 8ish. But 5 pm gives me enough time that I'm not killing myself in the morning, and gives my guests time to hang out and snack, if they get here around 2. Then we get hungry for leftovers around midnight, and all is well. My mother, on the other hand serves it at 1. I kinda hate it, because it kills breakfast plans we might have, and then by 5, we're starving, and if we eat at her house, we don't get leftovers... In fact, we often wind up hitting the diner, by 8-9, out of desperation.

Well, no matter how much I like bitter presence in stuff, tasting it straight up for work is still yucky, and that's my off the books opinion, hehe. It's a great part of flavors, but plain straight up bitter dissolved in pure water is a lingering intense taste that always has me cringing. I imagine those strips are a lot like that. There's a difference between enjoying a strong bitter black cup of coffee, and getting a straight hit of it plain. So, yeah I totally agree about that, and I think that's sort of across the board, between regular tasters and so called super tasters.

That's gonna be awesome! If you can get your hands on pure caffeine, that's what we use for bitter taste. Or...better yet...skip that, pure caffeine can be lethal at high doses...and by high doses, I mean a few grams. Still, as a taste-nerd, making everyone in your family taste things sounds like a fun afternoon, to me.

Like I said in one of my previous posts, that's sort of a sweeping generalization. Out of my panel of 12, some of us actually like bitter flavors (hence my obsession with stouts and IPAs) and some of us don't, it's opinion. Two colleagues get the bitter/sour flavors wrong a lot, and all of us have made the mistake at least once (I did it myself, a few weeks ago...and again, I enjoy and can taste bitterness). "Aversion", that's where opinion figures in, and opinion is not a measurable thing. When I think of the word intolerance, I think of something that makes one physically ill, and I assure you, not one of us "supertasters" has ever gotten sick from the bitter flavor. On a slightly related side note, the term "supertaster" is about as meaningful, in a professional setting, as "foodie". I use it here, because it's a recognizable term, but I get that it's sort of a media friendly catchall term.

Slow cooking over wood fire is traditional, and I would say essential to the whole overall flavor. Down there, they cook it over the wood from the tree that allspice berries grow on. You could do a Caribbean spiced turkey and season it however, and cook it in your familiar chosen way, but it wouldn't really be jerk turkey without the smoky element. It would probably be very tasty though.

I jerked my turkey (hah) last year, for Thanksgiving, cured it for a few days in a fresh jerk paste rub, then smoked it all day. I made a big pan of coconut rice and black beans instead of stuffing, made tostones, roasted some sweet potatoes with cardamom, allspice, and honey, then sauteed some spinach and garlic to round it out. It was the most untraditional and awesome Thanksgiving dinner I've ever made. I highly recommended trying it!

http://www.sensorysociety.org/ssp/wiki/Labeled_Magnitude_Scale/ Heh, there ya go. In our terms, we decided that barely detectable is the equivalent scent/aroma/flavor of tap water, weak is skim milk, moderate is the scent of a fresh rose/buttered popcorn, strong is a garbage can in warm weather/very sharp stinky cheese, very strong is bleach or ammonia in a closed room, and the strongest imaginable is...well, off the charts, like as pervasive as rotting flesh. In various different panels, we come up with our own vocabulary for the LMS, so we can discuss it and everyone is on the same page. It's a 0-100 scale. 1.4 is Barely Detectable, 6 is Weak, 17 is Moderate, 30 is Strong, and I forget what Very Strong is, and Strongest Imaginable is 100.

I think I got lucky with this job, one of the major R&D facilities of IFF is in my town, and they have regular consumer panels, open to anyone. I got involved with that first, doing focus groups and showing up regularly for basic stuff (like, "sniff this detergent, tell us how it makes you feel" or "describe the berry flavors in this new yogurt"). I did that for years, then out of the blue, years ago, they called me for "internal" which then kicked off six months of pretty intense training, and screening, and is considered a full time job. We're constantly getting trained, screened, and calibrated. All 12 of us in the panel are considered "supertasters" (although no one counted our tastebuds...)Whoever said that supertasters can taste bitter, or whatever, is incorrect. We sometimes have issues with bitter and sour too. I think flavor and aromatics are very subjective, which is why everyone has some sort of different ideas about how a thing tastes or should taste. So, when all your cylinders are firing on cosmic synchronization, and everything gets clear and you "get it" then...totally ignore outside influence, because I'm sure you do. We're not even allowed to talk to each other, during the actual tasting/rating stuff. People are WILDLY influenced by each other. We can taste a broth, and our boss doesn't say anything, and we have 12 very different ideas. He says "roasted" and we're all like "ahh! Aha! roasted chicken! Yes!" Then he's like, "I lied.". So, yeah, it's a great exercise. Don't second guess yourself. I'm really into fine beer, but through my experiences at work, and hanging around various beer tastings and online communities...well, I just don't really participate in hobby groups anymore. You cannot really properly quantify flavors, though by God, people try. It boils down mostly to opinion and a certain non-standardized vocabulary, where aromatics and flavors are concerned. My boss goes into meltdown mode, when we're tasting, when someone says "this is good, very nutty" or something like that. When it comes to tastes (and by tastes, I mean five basic) it's a lot more concrete, and for us, very standardized. We have a numerical scale. Maybe the op should use a numerical scale with the SO, to gauge just how bitter/sour a thing is, and what's an acceptable threshold. It really cuts through the "I don't like it, it's bitter" talk, and gets right down to numbers, hehe.

I do use a bit of blonde roux, but I don't like the filling gluey. It's a fine line.

It's actually quite real, and not uncommon. I work as a professional taster, and part of my job is identifying and rating the intensity of bitter taste(along with the other 4 tastes) in various things. Some of my colleagues simply can't do it, and my boss knows to toss their data, when it comes to bitter/sour, and we've all been highly trained. It's been the subject of some very stressful meetings. We were told that 33% of people can't taste "bitter" properly, and it definitely shows among my group. Even to someone that can usually detect bitter, there's an intensity level, or certain chemicals, sometimes, where the two tastes cross, and fool even those of us that have no problems telling them apart, usually. We just had a huge screening on citric acid, recently, and I got a few wrong, rating pure citric acid dissolved in pure water with a hint of bitterness.

Pieplate?! That wouldn't make nearly enough Two pies might...might work. But, you do have a good idea. Two pies worth. It's just that my filling is very soupy, and trying to slice a pie would be a comedy of errors...although there's no law saying we can't just dig it out of the pie plate with a serving spoon... Definitely got me thinking there.

I really like dark chocolate Milky Way bars. Especially the tiny bite sized cube types found in candy mixes. They're called Milky Way Midnight, I think, and I have never seen them in a full sized bar anywhere. I happen to be a huge fan of caramel and dark chocolate.

Pfeffernüsse, not so bad. The worst thing today, though. It's only 2:30, and I know it'll be the worst thing. Because I ate nine of them. This is the best time of year, because I'm not gorged out on holiday cooking and cookies, but the good stuff is in the stores already.

Wow, I've been talking about chicken pot pie for two days. I have a pretty good method, where I take the cooked shredded chicken and simmer it in broth, salt, lots of pepper, maybe some minced onion. Then I add the veggies, pretty much the exact ones you mentioned plus corn, maybe string beans if I have them, (never potatoes, potatoes and pie crust gives me the willies), simmer till mostly tender, then turn the broth into kind of a bootleg veloute, with a blonde roux. When it looks silky and wonderful, I finish with a handful of thyme or sage (or whatever else is threatening in the garden, or feels good...) and a glug of cream. I like when the chicken is almost falling apart wispy. I put it in a deep casserole, and lay a thick slab of pie dough on it, venting, like, thicker than I'd use for regular pie. Or I plop biscuit dough on it, sort of leaving holes around the biscuits. Or, on weeknights, and I feel comfortable enough with you guys that I can say this...whack biscuits. Then I bake it till the crust looks right, and the whole thing is bubbly. What we've been mulling over is how to do this so everyone gets more crust, with the pie crust versions. My chicken pot pie is a sloppy affair, to eat it, it's a bowl of chicken veggie stew with a little hat of crust on top. Hubs suggested making little pies in big muffin tins, with a bottom crust as well, and he might be on to something. I don't have any nice individual casseroles, so that's right out. I also considered making foldover pies with puff pastry. Or, we thought about laying a bottom crust in the casserole, blind baking it, and proceeding as usual. Your suggestion of roasted garlic sounds like it would be awesome. I say, if it feels right, go for it.