Katie Meadow

I grew up in a pre-war apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. We had no dishwasher. My brother and I were the assigned dish dryers. In fact we didn't have a dryer for clothes. My mother used to rig some laundry lines in the kitchen so she could dry our clothes. Doing the dishes sometimes meant having damp laundry flapping around your head. Now I love my dishwasher. The kitchen tasks I don't like are mostly prep work for cooking. The worst ones involve raw protein. I simply detest touching raw chicken. I can't stand cleaning and deveining shrimp. The act of mincing onions is so horrid I have my husband do it. I'm a very good mincer, but my eyes suffer greatly. I also don't like making green leafy salads, especially washing and drying lettuce. There are numerous other jobs that are simply boring, but I don't even want to think about them. Some vegetable prep I find pleasant and meditative: cutting cauliflower into florets. Shelling walnuts. Fine slicing cabbage for slaw. Shaving hard cheese into paper thin curls. Peeling and chopping roasted green chiles. Mincing green herbs. Slicing mushrooms. Cutting corn off the cob with a sharp knife. I can do it now without having stray kernels flying off to the far corners.

Now that's a thing of beauty. We've often had bagels and lox on xmas morning but sturgeon and caviar is just plain heaven.

Zojirushi Fuzzy Logic rice cooker: use it all the time Thermapen: Husband loves it Pizza steel: invaluable Tamaki Gold sushi rice: delicious Mala Market: pricey, but a great resource for some hard-to-find products I can't find (or I'm to lazy to look for) in Oakland Chinatown No doubt there's more, but I can't think of anything right now Oh just thought of another: Bamix immersion blender. Don't know how I lived without it. Not an unqualified success: Trader Joe's recommendations. I'm somewhere about 50/50. There have been a few good recs, but TJ's is only useful for a few things in MHO. I don't buy a lot of appliances at this point, so no Instant Pot or CSO or SV or blast chillers, etc.

Vaxxed, boosted and sozzled! You deserve a nice treat, @blue_dolphin. Happy holidays!

@weinooet al, I don't think I will ever roast a chicken again without quick-frying arugula or watercress in drippings. Really good.

I don't think I ever said anything about rosti.

We are going to roast a whole chicken today and I have a bag of arugula, which also makes a nice bed. But now I think I will try this twist and sauté it in the roasting pan. Thank YOU!

David Lebovitz has a very nice watercress soup recipe. Also it is great added to other greens for a soup. I like raw cress as a bed for juicy meats. Just plop a whole hot roasted chicken on a thick bed of cress and let it drip so the greens get warm and wilted. Watercress is kind of a pain to clean and stem so it helps to be in a meditative mood, or perhaps I've just gotten less patient with certain tasks. Watercress makes a nice playmate for beets, too. Floating around the internet is a salad associated, I think, with the Zuni restaurant that sounds great when I come across it: cress, beets and walnuts served with mascarpone toasts or some variety thereof.

For every raisin you find in your coffee they pay you 1cent.

The ubiquitous Momofuku Ranch Dressing is all over the net. It does not include cheddar cheese, which seems like a weird ingredient for ranch. It does use Kewpie, and it also calls for pickled ramps, which sounds great but certainly isn't common on grocery store shelves here in CA if anywhere. Maybe you are supposed to make your own, also easier said than done here where ramps do not grow. Ranch dressing isn't in my DNA, and I can't abide Kewpie mayo, so I can't vouch for Chang's recipe. The book sounds a mess.

@rotutsOf course those chocolate oranges were fun to knock apart,, guaranteed stocking stuffers. Here's another good bar: Lindt Excellence dark chocolate Intense Orange. Besides finely chopped orange it also has a modest amount of finely chopped almonds. I'm hooked on this and don't consider it that intense; the chocolate is not overwhelmed by orange, and the orange doesn't taste artificial. Easily available in grocery stores that stock Lindt.

Okay, labeling a mysterious jar CLIVES is hilarious. How long do you plan on keeping it? And what do you think the recipe really called for? Cloves or chives or olives?

I'm pretty sure it's me and not the pretzels, but tell me what you think.

Last year i became hooked on TJ's seasonal Butter Toffee Pretzels. I tasted them again this year and they are actually quite awful! Maybe it was Pandemic Lunacy, or maybe just the usual unpredictability of taste.

Agreed, but with a caveat for the inexperienced host: Take into account your climate, the temperature of the room, whether or not the cheese will be in the sun's path while you are ignoring it and the ripeness of the cheese the day you want to eat it. Some hard salty cheeses get oily and unpleasant if too warm. Some soft cheeses can turn into puddles of unspreadability. You, @Margaret Pilgrim, of course, without even thinking, probably make these adjustments, but some may not.. I have a SIL who reliably serves brie straight from the fridge! What a waste!

And most of the tube pastes come from Italy and are much better anyway. Just trying to open those dollhouse sized cans with a standard can opener is enough to make you crazy. May be useful for self-defense. If you miss you can throw the can opener.

A harbinger of things to come, and not in a good way. I love a small amount of bergamot juice and peel in my marmalade. In the 15 or so years we have been making marmalade, bergamot season, though shorter than seville orange season, has always coincided with the seville season. Sevilles have reliably been available here in northern CA roughly late January or early February through most of March. All of a sudden last week my husband spotted bergamots in our usual shop. I am guessing they will gone by the time the sevilles come in, unless by some freak of nature (oops, that expression is going the way of the Dodo bird; of course I mean climate change) seasonal produce is changing seasons.

Carcass, uneaten leg, neck and the usual scraps are simmering away right now. Couldn't happen at a better time, since I am feeling sorry for myself and my dislocated finger. Of course the timing of turkey soup isn't exactly random. Falling down the stairs is, however.

Wow! My first real post to this thread! Not that it's anything to be proud of. We were staying out at the family beach house (with a very small select group of vaxxed relatives) so I don't have good muscle memory of the staircase configuration. Five hours of Black Friday were spent in the cozy little Petaluma ER to get a dislocated finger relocated. When asked how it happened I told a half-truth: I said I got drunk and fell down the stairs. The whole truth is that I got drunk, then had a gummy, and then in the middle of the night fell down the stairs on the way to the bathroom. I figured that for all the other people in the ER just getting drunk after a big Triptophan hit was all that was needed to fall down the stairs; I didn't feel it was necessary to include the fact that I was tripping before I tripped. Anyway, I hope I will never do that again. The good new is I didn't break anything (except maybe the washing machine which I crashed into) and came away with only a bent finger and some minor bruises. Lucky me, right? Happy Thanksgiving. I'm safe and sound at home now with nothing more dangerous than the Sunday Times and some opiates.

Serve them in an egg crate why dontcha?

I keep thinking I want to bake one, but then I just don't get around to it. If it's good, point us to the recipe. It looks lovely. Any dessert that's better for being in the fridge overnight has my approval. Until 2020 every Thanksgiving for exactly FORTY YEARS has included my SIL's pies: usually five of them! Last year there was just me and my husband and no pie. This year there will be five of us and two bakery-bought pies, since the pie baker will be elsewhere on Turkey day. Sad. Her apple pie is always my favorite, but her pecan makes an excellent Friday lunch.

Good fried green tomatoes are an elusive item. Besides the tomato being good to start with, the batter should be airy and crispy, like tempura, allowing the tomato to be the star. Every time I visit my daughter in Atlanta I order them and I'm always disappointed. The crust is typically too thick, heavy handed or however else it can miss the mark. I would make them myself but alas, finding a good green tomato in the Bay Area, even when they should be in season, even at the farmers' markets, is a rarity. No one seems into fried green tomatoes around here. One of the best versions I've had was stuffed into a fried green tomato BLT in a tiny town in the Blue Ridge foothills.. Delicious. Still, hope springs eternal and it's very hard for me not to order them if they are on the menu.

Of course they have. If luck will have it I will be dead before that's all that's left to eat. One site I looked at described them as an intestinal track with a hole in each end.

In days long gone, an older southern gentleman had a table at the Berkeley Farmers Market. He had very nice fresh eggs and for a few weeks at best during the appropriate season he sold fresh shelled butter beans in generous bags. They were a sort of grayish mauve color, and absolutely delicious. They were not lima beans, at least not in my book. I was so sad when he disappeared from the market and assumed that he grew old and stopped farming or selling.

Thanks for the review of sea cucumbers. They look awful and sound very unpleasant. I'm guessing they will be on earth longer than we will.