Katie Meadow

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.

Pineapple especially, but also other fruits like papaya, are commonly served with a generous squeeze of lime and a dusting of red chile powder. I came home from my first visit to Mexico and started doing that for myself. Tajin mix is chile, lime and salt, I think. I'd rather control the elements myself and use only fresh lime juice and good quality pure New Mexican chile. Delicious! For those with a sweet tooth pineapple is great with lime and a sprinkle of brown sugar too. It looks like your fruit package includes fresh lime, so I might be inclined to toss the tajin or relegate it to the drawer where soy sauce packets go to die and just use my favorite chile powder.

In my twenties I lived on a communal farm. I know, I can't believe it either. The property was owned by a jovial porky chap who grew up in Argentina, also on a farm. He was into rabbits. And yes, the liver was good and so were the kidneys. Those days I probably didn't know the function of a kidney or a liver. Now I'm squeamish about touching raw chicken breast, let alone anyone's liver, etc. But the kidneys were extremely popular with my friends on the farm.

@Shelbyyou are a forgiving and kind soul to make your in-laws bread for Thanksgiving dinner even though you will not attend. And five years ago, before xmas dinner after the election of he who shall not be named I never imagined my relatives would have a political argument during a holiday dinner (and we always talk politics), but two of my favorite people ended up in tears. Now the nephew responsible for that miserable event has apparently refused to be vaccinated. Several of us made it very clear that we would not attend if he was there. I don't feel the least bit guilty. There will be be five of us this year, all of us having spent the last two years in an abundance of cautious isolation. Anything less seems like lunacy.

I just could not let that typo stand. My original post said "dummies" instead of GUMMIES! Despite the obvious, it was the doing of spell check! I'd have to consume a lot of edibles before I couldn't spell that word.

I feel for you @Kim Shook. But my Thanksgivings only get better the more I give up. If my husband hadn't taken over the job of turkey I swear I'd be happy enough without it. Get some weed dummies and settle back on the couch and eat whatever comes out of the kitchen.

Kewpie was one of various purchases in recent years that I actually felt paid for itself just in the satisfaction of taking one spoonful and tossing the rest into the garbage. I totally agree that as I get older I have less and less desire to keep anything I don't like. I just have to be sure my husband doesn't notice. Sad, of course, but you can't donate what you've already sampled. I've reached maximum space available in most kitchen cabinets, but it's really that my brain that can't handle the clutter. Where exactly are you now?

So funny! I too used to fume when all the food came to the table and my MIL insisted that everyone take a turn to say their gratitudes. I slaved over a lot of that food and resented the hell out of getting colder by the minute.... Now it's different. The old people (well, older) are, sadly, gone. The rest of us mostly just dig in once the wine is poured. Last year there was no family Thanksgiving. This year it will be just be a few paranoid vaxxed up boomers; no millennial cousins, no greatest generation. It should be...dare I say...relaxing! I'm grateful for that.

Save the Horseshoe crabs, save the Red knots. https://www.audubon.org/news/saving-red-knots-one-crab-time The crabs were abundant on Long Island, where we used to summer. No one ever considered eating one. They were harmless, and we just stepped around them. Sometimes there would be hundreds. Now I suspect there are way fewer.

Totally agree, best raw, paper-thin, cold, salted. It never occurred to me to grind some pepper on it, but that's probably because growing up my mother never put anything on it but salt. I'll try pepper. I've used it julienned in stir-fry, usually when I'm running out of the usual suspects, and it retains some crunch but lacks flavor. Perhaps some of those who heap insults on kohlrabi have only had old overgrown examples. When it's woody and dried out it's pretty unappealing, but fresh and tender it has a delicious character. @Duvelyou must have had a traumatic encounter with a kohlrabi as a child.

If the wind is blowing in the right direction I'm sure you can smell camels from 6 miles away.

Just a personal observation about my own preferences in pizza, which are changing as I get older. I no longer like a multitude of toppings; in fact I like my toppings to be very minimal. The current trend, at least with restaurant pizza, is to pile them on, the more the better. The last time we tried ordering pizza we were in Atlanta, with my daughter an her husband, and the place they were going to order from didn't even list a Margherita pizza on the menu. It was more like, pick three toppings for X price. Hello, no. We used to do artichoke pizza or radicchio, but now we don't bother. I don't care and I'm lazy, I guess. And although I am not vegetarian, I actually don't like any kind of animal protein on my pizza. Unless in a social situation (what's that?) where ordering pizza for a group, we almost never eat commercial or restaurant pizza. W make it ourselves, and it is very plain. My idea of a perfect pizza is a thin crust, minimal tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella (not a thick layer), a little basil, and if it's ripe tomato season, a few thin tomato slices on top. I like my salad greens on the side, please, as a....well, salad. Also not a kale person, raw or cooked, so the question of whether or not it belongs on pizza is irrelevant to me.

My dad always made his chopped liver with cognac or brandy, probably which ever was the shorter reach. As a result, so do I.