Katie Meadow

If I was Jack Bishop I would push CK off the roof of the rustic barn he pretended to live in. Or into the pig pen, Deadwood style. Swidgen! I really know nothing about this, but have always disliked CK and his inflated ego. I watched ATK a few times, but never cared for it much. Bridget was cute. Jack was sweet. Once upon a time I made the mistake of trying to get a free year's subscription to CI just to see what it was like by submitting a quick trick idea. They went for it and I got my subscription. After a year of that boring self-satisfied magazine I was happy not to subscribe, but CI hounded me with unwanted emails for several years, no matter how many times I asked them to forget about me, unsubscribe me, etc. The ATK philosophy boiled down to: "We are genius, you know nothing, do what we say, and never imagine that we will give you even one free recipe on line." Okay, so I exaggerate a bit. And I've wasted brain cells on thinking about it. And now I swear I am not going to look at this thread ever again.

PHO NOTE For those of us who order rare beef pho (or rare beef in combo w/ other cooked beef) I learned a great trick last year. I've been eating pho for many many years. Sometimes the beef really is rare, other times it isn't. If the kitchen doesn't get it out to you quickly it will no longer be pretty in pink. Sitting at a neighboring table was a couple ordering pho. They both asked for the rare beef on the side. I watched as they were served a lovely platter of thin slices of raw beef. They dropped in a few slices as desired--you get the picture. It only works if your soup is truly hot when they bring it to the table, so hopefully you know whether your fave pho place routinely serves it steaming. Love pho even mo"!

Just a little googling and it seems that the Cottage Roll or Cottage Ham originated in Cincinnati (you have to be proud of something in your home town) and is a part of the shoulder that is brined and not cured or smoked in the same way as "ham." Does that mean it's sort of the pork version of corned beef? Supposedly it is sold raw after brining, wrapped in a net, and often got boiled rather than baked. My mother, coming from a fairly strict Jewish household in Cincinnati, never cooked a ham in her life, although she moved to NY in her twenties and acquired a taste for bacon.

Speaking of milk on the cusp of turning, I experienced that this morning. It doesn't froth up at all with a wand. Not that that has anything to do with rice pudding. The perfect rice pudding eludes me. It's a rare thing. I want it creamy but not too fatty, toothsome but not chewy, rich but not eggy, with a layer of just creaminess but no rice at the top.

Okay, thanks! So hardscrabble ham is exactly what? Just ham tipping its hat to hard land and tough folk?

I would eat anything that was spatchcocked, cloverleafed or hardscrabbled, although I admit I have no idea what hardscrabble is, but they are all such excellent words. Oh, and how do you scratch-cure something? Get the turkey to walk back and forth on it for several hours before the poor bird is dispatched for spatchcocking? And what is turkey jus gras? I'm guessing it's modernist for extra fatty turkey gravy. I could get behind that on mashed potatoes. Okay, onion bagel dressing is hilarious; forget tedious chopping and frying of onions and go right to the source! I would eat that in a New York minute, if only to tell the tale. And stale onion bagels are a snap.

Like you I don't buy a lot of bacon. But you are probably not far from The Local Butcher, which is at Cedar and Shattuck. Don't they have some good bacon? I haven't been up there in quite a while.

Thanks, prof, for the detailed onion pix and instructions. Lovely. I've been seeing those cipollini onions all season and just haven't bought any, mainly because I really didn't know what to do with them. If I were doing an Italian Thanksgiving I would make sweet potato (garnet yam) gnocchi with brown butter sage sauce. A friend served that the Friday after T day one year and it was everything anyone could want out of that vegetable. I think I will cook my turkey as planned the day ahead but then let my relatives figure out what to do with it along with their traditional bucket of cement, also known as mashed potatoes. (They mean well, but as you can see I'm on a roll.) Meanwhile I will be dining in SF Chez Shire. Say that several times, very fast.

I am always impressed by the variety in the breakfast thread. Ninety nine mornings out of one hundred I eat toast with butter and marmalade. I do enjoy several types of bread, as long as it gets toasted. Once in a while we make popovers, but only if we have forgotten to buy bread. I could imagine pho or some kind of Asian soup for breakfast, not that I ever have leftover pho around. What I would really love is someone who plies the streets with a pho cart every morning. You hear them calling or ringing a bell and you run outside with your big bowl in hand. Then half an hour later the Vietnamese Coffee Cart comes by....

Thank you all for your comments. The real goals here are simplicity, less work for me the day of, and being able to bring a platter of parts plus slices to the table reasonably moist and edible. There is no sous vide in my life. There is no desire to make it look like I just took a perfect whole turkey out of the oven. This family is way beyond presentation. I love them deeply and I am also sick of them, if you get my drift. And, to their credit, none of them really care as long as the table looks pretty much like it has every year since they were born, there's an abundance of vegetarian dishes and the wine is flowing. Creativity is not typically a plus with this crowd at Thanksgiving. I do think there would be takers for those onions, though, as long as no bacon fat is involved. So, as per some suggestions, after the bird is cooked on Wednesday and we have had the crispiest parts for dinner, I will break up the beast into several pieces and wrap them well in foil and put them in the fridge. The day of I will put a selection of pieces in a roasting pan with a bit of turkey stock for moisture, cover the pan with foil, and heat it in the oven. As far as keeping the turkey from drying out, is it wiser not to slice anything before reheating? Slices would get warm a lot quicker, no? But some people do like the option of whole parts, so maybe slices would dry out, unless they were heated in a separate pan for less time, which is an option. What do you think?

My husband and I have been making the turkey for about 30 years. In those 30 years neither of us has missed a Thanksgiving with his family: his parents (now only his mom), three siblings plus partners and some or all of their five millennial offspring. This is a family of very different habits. Some are vegetarians, some don't really care for turkey but think it belongs on the table, three large 20-something boys can inhale a fair amount, and so can my hollow legged husband. And then there's me. I'm bored with cooking it, I don't even like turkey that much, but I swear turkey soup is a narcotic for me, so I need the carcass. Also I'm in it for my husband's gravy, which is fantastic; leftover gravy makes for a fantastic turkey pot pie. None of this has anything to do with the latest family wrinkle. We always sat down to dinner around 6:30. But one strong-minded in law has now decided she wants to eat early in the day, like 2 pm. No one wants to cross this woman, and that's all you need to know about her. My husband and I do a lot of work for this meal, and one thing I'm growing increasingly tired of is the chaos in the kitchen working up to dinner hour. Also I don't wish to be in a hurry, scrambling to get things done, etc. When I pointed out to said family members that I wasn't keen on waking up early just so I could get a turkey in the oven by 11 am, one BIL suggested I set an alarm. And he actually meant it. Well, hell will freeze over before I do that on Thanksgiving morning. So, although I grumbled at first, I am now secretly thrilled with our solution: we are going to cook the turkey the day ahead. We will wake up alone at a beach house. It will be peaceful. We will have a long leisurely breakfast. And later we can nibble on the crunchy parts in private. Sounds naughty, doesn't it? Mmm, the Pope's Nose, as my mother used to call it. And we won't have to navigate the kitchen or fight for oven space during the main event, which is Grand Central Station. Yes, I do have a question. How best to heat and serve the turkey meat the day of? Can it be kept in a cool place overnight, but not in the fridge, so it doesn't dry out at all? Heat it in the oven? Microwave? It will be a dry-brined turkey with no stuffing. No clue, any ideas welcome. And remember, my goal is to do as little work as possible on Thursday, so no rolling it up or layering or anything interesting. I'm looking forward to sitting around at 1 pm with a cocktail and and not caring what happens next! Sadly the five cousins, including my daughter, either can't or don't like to boil water, so future is a bit murky when it comes to tradition. And if she continues to live in Atlanta she won't be cooking my turkey an time soon. Prof. Hobbit those onions are to die for. How do you do them? OMG I've written a novel.

But the best thing about Paul Hollywood IS those three women!

Today we had a modest lunch made great by crispy old leaves. We came back from several days on the northern CA coast with a meager bunch of leftovers and a few odds and ends. There was one large heirloom tomato, about a cup and a half of cooked fresh cranberry beans (most used in soup and on garlic toast previously) and a package of wilting sage. I minced the tomato, liberally sprinkled with salt and let it make its own puddle of juice for about half an hour. It turned out to be a very good drippy tomato. I made basmati rice. I heated up the beans with the small amount of bean liquor that was left. Then I took a handful of sage leaves and crisped them up in butter. I topped the rice with tomato and all its juice, the hot beans, and then drizzled over the brown butter and sage leaves. Added salt and pepper and that's now by new favorite thing to do with fresh cranberry beans. Brown butter and sage on beans is like finding a pot of gold.

I might make a sorbet with the pine shoots and needles syrup. What does that one taste like?

Truly a wonderfully written article in the Times; hilarious and chilling, so thanks for the heads up. Today's NYT magazine special food issue includes that piece and several others. I haven't had the nerve to read them all yet. Change is hard, we all know. Too bad the candy industry ruined us when it comes for color / taste memory. I would like to taste a bit of swamp in my green m & m's. We just need to reprogram ourselves and start to enjoy the flavors induced by m & m's with names like blue algae, winter white, sheep dip, alligator, red tide and fog (not mauve for god's sake!) Bring it on, but don't let's forget there's nothing that's actually good for you in a bag of candy.

I too for the first time all year saw English peas at the Berkeley Farmers' Market. No, I don't think its normal. I'm used to seeing them in the spring. I tasted them, and they were so-so, so I didn't buy them. When I asked the seller about it he looked at me like I was insane. So much for solving that mystery. My haul included young fresh ginger with the leaves attached, fresh peanuts (not exactly green, but pretty young I think), lots of tomatoes, garlic, organic Pink Ladies and a couple of other varieties of apple, Espelette peppers, beautiful colorful eggs, fresh cranberry beans and my favorite October item: Barhi dates. Like liquid inside, best right from the fridge. The peanuts will be boiled, southern style. I first had boiled peanuts several years ago. While visiting my daughter in Atlanta in the fall I bought a bagful of them and took them with me to NY to my mother's. We made them there, according to instructions from a woman buying about 20 pounds of them at the Atlanta market. My mother took one taste and told me I was insane. So that makes two, and I'm sure there are others. But I was hooked.

Currently I'm reading Ronni Lundy's book "Butter Beans and Blackberries." Lundy claims that Butter Beans typically refer to the small variety of Lima beans, most notably when they are fresh and in season only. However she waxes downright poetic about what she calls the Speckled Butter Bean. She says it is a variety of Butter Bean (or Lima) that is notable for its speckled purplish-greenish-blackish-brownish appearance, and she claims everything about them puts those big Limas to shame. It sounds like they are available fresh in the deep south, and also seasonally fresh frozen and sold in local markets. According to Lundy, the precious Speckled Butter Beans are mainly found fresh at farmers' markets and farms. Then it gets even more weird. Around Montgomery Alabama she says the Speckled Butter Beans are also called Rattlesnake beans. I'm a devotee of the Rattlesnake Bean that is commonly said to be a cousin of the Pinto, and which is only reliably sold by Purcell Mountain Farms as far as I know. They are a rather blackish brownish mottled color, and don't vary. All that means is that perhaps Purcell only has one supplier. It's quite likely that the deep south Rattlesnake or Speckled Butter Bean is a very different bean than what I've been eating for the past few years. Or not! You could imagine many reasons for calling a bean Rattlesnake, since rattlers are all over the place. And of course--at least all the slithering Rattlesnakes I've ever seen--are speckled. What a tangle. Best get those 'snakes in a pot.

Yes, they were available for a little while when the co. tried to market them here, but it has been several years since then. I assume it was not a big seller, or they would have continued to distribute them on the west coast, or at least in the bay area. Almost all of these newer m & m flavors seem awful, but that of course is without going anywhere near them, let alone having eaten any of them. S'mores? How do you get that hot roasted marshmallow in there? I'm starting to sound like my mother, who used to rail against Tootsie Rolls; apparently they went way downhill after the sixties and never lived up to her expectations after that.

I can think of only one improvement on the original m & m, and that's the dark chocolate m & m. It comes in a purple package and you can't buy it on the west coast as far as I can tell. It isn't as if their dark chocolate is anything to write home about, in fact you can barely distinguish them from the original milk chocolate m & m's since the quality of both is so lousy, but I have to say that every time I am in NY I buy them and eat lots. It's all about color and textures. The blue ones make me insanely happy. As for white chocolate, what the hell is it, anyway? The only thing worse than cheap white chocolate is expensive white chocolate. When I receive white chocolate as a gift it goes right into the trash. If I was marooned on a desert island and the only chocolate available was white chocolate I would slit my wrists. Sorry to all who like white chocolate, you don't deserve this dopey rant, but truly the only pleasure I can glean from the stuff is bad-mouthing it.

Franci, that looks so beautiful. I'm coming right over!

Ronni Lundy's "Butterbeans to Blackberries, Recipes from the Southern Garden." Southerners seem more attached to the foods of their childhoods than just about anyone. No one but a Southerner would rhapsodize so about string beans, and no one else could convince me that cooking them for an hour and a half until they pretty much dissolve in bacon grease would be a truly great treat. But I believe her! I'm ready to make them. Really entertaining read, with lots of asides, stories, historical tidbits and personal reflections. Also the chapters are hilarious. Okra is so beloved that despite only starring in three or four recipes it gets its own chapter. So does corn. This is a really sweet book, and I'm marking more recipes than I thought I would. Ready to order Sorghum on Amazon!

I also made the Julia potato gratin for a late lunch. I cut way back on the anchovies because I don't like too much, but in this case I agreed with my husband: I should have used a bit more. We had to add a bit of extra salt to finish, which I didn't anticipate. I had some not very distinguished Yukon Golds, and if I had it to do over again I would try to get a more flavorful farmers' market potato. I like the way the cheese on top crisped up. I used a 3 month old Manchego. It's hot here, so we ate it warm instead of right out of the oven, and liked it. Why does the recipe say not to refrigerate? Where did Julia keep her leftovers? This gratin, along with a nice chicken salad, counts as my debate prep. Let's hope it stays down. Expecting a long and painful evening of Gin and Tonics. And maybe popcorn.

Favorite treat this time of year: Thomcord grapes. In a clamshell at TJs. They were nice and fresh today. Love them! They taste more like Concord grapes than Thompson seedless but they are still seedless, so great for pies, focaccia, various cakes, etc. By the time I get to thinking about baking with them I've already eaten most of them. And that's within an hour of taking them home. Mmm, so delicious.

Club membership and the club's guest rules are really a different issue, although I wouldn't know much about that either, since I've never belonged to a private dining club, nor has anyone ever invited me to one. But I think the original post was really about giving women in specific a menu minus prices. Shelby, it's a good question what happened when two or more men only were dining. If it was a business meal or one person was paying, I imagine the host might have requested the priced menu up front if the restaurant offered such an option. So very glad these will never be my problems. And if I was on a date with someone I didn't know very well and he took me to a restaurant and handed me the priceless menu, you better believe I would order the lobster. And I don't even like lobster that much.

I have never been handed a menu at a restaurant that had no prices. I do know what Shel is talking about, a time when high end restaurants assumed that the man paid the check. Insulting then, and it would be insulting now. Granted I live in one of the most progressive cities in the country (as do you, Shel) and I don't eat out that frequently or that expensively. A so blatantly sexist practice it is hard to believe any place would do that now. What I do see, and what irritates me no end, are the high-end restaurants that put their menus up on their websites without prices. Give me a break. What are they trying to tell me? That if I have to ask I can't afford it? That I'm not their target diner? They shouldn't worry, because they are getting what they wanted. They might see the sharp end of my fork, but they won't see my money.