Well friends, we are officially into The Holiday Season. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. Bing, bang, boom. Thanksgiving is next week. I have not done much to prepare and am toning it way down from my previous years. I did buy a turkey, so I'll spatchcock that bad boy, but beyond that I'm not even sure what I'll be cooking. I guess I should think about that. What's your menu? Happy Holidays everyone! I hope you find something fun and something meaningful to do over the next couple months. Try not to embrace the bah humbug so much. Eat, drink, and be merry. TGIF!
I've actually been spending most of today finalizing my menu for next week and here's what I've settled on for now. Turkey Ham Mashed Potatoes Scalloped Potatoes Brussel Sprouts w/Bacon Stuffin Muffins Sous Vide pumpkin jar pies Italian Wedding Soup (I know this is not traditional Thanksgiving food, but I only make it once a year, and it's just for this holiday, so it's become my family's tradition.) I'm debating adding a 2nd vegetable since we'll have 25 people this year, so either corn or green beans.
Nice! I’m all about including non-traditional food for Thanksgiving. Ours will be: Turkey Ham Tamales Mole Green bean casserole Mashed potatoes Rice Beans Stuffing Probably more stuff than I can’t think of. The Mexican side of my wife’s family can make some food.
We're taking our kids up to Santa's Village in upstate New Hampshire this weekend. We went last year and that place is wild.
Turkey, dressing, gravy, hashbrown casserole, green beans, and some kind of homemade cookies. Maybe corn.
I have the first of many holiday dinner parties tomorrow night. The menu is: seafood chowder to start (cream based, with chunks of lobster, white fish, salmon, prawns, scallops, etc) baked salmon (Jamie Oliver recipe I've done before that was awesome) https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/salmon-recipes/stuffed-salmon/ sous vide prime rib baked tomatoes asparagus loaded mashed potatoes keylime pie for desert Starting to make the seafood broth right now with the shells.... it's smelling awesome so far.
Just had my last long run of the marathon training cycle and now I'm into the taper, which means lots of eating and sleeping with some occasional running for two weeks. Leave in a few days for a week vacation in Maui. Where we stay is walking distance from Lahaina. There are so many people there I know by first name. Every year I'd ask them about their kids, their families. I'm horrified to see who is no longer there. We will be cooking a lot in the hotel room, as many of our favorite restaurants still remain closed due to staff shortages caused by... death, I guess to put it bluntly. We felt a lot of guilt for going, but have been reassured by the hotel that they need tourism (specifically our money) in order to get going again.
I've been trying to buy something on Amazon, and the price has gone from $216 to $108 to $173 in the span of 24 hours. I managed to jump on it at $108. Then I saw that another variant (exactly the same, just different color) dropped from $216 to $93 in the last 24 hours as well. I'm exhausted and not going to chase that $15 savings, since I've pulled the cancel-and-reorder move once already. Shopping in between Amazon's algorithmic pricing feels like engaging in high frequency trading.
Have you tried camelcamelcamel? You enter the link to whatever you're looking for on Amazon and it tracks the price for you, and whenever it gets at or below what amount you tell it, it'll send you and email letting you know it's on sale. You can also use it to look at historical pricing to see if something that's listed as 'on sale' is actually at a lower price.
I just rode around town and my ass was so cold that when I got home to pee, it felt like my toilet had a seat warmer feature. I think as long as there isn't ice or snow, I'll be willing to get out there. Plus side, I got 4 more lbs of lye and some lunch. I ran out of lye last night in the middle of trying to make soap. Bah!
When I was bike commuting I welcomed colder and wet rainy weather. It usually meant fewer (or no) people on the multi-use paths. Me on my way into work one January morning when temps were in the teens:
Ya know, the thought has crossed my mind many times lately about how you can drop roadkill in a bucket of lye water to eat the soft tissues away and then you can have like, a skeleton or a skull or whatever left. I've thought about it so many times that impulse might strike one of these days.
It was wet and drizzly here today, too, about 37F. You were probably cozy with your gear. When I first started out, my eyes were stinging and tearing up like mad and I was tucking my chin into the top of my coat. I need to get some kind of ear covering too because I'm going to get an infection if I do this regularly. My ears are still hurting from earlier.
When I was in college they still used live animals in many of the biology based classes. I worked in the bio lab at school and we had rats, mice rabbits and other animals that I would care for, then prep for them for use in lab sessions. For one class, they requested a rat skeleton. To accomplish this I euthanized a rat, “dressed “ it to remove as much skin, organs and muscle as I could, and slow boiled it in acid to remove the rest of the soft tissue. And that wasn’t even the most gruesome thing I did for that job. PETA would have wanted posters out for me if they knew the half of it. Most schools have done away with the use of animals for classes entirely unless you’re studying to be a vet or a doctor, and even then you’re often using preserved corpses.
Kind of a weird year for Thanksgiving. The daughter-in-law and grandson are coming this way but spending actual Thanksgiving with her dad's side of the family so we're having "Thanksgiving dinner" on Saturday with her and the in-laws. They're making ham and raviolis. Weird, but whatevs